I've been robbed!

Nothing too exciting. Someone took my flip flops out of the side pocket of my backpack somewhere between Honduras and Nicaragua. They were pretty scuzzy, so I'm not too heart broken.

Monday I bussed from Chinandega to the tiny fishing village of Los Zorros, where I stayed at a place called Rancho Tranquilo. An American woman named Tina owns the place, and I met her in Leon a couple of weeks ago. The whole time I was in Honduras, I just wanted to get back to Nicaragua and for some reason I felt a craving to go to the beach. So... I did! When I got there, Tina showed me my room, commenting that ''the holes in the (dirt) floor aren't from snakes, just crabs.'' I more or less never wanted to leave. I swam, then had lunch with Tina, then went on a walk down the beach, then got lost on my walk and ended up in the wrong fishing village, then made it back in time to read in a hammock. There were 2 girls from Basque staying there, along with one of Tina's friends and her daughter, so we had dinner together. Then Tina's adopted Nica father came over and entertained us with stories of his time spent in Bakersfield, California. Apparently he was quite the ladies' man, to the point that he got an AIDS test every 6 months, just to be safe.

I woke up this morning to the sound of waves crashing and went and played in the water by myself until breakfast. After breakfast, I caught a ride to Leon with the Basque girls, who had rented a truck, and from Leon shuttled to Managua (for the record, Managua is hands down my least favorite city ever), then from Managua bussed back to Granada. So here I am, about to spend my last night in Granada before I go to Managua with 2 other girls tomorrow so we can spend the night there and fly out on Friday.

So that's it. My time in Nicaragua is coming to an end. The only word to describe every piece of clothing I have with me is "rank", so I think it's time to head home. I don't have any deep final thoughts. I'm still too busy processing everything that's happened over the last 2 months. It's definitely been a rocky road at times, but I've been so blessed and so protected through it all.

End blog. Thank goodness.

The only chela in town

Last night after I ate dinner at "The house of hamburgers" with 2 other Americans I met, I sat in the central park by myself for awhile to people watch. It was great and I was more or less left alone because I pretended I didn´t speak English or Spanish. Unfortunately, once night fell I looked around and realized that the only other women in the park were prostitutes. Ah, the joys of the big 3rd world city.

Woke up this morning at 4:30 to catch my 5:30 bus. Was dropped off at another random hotel at 7:30, at which point I got on another bus that brought me to Managua. From Managua, I caught a shuttle to the town of Chinandega, and from there got a taxi to my hotel. Chinandega´s really just a pit stop for me, since tomorrow morning I´m going to try to get to the beach and spend a night there. My hotel is nothing to write home about (although, ironically, I guess I am writing home about it right now...), but the landlady´s really nice and is letting me stay in a room with a private bathroom, even though I´m only paying for a single room.

Probably my favorite part about Chinandega is it means I´m off the "gringo trail" and back in the middle of nowhere. So far I haven´t seen another tourist here (possibly because there´s not much to see) and I´ve been called "chela" or "chelita" about 6 times. Chele/a is a word they use for white people, but when you´re in a sea of gringos, no one differentiates you that way. Nicaraguans are huge on addressing people by their physical characteristics rather than their names. It would be like calling someone "chubby" or "tan" or "blonde" to their face in English, only it´s much less offensive in Spanish. So right now, I own the chela title.

The entire city looks like Spanish Harlem

I did not in fact make it back to Nicaragua today. I guess my luck with bus schedules ran out, because I only made it from Copán to Tegucigalpa (the Honduran capital) today. Granted, that was a good 7 hours on the bus/9 hours of total travel time, but it would have been nice to make it all the way to Nicaragua. This totally throws off my beach plans, too, so now if I want to make it to the coast one more time I´ll have to move really fast and spend a lot more time and money on buses than I want. But maybe I´ll decide it´s worth it. Or maybe not. I realized how much money I´ve spent on transportation just getting up to Copán... Honestly, I probably blew more money on buses in the last 5 days than I did in the previous 2 weeks. Ridiculous. That´s what I get for trying to do too much in too little time, I guess.

So I´m in Tegucigalpa for a grand total of 12 hours now. I was prepared to hate everything about the city and hole up in my hotel all night, but after walking around for a few blocks, it´s not so bad. Really, it looks like the dirtier part of New York. I´m not saying I´ll be jogging through the streets after nightfall or anything, but I think it has an undeservedly bad reputation. Today is Sunday, unfortunately, so most of the restaurants and all the museums are closed. But the people-watching is still good, and it goes both ways. I watch them, they watch me, we watch each other. Story of my life in Central America. I´ve become a tourist attraction. More than once, I´ve noticed people (men and women) snapping pictures of me either with their cameras or their cell phones. Should I start charging a small fee?

It's like reaching for an apple and getting an orange.

Mad shout out to Katie Anderson for perfectly describing my 2 months here: It's like reaching for an apple and getting an orange. It took me a really long time (well, 3 weeks at least) to understand that Nicaragua was not Argentina. But now I've adjusted to the orange, and I like it in a different way.

That said, Honduras just isn't doing it for me, so I'm running back into the safe arms of Nicaragua tomorrow. I decided that I don't have enough time to give Honduras its fair chance. Even though I've spent almost 3 days in the country now, I don't feel like I know Honduras at all because this town is so not real. So I'm glad I got to see some ruins, and now I will go back to Nicaragua and if anyone asks, I've never been to Honduras. Hey, there's no stamp on my passport, so who's going to prove any different?

Last night I went to dinner with the 3 girls who toured the ruins with me. Afterwards, Nele (the Belgian) and I sat in our hostel and talked to Lucho, the travelling artisan from Guatemala, for awhile. Nele and I are making dinner for him and 2 other travellers tonight. Well, Nele's really making dinner. I just cut some tomatoes and ate pieces of cheese when no one was looking. Since I've been travelling I haven't gotten to use my Spanish much, so it was nice having a long conversation in Spanish last night and hopefully tonight will be more of the same.

Today, Nele and I went on a 3 hour horseback ride of the country along with a couple from Spain. For the record, I have hated horses since I was 8. I used to go to extreme lengths to get out of horseback at camp (scooping poop in the barn, waking up at 5:30 in the morning to play polocrosse rather than going to regular horseback activities), but I thought maybe my feelings toward horses would have changed as I've grown. False. They still suck. But I wanted to see more of the countryside, and I'm all hiked out. Actually, this wasn't too bad as far as horseback experiences go. My horse and I reached an understanding that she could do whatever she wanted so long as it didn't involve knocking me into a tree or attacking another horse. We made a good team in that sense.

Tomorrow I will wake up at 5 so I can start waiting at the town soccer field for the bus to come and take me to San Pedro Sula, where I will probably take a bus to Tegucigalpa, then on to northern Nicaragua. My plan is to get to the Pacific coast by Monday evening and spend all day Tuesday enjoying the beach and the locals. I have high hopes that all will go according to plan. Unless Honduran authorities find my drug stash this time...

Honduran customs didn't stamp my passport. What a waste.

So after waking up at 4 a.m. yesterday, waiting at the gas station until 6 for the bus, crossing the border to Honduras, not getting my passport stamped, changing buses in the middle of nowhere, getting stopped by the Honduran police and having all my belongings searched for drugs and weapons, changing buses in Tegucigalpa and finally in San Pedro Sula... I have arrived in Copan Ruinas. There's an accent in that name, but this keyboard won't do accents or parenthesis, for whatever reason. And the guy running the cybercafe is really surly. And probably 15 years old. Awesome. I think I am kind of grouchy right now as well.

This morning I went to the nearby Mayan ruins with 3 other girls I met, one from my hostel and 2 who we ran into while getting coffee. The 4 of us, along with 2 other travelers, split the price of a guide for the ruins, which was totally worth it. I got some cool pictures and had a good time laughing with our guide Mauricio and with my group. These were my first real ruins, other than the ones I sketchily visited while in Argentina, so I just tried to absorb as much as I could.

I am still up in the air as to whether I will stay here tomorrow or head to Tela, on the Caribbean coast. Part of me hates the thought of getting on another bus, even if it is just for 5 hours, whereas part of me has no desire to stay in this town. It's a cute place, but not at all Honduran. The town was built so people could visit the nearby ruins; hence, it feels a little like Disneyworld. Also, I think I have hit my full capacity for new experiences, and I sort of just want to run back to Nicaragua and enjoy that country for the next 5 days. I should give Honduras a chance, though. Thus far I've found the people to be incredibly kind. But really, I miss Nicaragua.

Also, being on the bus gave me some serious time to reflect on my time here, and I came to the stunning conclusion that I really strongly dislike Granada. The Nicaraguan Granada, I mean. I have nothing against the Spanish version. Anyhow, the whole time I was there I couldn't help but feel this separation from the city, almost like the place was drowning and I was standing on the sidelines watching. I thought that was how I felt about Nicaragua in general, but after travelling for a couple of weeks I've realized that, for all its poverty, the country itself is really beautiful and the people are just normal people once you get away from the tourist hubs. The problem with Granada, in my opinion, is that it's almost entirely a city of foreigners. Nearly all the businesses and hotels are owned by foreigners, and even those that are owned by locals cater to tourists because we have the money. This creates a huge gap between the Nicas and the visitors and it leaves the city feeling half dead, in my opinion. I honestly feel so strongly about this that I'm dreading going back there to pick up the stuff I left on Wednesday, and I wish I could just skip it and head straight to the airport in Managua. But that's impossible and irresponsible, so I will just suck it up and spend one final night in a hostel in Granada. And who knows? Maybe distance is just making my heart grow less fond.

Head for the hills!!! Or, for Honduras.

Approximately 30 years ago, Somoza (dictator/leader of the Nicaraguan conservative bastards) stormed and bombed the city of Matagalpa because the Sandinista rebels were situating themselves here. As a result, almost 4500 Matagalpans fled the city and hid out in the nearby hills. Why am I telling you this? Because nowadays, with the help of a map purchased for just a little over a dollar, you too can experience the joys of tramping through the fields of the hills surrounding Matagalpa, following the same path so many people took in 1979. It´s absolutely as good of an idea as it sounds.

Monday night when I got back to my hotel after dinner, I ran into 1 of the guides from my full moon hike, Josh. He and his friend Rob were also in Matagalpa for a couple of days, and had bought a map of the Sandinista trail to hike for the following day. I, along with 2 other girls from North Carolina, ended up joining them on one of the greatest hikes to date. The scenery was beautiful and it was cool that we were following the trail that so many people used to literally flee for their lives 30 years ago, but the best part was the directions on the map. And I quote, "From the northeast corner of the city park, head straight up the big hill. Turn left at the fork in the road. Turn left at the next fork. At the line of trees, head right. Cross 2 fields. Pay a Nica man named Tito Prado 10 cordobas for the privilege of crossing his property. Climb a barbwire fence. Walk through a field until you get to the next fence. Climb that fence. Follow the trail across the main road and turn right when you see the radio antenna."

We actually didnt get too lost until the very end, at which point we accidentally wandered through a farmer´s mango grove and wound up in his backyard. I think more than anything, we confused a lot of Nicas. What we were doing for "fun" (walking through farms and dirt roads, that is) they do every day out of necessity. 6 hours and a few wrong turns later, though, we made it back to Matagalpa just in time for an early dinner and a nice hot shower.

This morning I woke up around 3:30, and 5:30, and then finally 7:30. People in hotels with paper thin walls should NOT let their infants cry all night. I got breakfast and bought some jewelry (Matagalpa is known for its black ceramics and I bought some kick-a necklaces from the cutest woman I´ve seen yet), then caught a bus to Estelí. After I had my 2nd breakfast (get off my back, I do a lot of walking here), I hunted down one of the girls from my night hike who is staying here with a family. I ended up going to La Casita, an organic farm and bakery outside the city, with her and her host sister. We had phenomenal yogurt, granola and whole grain bread--all things I miss terribly from home! By the time we got back it was already 4 in the afternoon, so I found a bank and then bought a bus ticket to go to Honduras tomorrow. Supposedly, a bus will pick me up at a gas station outside town at 5 a.m. So little can go wrong with that plan.

The bus should take me to the capital city Tegucigalpa, but seeing how I´ve heard nothing good about that place I´m going to do my best to get another bus further north in the country. My ultimate plan is to get to Copán Ruinas, because I figure I shouldn´t leave the area without seeing some Mayan ruins, but that´s not entirely feasible to do in 1 day unless the stars and bus schedules align perfectly. So tomorrow will probably be a sucky travel day, followed by half a travel day on Friday, some ruins on Saturday, perhaps another travel day on Sunday, the Caribbean (!) on Monday and then 2 travel days back to Granada by Wednesday. It´s going to be fast paced and not how I´d prefer to travel, but hopefully it will be worth it in the end. Say prayers for safe bus rides, a lack of pickpockets and good hostel situations.

Houston, we have hot water

I may never leave this place.

I still dont know where I will be 3 days from now. I mean, I will be in Nicaragua or Honduras, thats for sure. I am starting to get lazy about travelling, and since I only have 8 days left before I need to be back in Granada, I am not sure if its even worth it to press up to northern Honduras. Then again, 8 days is a good long while to entertain myself in the northern hills of Nicaragua.

I should decide soon. I am making Thursday my cut off day for leaving this country.

Not much to report today. I went to an organic coffee plantation called Selva Negra and hiked by myself for almost 3 hours. Coffee picking season is November-February here, so there wasnt much going on in the way of that, but I did go on a tour of the farm and at least got to see where the coffee grows, where they wash it, where the workers live, etc etc. It wasnt as cool as I was hoping, but at least I made it to a coffee farm, right? Check off one more goal for this trip.

I like Matagalpa. Its set up in the hills of Nicaragua so its not nearly as hot as the other parts Ive seen. And its much less popular with the backpacker crowd, so I feel like I am getting a little more of the real country. Unfortunately, this also means I have a lot more time alone. I dont really mind, though. The only part I dislike about being alone is dinner time. Eating alone can be awkward sometimes. But I cant complain.

Oh, and for the record, I cant figure out how to work the apostrophe button on this keyboard.

For those of you who have never spent time in hostels...

I am dedicating this post to hostels because I am currently not staying in one. Instead, I am paying a wopping $7.50 per night for my own bedroom and what looks suspiciously like a hot water shower in a hotel. At first I balked at the price since I have been paying between 2 and 6 dollars for shared dorm rooms, until I realized that $7.50 wont even get you a meal in the States.

I think everyone should have to spend some time in hostels. No matter how cool you think you are, you are guaranteed to meet someone (usually European) who quit their job and has been travelling (alone or with a friend) for at least a year through Central and South America. And their pack is usually way smaller than mine. Besides the super intense solo traveller, you are also guaranteed to encounter the following:

1. The group of incredibly attractive Scandinavians. They all hang out together, they are all beautiful and they drink beer like water.
2. The Israelis. Chances are they are on their year long tour of the world after finishing 3 years of military service. So far, all the Israelis I have met have been the funniest, nicest group of people. If you are fortunate enough to share a dorm with an Israeli or 2, try to chat them up.
3. The Canadians. If you hear someone speaking "American" English, its usually best to ask if they are from Canada first. I got this advice from a British guy and so far its working out great, since the Americans dont care if they are mistaken for Canadians whereas the Canadians can get annoyed if you assume they are from the States. Some Canadians are great, some of them suck. I would rank them the same as the travellers from the US in that you get your good ones and your bad ones. I guess you can go ahead and stick the British and the Australians into this category as well, although I have laughed more with the English and the Ozzies than with the Canadians.
4. The single Canadian/American guy. This is the only trip he will ever take. He doesnt speak the local language and he takes about 500 pictures everywhere he goes. He probably works with computers and his friends back home think he is awesome. I first encountered this in Argentina when we met Jeremy during our Easter break trip.
5. The people from other Spanish speaking countries. Half of them are travelling the continent selling jewelry. They have really awesome dreads.
6. The people who dont belong and complain about everything. Like the girls in my dorm last night, who were visibly pissed that other people kept opening and shutting the door. In a 6 person dorm. At 9 p.m. on a Saturday.

And finally, some commonly heard questions/comments in hostels:

• Do you think this _____ (snake, caterpillar, vine) is poisonous? (So far the answers have been no, yes and yes, respectively)
• Have you been robbed yet? (Automatic cool points if you have. I would still rather not answer yes to this question, though)
• Did you hear about the other people who got robbed? (This is a great conversation starter)
• Are the showers nice? (This is a more or less pointless question. Chances are, the showers arent nice. But that doesnt mean you wont be using them all the same)
• Well, my guidebook says... (The guidebook is overquoted, but still so helpful at times)
• The drunkest I have been was in... (And we all know what a good idea it is to get faded in a place where you are obviously a tourist)

I left Leon at 7:30 this morning and spent 3 hours in a chicken bus going down the worst pothole, I mean road, I have ever experienced. It was so bad that at one point my seat actually flew up in the air and came off its track. I still managed to sleep the entire way, though, which impressed a couple of Canadians sitting across the aisle from me. I am currently in Matagalpa, and tomorrow I will try to get myself over to a coffee farm, then probably head to Esteli on Tuesday. After that, I am still up in the air as to whether I should head to Honduras or to the Nicaraguan coast. We shall see...

I hate updating this sometimes

So much has happened and there´s so much to share, but part of me doesn´t even care to update anymore, especially since I´ll be back in the States in less than 2 weeks. But a lot can happen in 2 weeks, so I´ll keep trucking...

Thursday: Met Judith for a drink around 9. How do I keep meeting such nice people? She´s living with a friend who´s making a documentary on the pesticides used by local farmers. Apparently, the chemicals are causing kidney failure in a scary percentile of them (one area has 78 widows out of 400 families), so Judith´s friend Steve is making a documentary on the problem and has started an organization to provide information and counseling to the families. Oh, and he rents a totally sick house here in León. In his words, "I have palm trees. That never gets old."

Friday: Got up at 9 to go volcano boarding. Volcano boarding? Yes. You climb a volcano and then sled down. The volcano is called Cerro Negro and it´s the youngest in Central America. Sounds great. Too bad the rain came and the trip had to be called off. The good part, though, is that I was in a truck with some really cool people (2 Australian girls, a German guy, a Canadian guy and a few Israelis) who I ended up hanging out with during the afternoon. We all went our separate ways after lunch, but at 3:30 we met back in the hostel because we´d heard a rumor that President Ortega was coming to speak in the city center to commemorate the 29th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution. The actual anniversary was today, but I guess they like to start the party early. We got to the center a little before 4, and then we waited. And waited. And waited. We heard rumors that he wasn´t even coming, or that Hugo Chavez was coming, or that he´d be here tomorrow. But finally, amidst overpoweringly loud music, fireworks, sirens and waving flags, we got to hear the president of Nicaragua speak. I was more interested in Che Guevara´s wife and daughter, who were honored guests at the rally, than in what Ortega himself had to say. But to sum up his speech for you... "Down with capitalism. Fight the imperialist pigs. Shun the yankee bastards. Free yourselves from the constraints of foreign NGOs and foreign dollars. Equality! Freedom! Long live the revolution! To victory, now and forever!" You get the picture.

Friday night (which has bled into Saturday with no definite beginning or end): 2nd volcano hike of the day to Volcán Telica. I went with an organization called QuetzalTrekkers, which is run entirely by volunteers and gives all their profits to an organization called Las Tías to help street kids. Apparently the locals are iffy as to how much good Las Tías really does, but I couldn´t pass up the chance to hike an active volcano in the moonlight. We ate a snack at the QT office around 10:30, then hopped in vans which drove us to the park, and by 11 p.m. it was just us, our packs, our flashlights and the countryside. Our group was about 15 large, including a guy from California, 2 Spanish girls, 2 Dutch girls and their dad, a Swiss woman and her 14 year old son, 2 more girls from California, another Dutch guy, me and our 4 guides. One of the guides was entirely preoccupied with flirting with one of the gorgeous Spaniards the entire time, but the other 3 were so cool. My favorite was the German who has been travelling for 19 months now, and can mark how long he´s been travelling by how long his mohawk and his single thin braid are. Oh, and German is absolutely my next language to tackle. I´m sick of not understanding half the people I hear in hostels.

So we hiked from 11 p.m. to about 4 a.m. First we were on a dirt road, then we started crossing fences and walking through corn fields, then we suddenly plunged into the pitch black forest for the last 2 hours or so. This was, of course, when my flashlight decided to burn out. The guide near me was way too busy with his Spanish lady, so I ended up falling down a lot. But then, so did everyone else. We took a couple of breaks, my favorite of which was under a huge mango tree. We saw it again in daylight but I think it was almost cooler at night, the way the branches spread out and made everything so shadowy. We finally made it to the crater rim and stumbled our way over tons of volcanic rock until we got to the edge. The guides told us to lay on our stomachs and peer over the edge down into the volcano. No lava, but I did get a face full of sulfur smoke. The wind and the rain finally became too much for us, so we went down into a valley where it was slightly less cold and huddled on the ground like the pansies we were until superfly Germanguy started a fire, at which point we Americans introduced the Europeans to the joys of roasting marshmallows. Yes, we roasted marshamallows at 6 in the morning on the side of a volcano. We tried to explain how awesome it is to set your mallow completely on fire, but the perfectionist Dutch girls had to show us up and perfectly brown theirs, leading me to point out that "Maybe Europeans really are better at everything?" The other Dutch guy saved us from our American embarrassment by bringing up that one country that has set the standard for perfecting what others have started. And I quote, "At least no one here is Japanese. Then we´d all look bad." 10 times funnier when you haven´t slept in 24 hours and the speaker is foreign.

After breakfast (coffee, bread and peanut butter!) most of us headed back up to the crater rim to see if we could see anything more. The clouds had started to clear away and we suddenly had an amazing view of our volcano, other volcanoes, farms and hills on all sides. I took so many pictures and I´m sure they all suck next to the real thing. At some point, we started a game called "throw rocks at other rocks and try to make those rocks fall into the volcano." Everyone, from the 50 year old Dutch man to the 14 year old Swiss boy, participated. The competition got pretty fierce.

We hiked back down and got to our lunch spot in a nearby town, passing through an area with bubbling mud springs (think Old Faithful toned down and way dirtier). Finally, at 2 p.m. today, we got back to León. My original plan was to press on north to Matagalpa today, but I decided nothing sounded worse than sitting on an old school bus for 4 hours, so I checked into the same hostel as before and will go to Matagalpa early tomorrow morning. I´d gotten to know a few other travellers in the hostel and they are all here for one more night as well, so it was nice to have a sort of homecoming.

Mom and Dad: It´s probably a little late in the game for this, but do I have travel insurance?

It´s raining lizards

Today I heard the song "Piano Man" translated into Spanish. Not the point of this post, though...

Wednesday night: Joseph, Caroline and I went to a place we´d heard had good burgers (the last "burger" I got consisted of shredded chicken and mayonnaise on a hamburger bun, so I was skeptical). The food was great, but right as I took a bite out of my burger I felt something heavy fall onto my hand. It felt like a french fry had somehow flicked up, but when I looked down there was a lizard halfway on my hand and halfway on my burger. I screamed (out of shock, not fear) and Caroline and Joseph both thought the lizard was climbing out of my food. There are little black lizards everywhere, and I´d heard about them falling off ceilings before but had never personally experienced this wonder. I was laughing so hard I couldn´t breathe, much less speak English or Spanish, so it took a good 5 minutes to restore order. I had to assure our waiter about 6 times that it was fine, that I didn´t want a replacement burger, that everything was ok, etc etc.

Afterwards, we went to a restaurant/bar called Olla Quemada (burned pot) to hear a local band play. The place was entirely packed and maybe 10 people in there were Nica, while the rest were fellow gringo travellers just looking for a good beer and some nice music. We got there early enough to get a table, but it turned into standing or perching room only. The people watching was spectacular. Caroline and Joseph had to get up early-ish this morning to catch a bus back to Managua for their noon flight, so we left around 10 and said goodbye for real this time.

Thursday (today): After my breakfast of yogurt, cereal and coffee (which feels like a luxury after 6 weeks of beans and tortillas for breakfast), I started talking to an English girl and a Swiss girl in my room. They were heading to the beach today, which I was planning on doing, too, so we rode out to the beach about 45 minutes from León together. It was so gorgeous. The sand was dark but the water was fairly blue and clear, plus we literally had the entire place to ourselves (minus the pelicans and sand crabs). I also realized that this was the 3rd time I´ve seen the Pacific in the last year (San Diego, Chile and now here), but the first time I´ve really swum in it. We played in the water for maybe an hour, then hung out on the beach for an hour, then got back in the water for awhile. After lunch we caught the bus back to León right before it started raining. Speaking of lunch, I´ve been increasingly glad on this trip that I don´t have any food allergies or generally picky eating habits. Maybe I have low standards for food, but at least I never go hungry. One of the girls was vegetarian and couldn´t find anything on the menu that looked good, so she just didn´t eat for the entire day. I, on the other hand, dominated my plate of fish, rice, cabbage and tortilla.

Oh, side story: the bus we caught from the beach left from a market on the other end of town in a more indigenous community. Right by the gate into the market was a woman selling live crabs, mollusks and eggs. Chicken eggs? Nay. Turtle eggs. So much for wildlife protection laws, I guess.

I am supposed to meet up with Judith, the Austrian girl, for a drink at 8, so I need to go find some dinner before that. Tomorrow´s a double volcano hike (more on that after I make it through alive), then hopefully Saturday I will head to Matagalpa. Travelling by myself is so interesting. Sometimes I think it might be nice to have a buddy for moral support, but it´s really freeing to realize that there is no one telling me where to go or what to do. I am in complete control of my time and my agenda. It´s a little scary if I think about it too much.

I do not deserve any of this

In a good way, I mean. I am far too blessed. Here´s the rundown on the last 24 hours of my life...

After I made that last post, I decided to wander around and try to find somewhere where I could eat dinner alone without looking too awkward. As I was walking down the street, I heard someone calling my name--Caroline and Joseph just happened to be eating dinner right across the street from my hostel! So I ended up eating with them, then went back to my hostel and watched the 12th inning of the All Star game (who won, anyhow?) until I decided I was too wiped from my day of travel to take anymore. Slept a good 10 hours, and then came...

Wednesday (today): Woke up at 8 and went to the supermarket to buy myself yogurt, cereal and bananas. I figured it would be much cheaper to eat breakfast that way than going out every day (and less alone since I can eat in the hostel.) I ended up talking to a 50 year old hippie who was selling jewelry in my hostel for about half an hour. He was born in a favela (read: ghetto) in Brazil but moved to Bolivia when he was 7, after which point he travelled all over, even spending some time in Austin. He told me he loved hippie hollow, back before "they" ruined it. He also told me I was welcome to come by his workshop any time to check out his jewelry and, since I "look like a person who enjoys a good toke", to light up with him. I probably won´t take him up on that offer. I told him I´ve never smoked weed a day in my life, at which point he told me "well, you´ve got the look down!" I´m not sure what that means but it doesn´t really bother me. Maybe it means I look relaxed? It´s also funny to me that he´s not the first person down here who´s suggested that maybe I enjoy "alternative" forms of recreation.

Anyhow, after I left the hostel I ended up walking around the city with a British woman named Sarah. We went to the cathedral (biggest in central america, I think) and to an art museum. The art museum was AMAZING. It had so much more than I´d expected. There was of course the usual 400 year old Catholic paintings of sad looking people surrounded by fat angels, but there was also tons of indigenous art, surreal paintings and 3 original Picassos! And, it only cost us 60 cents to get in. Afterwards, Sarah and I went for lunch at a café with amazing coffee. She went back to the hostel since she wasn´t feeling well, and I checked out another museum.

I feel so uneducated, but until I got down here I´d never heard of Ruben Dario. He´s apparently renowned as one of the best Hispanic poets ever, and after visiting the house where he lived and reading some of his stuff, I can see why. His work and his life remind me a lot of Pablo Neruda (or maybe it´s just that good poetry comes out of a life of travel, women and rebellion). They didn´t have any books of his poetry at the museum, so afterwards I went to a nearby bookstore to look around. No luck there, but I did start a conversation with a girl from Austria named Judith who´s visiting her friend here for a month. We ended up having coffee together and talking for almost an hour, and we might try to meet up tomorrow.

I´m meeting Caroline and Joseph for dinner tonight (they are leaving tomorrow), so it will be nice not to have to worry about eating alone. I´m realizing more and more, though, that every time I think I will be "lonely", I´m not. I´m sure it will happen in time, but so far I´ve been amazingly blessed with friendships, even if they are random and short lived. I like León a lot, it´s a beautiful city with a lot of history, and I´m looking forward to getting to see more of the area (volcanoes and beaches) over the next couple of days. Since I´m travelling, my Spanish isn´t getting as much of a workout now, but my legs and my brain are working overtime so I think it´s a fair trade off.

Enjoy your lives and your friendships back home, I am definitely getting ready to see people and hear about other summers!

Excuse the itinerary

Those of you looking for a social commentary won´t find it here. What follows is almost strictly an itinerary of the last 3 days of my life...

Saturday: Woke up around 7:30 to eat breakfast, check my email and finish packing. Said goodbye to my host family, which was so strange. It was a warm goodbye, but detached all the same. I guess it has to be. Went and met Caroline and her brother Joseph at their hostel. I wasn´t sure how travelling with them would be, but Joseph has one of the happiest laughs I´ve ever heard and it worked out really well. We bussed from Granada to Rivas along with a dozen other foreigners and a guy playing a guitar and urging us to break free from the constraints of "Catholicism and coca cola". He also ranted for a good 10 minutes about how before the Spaniards came, all the indigenous tribes lived in peace and how we need to expel the foreigners who come here looking to use the locals for their own entertainment. He also said we should create a world without borders or passports. I held my tongue. We got to Rivas and from there taxied to San Jorge. The driver pulled a fast one and overcharged us by 20 córdobas, which was more irritating than anything else. Oh, well. Got on the ferry and sat down below with the few life jackets, the anchor and the highly necessary beer cooler. Got to Moyogalpa, on Isla de Ometepe, and ended up splitting the cost of a van with 4 British girls and 2 British guys to our hostel about an hour away.

Isla de Ometepe is actually being considered for one of the 7 natural wonders of the world. It´s formed out of 2 volcanoes and supposedly fulfilled an ancient indian prophecy of finding 2 joined mountains in the middle of the lake. It´s also crazy beautiful. However, I realized this weekend that I don´t like the idea of being on an island. Too much can go wrong, especially when half the island is an active volcano.

We all slept in a dorm room at our hostel, Finca Magdalena, which is an old coffee plantation. Our beds were more or less tall plastic cots. Caroline actually ripped through hers on the 2nd night, which may help to explain the phenomenal grudge all the F.M. staff seemed to hold against us. Caroline, Joseph and I walked around the grounds and looked at some petroglyphs (indigenous stone art) until it started pouring rain. We then went back and ordered dinner from the hostel, at which point we realized that the F.M. kitchen is in fact a black hole where food orders go in and are never seen again. Fortunately, we had a good time talking until our food arrived. The British kids were completely hilarious, especially the guys, which was good because we all spent the entire weekend together.

Sunday: I slept like a rock all night. Everyone else said they woke up around 10 times. We were supposed to meet our guides for the volcano hike around 7:30, but we didn´t end up leaving until about 8 (that´s known as the latin hour around here). We hiked Maderas, which is the smaller of the 2 volcanoes. Small is a relative word. It was supposed to be a 7-8 hour hike, but unfortunately 2 of the girls hurt themselves pretty badly and it took us almost 10 hours of walking, which was broken up by frequent water, snack and (for our guides) lollypop and smoke breaks. The first 5 uphill hours redefined the term "muddy scramble", the last 5 were more or less a series of coordinated falls down the mountain. There was a crater lake at the top where we stopped for lunch, which was so beautiful. It rained on us on the way down and we were all definitely ready to be done, but I would said it was worth it in the end. The area was so lush and green, broken by red flowers and spider webs. We heard loads of howler monkeys (which the English guys insisted were cows, just to piss me off) and passed above the cloud line. When we got back we all hit the cold showers, then ordered coffee, tea, beer and dinner. The coffee kept me up until about 2 a.m., unfortunately, but a few of us stayed up talking until around 11. Caroline and Joseph went to bed early and left me alone for almost 2 hours to fend off British attacks on my "lazy" American English. We laughed a whole lot and I´m so thankful for that.

Monday: The others went back to Moyogalpa to catch the ferry and go their separate ways, but I decided I wasn´t done with old Ometepe quite yet. So, I had the van driver drop me on the beach between the 2 volcanoes in a town called Playa Santo Domingo. I hated saying goodbye to the others, but going to the ferry would only have been delaying the inevitable since we would all be splitting on the other side anyhow. I checked into a hostel called Hospedaje Buena Vista, which was right on the beach. I´d like to point out that even though the island is in the middle of a lake, it´s such a huge lake that it really does look like the ocean from shore. I ended up getting a 2nd breakfast at Buena Vista, then walked to a swimming hole with an English girl named Lucy. We swam and read for a few hours until the rain came, then went back to the hostel where I spent the rest of the day reading and writing in a hammock. I was sharing a room with 2 German guys, so I ate dinner with them and then Lucy, the Germans and I talked for awhile before going to bed. One of the Germans, Janni, downed 3 liters of beer without breaking a sweat. When I expressed my concern for his health, they both just laughed and said "We´re German!" It was their turn to be horrified later when I confessed to owning a gun, though.

Woke up this morning around 7 (I just can´t sleep in here) and caught a bus with the Germans back to the ferry. After the ferry I caught a bus to Managua, then a shuttle to León, where I currently am. It´s been a long day of travel, so I´m glad to be here. I found a hostel called Hostel Bigfoot that seems pretty cool (and it´s only $6 per night!) and tomorrow I´m planning on walking around the city and booking a few volcano hikes for myself.

Thanks for all your interest, emails and prayers. I´m tired right now but I´m doing good. Travelling alone is definitely a new experience and I´m still on the fence as to whether or not I like it, but I´m so thankful for all the opportunities I´ve been given and for everything I´ve seen already. Now I am going to find dinner and then hopefully find someone to laugh with at Bigfoot.

Sensory Overload

This was going to be a long, well thought out post. I´ve been on this computer for way too long, though, so instead it´s going to be a long rambling post that I make just for the sake of getting some memories out...

Wednesday: When someone dies in Nicaragua, the family, friends and awkward foreign girl sit around in plastic chairs on the sidewalk outside the deceased´s house. Some people stay all night, drinking soda and coffee and eating cake. Most of us just stayed until 10 or 11. The cousins also thought it was hilarious that I was sitting there "funeraling" with them. In my defense, I thought it was normal "hang out on the sidewalk and talk" time, not "remember our departed friend" time. The 2 are easy to confuse.
I also had an incredibly frustrating conversation with one of the cousins on why I have friends who aren´t Nicaraguan (ie dutch and from the US) here. I was going to rant about that, but I don´t have time now. I managed to bite my tongue during our conversation because I didn´t want to offend the family by telling off one of their sons in perhaps more than 1 language, but I did go home and spend half an hour writing out my frustration and my counterpoints in my journal.

Thursday: Took my laundry to the laundromat in the morning. This turned out to be one of my best decisions yet. I honestly had forgotten what truly clean clothes smell and feel like. Then went to school, where we had a piñata with the kids. Went home for lunch, went back to school and taught my 2 afternoon students. Picked up my laundry, dropped off everything I´m not travelling with at my friend Trista´s house, got home just in time for Angela Cristina´s birthday party. 3 hours later, I emerged from a house that contained cake, ice cream, a giant Dora the Explorer piñata and 15 groggy preschoolers to go talk to my friend Caroline about our upcoming weekend of travel. Ended up going out dancing with Caroline´s neighbor Nami, who just got here Tuesday. We went with a couple of other Americans who are here studying and Nami´s host dad, who is 36. We had a really great time and it was nice getting to laugh a lot in English and Spanish.

Friday: Last day of teaching. The kids were so badly behaved today that I cut class 45 minutes short and used the extra time to go say goodbye to the employees and kids over at the daycare. Went home for lunch, and now here I am. Today I have to buy a daypack for hiking, pack all my stuff, drop by 2 friends houses, change some money and go say goodbye to the other US girls at 8:30. They are going out to a disco by the lake but a big part of me wants to spend my last night in Granada absorbing the city, rather than other people´s sweat.

Caroline, her brother and I are leaving for Isla de Ometepe at 10 in the morning. I´m not sure what my internet schedule will be like after that, but I will update as often as possible until I get home on August 1 (3 weeks from today). Prayers for protection would be greatly appreciated. Keep sending emails about your lives at home, I love reading them even if it takes me a couple of days to respond.

Goodbye Granada, hello chicken buses!

Stress... what´s that?

Oh, but yes, I am in fact stressed by the amount of crap I have to do in the next 48 hours. Just so you can share in my distress...

1. Laundry. Easy, right? Wrong. We are currently experiencing a no water situation, and I have got to get my clothes washed by tonight or tomorrow at the latest if they are to dry in time for me to pack. And that´s assuming it doesn´t rain...
2. Pack. Easy, right? See laundry situation.
3. Plan for 2 more days worth of English class. Which, by the way, I am loving. Thank goodness.
4. Say goodbye to friends and host family. Goodbyes are awkward.
5. Plan my travels for the next 3 weeks. Or at least, for this coming weekend. It´s looking like the new volunteer Caroline will be travelling with me to Isla de Ometepe this weekend, after which we will probably go our separate ways. It will be nice to have a travel buddy to start out with, but this means we actually have to plan something so everything doesn´t fall through.

Oh, and I need to get home soon to watch the funeral procession go past my house. 2 (important) locals have died within the past week, which means the neighbors come out in droves to go to the funeral and watch the processions. There are also trucks with speakers mounted on them driving through the streets at literally all hours, announcing who has died and the time and place of their funeral. I hope I receive the same recognition when I pass. If anyone wants to loudly announce my death through their PA system at 4 a.m., I wouldn´t be opposed.

I am excited to start travelling, but I almost don´t want to leave at this point. I´ve really started enjoying my work, and my host family, and the city in general. It´s going to be bittersweet to leave for sure. Apparently on Sunday when I was wandering the city with my "cousin" some other "cousins" came over to see if I wanted to join their dance party in the other house. Even small invitations like that mean so much to me, and recently I have been noticing how blessed I´ve been with kind people here. Like I have said before, Granada is small enough that there don´t really seem to be any secrets or strangers after awhile. I see people I know everywhere and I recognize a lot of locals around town. My extended host family, fellow volunteers and Nica employees, kids from the school and daycare, as well as "schizo painter guy", "crazy eye mango lady", "drag queens", "guy with 1 leg", "guy who owns the pool hall", "old man who always says hi", "the guard at the rich people´s house", "that guy who delivers tortillas" and probably a half dozen others have formed my experiences here much more than anything I have done.

Enough reminiscing. I have a funeral procession to get to and clothing to wash.

"It´s like a giant game of red rover"

Last night, all I wanted to do was curl up at my house after dinner, listen to the rain and enjoy a quiet evening. Fortunately, Isabel Cristina convinced me to go out with the other US girls, which led to...

A series of highly ridiculous events. We started the night at this wine place right on the central park. The other girls apparently really miss "good" cheese, and this is the only place in town they´ve found that will serve a cheese plate. I´m ambivalent about the whole cheese situation. While we were enjoying our wine and brie, we noticed a marching band headed out way. That´s totally not unusual here since there are high school marching bands practicing at all hours of the day and night in all parts of the city. What we quickly realized was unusual about this band was that they were accompanied by dancers and all the musicians were covered in glitter. They ended up stopping at a stage about 2 blocks from us, so we walked over afterwards to see what was going on. It turns out this is just the beginning of a month long rev-up for the big carnival in August. Each city in Nicaragua celebrates their saint with huge parties. August 1-10 the party starts in Managua then moves this way, arriving in Granada on August 15, at which point the parades, bull running, drinking and dancing go strong for a few days and nights. But, of course, the high school bands have to start practicing now, and Miss Granada has to be crowned early.

We clearly didn´t fit in there since we were significantly older and more foreign than most of the crowd, but that didn´t stop us from somehow becoming part of the human barricade. The Nicas told us to interlock fingers and to not, under any circumstances, allow anyone from the crowd to break through and disturb the performers (hence the "giant game of red rover" comment). We all held hands and eventually the 5 of us got separated as more and more people pushed through. Imagine the pushiest crowd you´ve ever experienced, and then double the noise and the force. Eventually the Nicas decided we weren´t worthy of their barricade and we were literally carried away from the frontlines by the crowd. We ended up standing around and watching the band and dancers perform for awhile, then escaped to a nearby restaurant until the parade had moved on. We ended the night at a bar called Mi Tierra, where we were (pleasantly) the only foreigners and by far the worst dancers in the place.

Needless to say, we laughed a lot last night.

Today we were without both power and water for the morning. What do you do when there´s no power or water? Generally, you sit around your house and complain about how hot it is. You then go to your cousin´s house and complain about how bored and hot you are. Afterwards, you might go for a walk around town and buy some ice cream to console your sweating body. When you pass a house and notice their tv is on, you go home in hopes that the power has returned to your block as well. But don´t count on it.

She ate what?

Chicharrón. I ate chicharrón. For those of you who have never been to Nicaragua, chicharrón is fried pork rinds. With a little hair still attached for flavor. I´ll start from the beginning...

Remember my friend Fatima from the convent who invited me to her house? Well, I didn´t see her on Friday so I wasn´t sure if I was still invited or not. But after thinking it over, because I always think things over, I decided it would be better for me to go and stand on the side of the road where she told me to stand and have her not show up than for her to wait for me and me not show up. Does that make sense? This morning I left my house at around 8 to catch a bus from Granada to Nandaime. I then asked the driver to let me off at Empalme el Guanacaste which, incidentally, is the entrance to the volcano I climbed with Lesbia last month. So it turns out Fatima lives on the road leading up to the volcano. I remember passing all those houses and wondering what they were like inside... I waited at the gate for about half an hour, during which time all the taxi drivers who were waiting to take passengers up to the volcano entrance kept asking me things like "So, who exactly are you going to visit? You don´t know her last name? Or her phone number? Or her father´s name? Or where she lives? Hmm..." Eventually Fatima did in fact meet me and took me to her house where I met her mother, some neighbors, Fatima´s 3 sisters, 2 of her 4 brothers, her grandfather, her uncle and a few other people I couldn´t quite place.

I´m not a farming expert, but I could tell that subsistence farming in Nicaragua is far different from any kind of farming I´ve ever seen in the States. Necessity replaces aesthetics for sure. Fatima and her family all sleep in one building. I say building, not house, because house would paint a picture in your mind that´s not at all accurate. The kitchen is a separate building and they cook over 2 fires, one indoor and one outdoor. It´s on this fire that her mom fried up the pork rinds, some bits of pork and plantains. Actually, it all tasted really good. Fatima also chopped up a head of cabbage with a machete and threw in some tomatoes, some salt and some lime juice to go on top of the chicharrón. I "helped" chop cabbage but it´s harder than it looks to slice with a machete. They also grow rice and beans on the farm not to sell but for them to eat, and have a few goats and a herd of cows. It was a nice morning overall. Fatima, her sisters and I were the only ones who ate but it was a lot of fun sitting on the porch of their kitchen, drinking Pepsi and talking about things like what music we like (they asked me to translate the Black Eyed Peas into Spanish) and how hard it is to learn other languages.

After lunch, the girls took me to the bus stop and said goodbye. I ended up going to Masaya instead of Granada so I could visit the market one more time before I leave next week. The bus stopped in a completely different part than I´d seen before but I made it just fine. This day has been one endless example of the way things seem to work here: nothing goes the way you plan and everything´s confused, but in the end you get where you need to be. Unless you don´t, and then you´re in a new place. Last night at dinner my friend Trista said she doesn´t like South America because she feels like it might implode at any minute. I think that´s why I love it. It may and in fact often does implode in multiple senses, but at least that keeps things interesting.

There are no secrets in Granada

Truly, there aren´t. Case in point: the day I was sick, Angela Cristina apparently walked around telling anyone who would listen that "Catarina está enferma y le van a poner una inyección en las nalgas. " Which, unfortunately, translates to "Catharine is sick and they´re going to give her a shot in her butt." We´re not sure where she got the shot part from, but the fact remains that anyone who didn´t already know about my illness sure does now.

Caroline (new volunteer) and I changed our worksite today. We´re now teaching English in yet another "dangerous during the night" neighborhood. It´s still not exactly what I wanted, but I only have a week left. And anything that keeps me away from the screams of 60 preschoolers is fine by me. The kids we´re teaching are pretty ridiculous. We taught them for about an hour, played duck duck goose for half an hour, and then we all picked mamón, a local fruit, and ate it for the rest of the class. Today they ranged in age from 7 to 12, but apparently next week in the afternoon I´m going to get some older girls. I´m unprepared for this, so bring on the adventure. It will for sure keep me busy next week, which is good because Marjan is gone and I miss her terribly.

One of the girls I´ve been tutoring at the convent is going home tomorrow, and she invited me to visit her and her family on Saturday. I´m not sure if I´m going yet, but hopefully I will. And even if I don´t, the invitation itself means more to me than she probably knows. Hospitality and conversation mean so much here. I love it.

Sweet freedom

Here´s what happened at the daycare Monday: the new volunteer (Caroline) and I were getting ready to leave when Elsa and Claudia dropped the bomb that oh, by the way, the kids will be on vacation for the next week. So we don´t have to go to work, but if we do we´ll be helping them clean and organize until the kids come back next Tuesday. I think in metaphorical terms, we could call that the "final straw". I made an appointment to talk to Henry, the director of the Spanish school here, about the whole situation. When we met last night, I tried very hard to explain that we weren´t angry with the situation, just slightly unsatisfied and maybe a little frustrated. I say "tried very hard" because I think he still felt really bad about the whole thing, although he was very helpful. Weirdly, we ended up speaking in English, but since I´d been planning all day what I wanted to say in Spanish the conversation came out way more broken and awkward than I intended or expected. Anyhow, it turns out there was a huge lack of communication with the nuns, especially since the head Mother moved to Honduras 4 weeks ago without alerting the Spanish school. So, starting tomorrow, Caroline and I will be going to a different neighborhood to hopefully do English lessons/just hang out with a few teenage girls. Unfortunately, a lot of these girls will be gone on vacation as well, but I have high hopes all the same.

Part of me can´t help feeling really bratty and selfish about wanting to change all this. The daycare clearly does need help since they usually have 2 employees wrangling up to 65 kids. At the same time, though, I know that my strengths lie in working with older kids and definitely not with the younger ones. I´ve also been feeling progressively sadder and more repressed and today I realized that I feel freer than I´ve felt in weeks. Maybe I should have spoken up sooner, but the time never seemed quite right. It´s unfortunate that the situation is just now changing when I only have 7 work days left, but it´s better late than never.

In an unrelated story, there are 3 teenage boys who really like dressing in full drag and wandering the streets of Granada. I´ve seen them a couple of times now and I love watching them interact with the other locals, who have no problem letting the "ladies" know exactly what they think of their lifestyle. More power to them.