Navidad

Its Christmas in San Juan Del Sur! ....the rest of the world too, but the point is, ITS CHRISTMAS!
The holidays abroad are something new to me. I've done it once before, but my family was there, so this is totally new for me.
Last night we learned a little about the Nicaraguan customs that surround the holidays...

We were invited to have dinner with the family who owns the Hospedaje that we live in, but other than that we had no plans for Christmas eve. It turns out dinner was at midnight, so we really had all day to mozy around town. Here, everyone has dinner at midnight on Christmas eve, we learned.

We spent the evening wandering around town, watching the people walk around. Town was packed with locals and tourists, the locals dressed up in their Christmas best, the tourists walking around in surf shorts and tank tops.... Kids were lighting fireworks and sparklers, and while this isn't anything particularly new it was somehow more quaint last night. We ran into a few of our friends on the street and all wandered to the park in front of the church where loud music and lights were blaring.

The park was also full of people, a stage was set up in front of the church, and green, red, and sometimes a strobe light flickered across the face of the bright blue church. Guys selling carnival-esque toys walked around waving flashing lit up headbands and toys, babies ran a muck, and kids still lit off pyrotechnics in surprisingly crowded places.

The stage hosted various Nicaraguan acts. A few confusing traditional dances, a local boy singing Christmas carols, more dancing. We were thrilled, and confused when the audience was completely "blah" about the whole thing. "Can I get an applause for my guitar player???!?!" The singer would ask, and the crowd would unenthusiastically provide one or two slow claps...

The whole thing was bright and colorful and loud and people seemed to be having a good time, but we did notice that as an audience, there just wasn't a lot of team spirit.

Eventually, we moved on, grabbed a beverage, and went to sit on the sidewalk and watch people. Our friends have found that sitting on the curb can be one of the most fun things to do in this town sometimes. As we sat there talking and watching, it suddenly started to snow.

Yeah. I said snow.

After some further investigation, we saw that kid. That kid is this one little dude who sells things like grass woven flowers, shell animals, all the normal things that the kids here walk around pushing in your face. This kid, however, is seemingly everywhere and actually a total business man. He's a real kid, unlike so many of the others, he plays and laughs and just kind of wants to hang out with you rather than actually sell you stuff. So anyway, here's this kid, standing in the street, grating his fingers through a big block of styro-foam.
It was the most beautiful litter we had ever seen.
We sat there a little conflicted about the whole thing. "That's never going to break down..."
"Por favor, amigo, Nooooo!"
"No mas, no mas!"
But he kept going. He just really wanted us to have a white Christmas. Which I couldn't help thinking was adorable, despite the trash aspect.
Us silly Northerners and our environmental conscience.
As morally wrong as it may have been, it really did look like snow, and we sat there on the curb covered in white "snowflakes" and for a second, it was kind of magical.

Soon after, Ivano, a fellow resident of Hospedaje Elizabeth, rode up on his bike and said that Elizabeth had sent him to find us because we were eating early since some of the men were hungry already... I think it was 10:30 or 11 at this point.

We were a little nervous as to how this dinner would go. Imagine: A whole Nicaraguan family sitting down for their Christmas eve dinner with a small handful of uslong-term tenants. We had no idea what kind of customs they had, if we should bring something, what we should bring, what would be considered rude......

We arrived (with our bottle of wine, which we did bring.) and found a surprisingly causal dinner setting. The boys down the hall from us (also long term tenants) were helping shove tables together, Elizabeth and her daughter were bustling back and forth from the kitchen bringing out dishes. We sat down and Ivano immediately handed us his bowl of ceviche to start with, and everyone passed around the Flor de Cana without question. People served themselves and ate whenever they felt that their plate was full enough. Elizabeth, I noticed, didn't even sit down until most people were almost finished.
Our meal was delicious and more close to home than I'd expected, although there were some definite twists.
They served chicken, which had been cooked down and was sitting in a dish full of juices, almost enough for a soup, with GREEN OLIVES in it, which I was very excited to see.
There was also white rice cooked with carrots and onions, white bread, some kid of "stuffing" consisting of "everything" as Elizabeth explained. I discovered peas, capers, raisins, maybe some chicken shreds? Potato, and some other things which made it delicious and look just like stuffing...but without bread. They also had bowls of a sweet sweet bread cut into small squares for after you ate. It was made from corn and soaked in rum and something very very sweet. Ivano explained to me that its the same thing as the Italian Baba, for those of you who know what that is, "but just with rum. Just rum."

Another side note: Ivano is Italian, originally, though he's been here for years. I've started speaking Italian with him, which has been like a breath of fresh air after only being able to speak English in this foreign language country. Its still on Spanish, but its something, and it feels good.

After dinner, everyone sat around for a while, kids in the street were lighting things, as ever. One in a while one would run through the room with a sparkler looking for Elizabeth's grandson to come join, and his father would quietly get up and go outside to lay down the law.

Everyone (Except for Rosa and I, of course.) broke out the smokes after they'd eaten. Elizabeth included, which sparked a grand, "Ohhhhhh Elizaaaaa!!!!" and a small cheer from a couple people.
We were surprised at how open everyone was and the sharing that was going on so openly. Example: Jorge and Ivano reaching right over and helping themselves to the box of cigarettes. Everyone was very relaxed and friendly. We were so relieved to find that we fit in more than we thought, and happy to be there too.

We never cease to be amazed at the kindess thats shown to us by Elizabeth and her family. I think we may have been sitting there wide eyes and jaw dropped right open for a while just looking at what was going on around us. At least I was.

So this morning its Christmas. I can hear music coming from the church as I write this, although I think the majority of the holiday was celebrated last night around midnight, people today seem to be thinking about the lord.

We, on the other hand, are sleeping in. Our hand crafted Christmas "tree-net" is a glow, the presents are sitting patiently underneath it, and the stockings are stuffed. I had to get up early to fill Ryan's because if I left the chocolate in there overnight it would most certainly melt entirely by morning.

Today, I'm thinking about my family, and everyone up North celebrating, hopefully surrounded by family and love. We've managed to make ourselves a pretty sweet Christmas for ourselves down here, but we cant make family out of paper and glue.

Merry Christmas to everyone, I hope you all have a peaceful loving day. And everyone gets all the loot they wanted. But mostly the peace and love thing.

Feliz Navidad!

Granada

This week, we packed a couple small bags and took a trip up the highway to the beautiful, colonial, historic city of Granada.

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Arrival in Granada:
We started our trip like rats in a maze, totally disoriented, when we got off the bus and realized that we had no idea where our hotel was, what it looked like, or where we were.
The bus let us off in the busy crowded street market area of the city, and once we found Central Park, we realized that its actually pretty easy to navigate once you figure that part out. We ended up finding our hotel before too long. Our friends had gone the day before us and were waiting for us at the hotel by the pool. A perfect welcome after a long chicken bus ride, sandwiched between a thousand hot sweaty people. The Backpacker's Inn, where we stayed, is built in an old colonial home with two courtyards, both with gardens, and one with a pool just a couple feet from our door. From our window we can see the top of the dome on Iglesia de la Merced peeking over the rooftop opposite us in the courtyard. Tristan and Miranda recommended this place to us, and it turned out to be a great place to hang out on their final days here before they went back home.


Day one was spent mostly wandering lazily around the city. We realized all too quickly that the middle of the day is a bad time to walk around under the hot sun, so we laid low until early evening usually.

In total contrast to beachy little San Juan Del Sur, Granada is full of old buildings, churches, wide streets lined with horse drawn carriages, street vendors, and performers.

There is a wide variety of pretty good food as well. Tristan and Miranda showed us their favorite spot, The Garden Cafe where you can get a real green salad, smoothies, and a pretty good breakfast for cheap. We started most of our mornings here...

The main tourist drag is a little more pricey but still not too bad. Its close to the central park, the main cathedral, and the street performers wander up and down it, so despite our efforts to branch out, we ended up here most nights for dinner.


La Gigantona:
Every night when we ate on this street, a small group of young boys would wander up the streets, two with drums, one under a giant puppet-like figure of a woman with a colorful flowing gown, and the other wearing a jacket around his waist and a giant paper mache head that covered him to his chest. The two boys would drum, one of them would step forward and speak very fast Spanish and then they would drum some more, while the tall "woman" and the short "man" danced. The woman would spin and twirl and sometimes do tricks, depending on who was underneath the costume. The short one would shimmy and shake around the tables. At the end they would hold out their hats, and move a short way down the road and do it all over. We kept wondering what they were saying. It looked very much like some kind of story was being told, but we had no idea. A tour guide told us that they were saying tongue twisters, but nothing about the costumes. I looked it up and found out:

The Gigantona is a giant puppet figure representing the Spanish lady in all her power and splendour and majesty, her imposing stature demonstrating the power of the Spanish over the indigenous peoples. In construction the Gigantona has a carved wooden head mounted on a substantial cross beam from which wooden struts radiate downwards leaving space for the gigantonero. By comparison the Enano is made with a 3 foot diameter head formed from bamboo or willow covered in painted cloth. Below the head comes a short body and legs where a shoulder frame and suit disguise the bearer. Typical of the groups engaged in supporting this tradition is the youth group Viva León Jodido. This group is based in the indidgenous quarter of Sutiaba and celebrates the cultural traditions of the city through processions of the Gigantona. Children participating in these events create their own dance routines and prepare couplets which can be recited on the day of a public performance.

Las Isletas:
Granada, being situated on Lake Nicaragua, has 365 tiny islands, appropriately called Las Isletas, which it turns out, you can take a killer boat tour of with various companies. We picked one Miranda recommended, and our guide Carlos took us cruising around the isletas. It reminded me, oddly, of Florida. It felt like we were on a river when we started out, surrounded by tiny islands, most of them the size of a house, some smaller, some bigger.
We stopped first on an island where the San Pablo Fortress is located. Granada was prone to pirate attacks, with the San Juan river leading to it, so they built the fortress to stand guard and fend off the pirates. Apparently the whole city got completely destroyed a couple times, but it always bounced right back.



Next we stopped at Monkey Island, so named for its monkey residents. A veterinarian put them there to exist in the (controlled) wild. Problem is, he mixed spider monkeys and white faced monkeys. Spider monkeys are very territorial, so there is only one white faced monkey left :( Even though they're evil, they were still really cute and curious, following the boat all around and cautiously eating the Oreos that Carlos threw to them.

The last island we stopped at was made up entirely of a bar where we stopped for a quick refreshment and got to know our tour guide a little better, hearing a first hand account of growing up in Nicaragua.
We made our way back as Carlos told us all about the various types of birds we were seeing, and plants, and various history bits about the area. We had no idea what we were going to see and it turned out to be pretty amazing.
Tristan and Miranda left that evening, so we were a little lonely without them, but after a few nights crying ourselves to sleep, we managed to enjoy each others company, or whatever.

Tequila Vallarta:
This is kind of a side story, but it was a stand out moment in our trip for sure. We found Tequila Vallarta (A mexican restaurant on the main drag.) in a guide book and had some amazing Chile Rellenos there on our first night. We went back another night and chose a table inside this time. While we were sitting waiting for our food to come, we heard a "whack" sound and a giant "leaf" fell on the floor just beside me. Upon closer inspection I noticed that it wasn't a leaf, it was a bat. It had hit the fan and was flapping around slowly on the floor. Right then, our food came. The waiter looked at my face, watching the sad death of the bat on the floor, and at the bat, and made a motion at the fan like this happens frequently. He made a small laugh and went about his business. A tiny pool of bat blood pooled out from underneath it CSI style, and a bone from the wing stuck out. At this point we moved, slightly laughing about this situation, and also a little upset by the whole thing.
The End.

The Sights:
Museums and cathedrals and things like that are right up my alley so I was pretty excited to explore. We started at Convento y Museo San Francisco. The front of it was blue not too long ago, but now its kind of faded and antique looking. Inside there is a collection of pottery and the Zapatera statuary, which was seriously cool. They are a collection of basalt statues from 800-1200 AD found in the 1880's on an island near Granada. They're in the figures of Montezuma, El Diablo, Jaguars....Weird....person/frogs.....Its always really incredible to look at something that was made by someones hands so long ago.
Next we climbed the bell towers in the main Cathedral and the Iglesia de la Merced across from our hotel. The Cathedral is very very simple inside, but the bright yellow outside and view from the top makes up for it. The stairway was barely wide enough for us, and part of me was wondering if the boy who told us we could climb it was just trying to make a buck and we weren't actually supposed to be there due to instability....
We made it to the top though, don't worry.
Iglesia de la Merced is a white stone church with gothic black marks, almost like soot, covering it. There was some kind of baptism going on inside, so we stayed to the back and climbed the tower. They took care to ask us NOT to ring the bells, which made it really hard not to........
As we kept making our way up the street towards another fortress and a couple more churches, the rain came down, and when it rains here, you get soaked instantly like in the movies. Of course by the time we reached the fortress it was closed, but it was a good chance to cool off, and get stares from all the locals watching the silly gringos run around in the rain.

The colors in this city were one of my favorite things. The businesses, churches, bright fruit, various beverages being sold in plastic bags, people in costumes.


Making Chocolate at Choco Museo:

We got up early(er than we had been) and went to take a chocolate making workshop at a place called Choco Museo one morning. Ismael, our teacher, walked us through the process from beginning to end. The cacao was already fermented, of course, but we roasted it, husked it, and ground it. Then he showed us three drinks made with the cacao. One Aztec, one Mayan, and one Spanish. He told us how the Aztecs started it with just water, cacao, honey, and cinnamon, the Mayans added onto it, and finally the Spanish making it with milk. It was a far cry from our milk+chocolate=hot chocolate business that we do up North. I wrote down the recipes and will be trying them at home.
Our job was not easy, grinding the beans to a paste in a mortar, but the product was worth it. We each made one chocolate bar and the remains of our chocolate, we mixed together to make a third. Ismael quizzed us at the end, and we retrieved our chocolate bars later that evening and are still enjoying them as I write this.

Here are a few of the things we were quizzed on:

• Cacao is best fermented under banana leaves
• The ideal fermentation is 93%. Here in Nicaragua, they've got it at 85%, but in Peru they have 93%. Its all luck, apparently.
• The cacao pod grows directly off of the trunk of the tree.
• The tree grows best in cool climates.
• You can tell if cacao beans are fermented if you: a) Shake them in your hands. They should sound hollow. b) Open them up. They should be brown inside, not purple. c) Taste it. If it's bitter, its not fermented.

We both got A+'s. But I helped Ryan with a couple of his answers....

Laguna de Apoyo:

After our workshop we hopped a bus to Laguna de Apoyo, a crater lake with blue blue water thats super warm. It was a cloudy day when we went, so the photos didn't quite capture it, but you'll have to trust me on this one....Or Google it. We'd heard that you could skip the $12 shuttle and get a bus to the turn off, where you get a cab to the laguna.... We should have known it wouldn't be that simple. We got the bus to the turn off, and another bus came and took us to.....another turn off. At this point, we saw a sign that said "The Monkey Hut 2km". This was where we were going, and 2km isn't that much, so we thought this was a good thing. THAT SIGN WAS A LIE. We walked down an endless hill, corner after corner for a goooood long while. Way more than 2km. A family of locals was walking behind us and just kind of dissapeared into a bush leaving us to wonder if a) they were wizards, b) there was a path we were supposed to take, c) we were hallucinating due to the long walk without water or civilization. We'll never know for sure....
In the end we made it without being eaten by a jaguar. The Monkey Hut is a hostel that you can pay $6 to gain access to their dock, kayaks, restaurant, and pretty much whatever else they have there. The water was warm, the weather was not boiling, and it was beautiful. We headed back relatively soon to get in before dark, hopping on a bus...well...no not hopping. Being persuaded to get on the bus that didn't look like it could take any more people. The driver always has his sidekick who hangs out the door shouting its destination and dragging people in, and he seemed to be confident that we could fit. We were literally hanging onto each other for dear life as we stood on the step on the open door on the highway. Maximum capacity isn't a thing here.

Masaya:

We planned to leave for Rivas on to Ometepe island the next day, but upon hearing that Masaya was the "making things" capital of Nicaragua, and may have guitars, Ryan suggested we make a stop there before heading out. Another crowded bus, and we made it to the artisan market. The market is set up within old stone walls that look like a castle, which is exciting on its own but then you go inside...

Its an endless maze of stalls all selling hand crafted things from goofy trinkets to elaborate sets of wooden table settings, leather, hammocks. We wandered around for a couple hours, never really sure if we'd been to that booth before, aimlessly meandering around... My favorite things were the wooden boxes, hand woven hammocks, and leather bound journals with volcanoes, flowers, and birds on them. We didn't buy much due to backpack space, but they were able to steer us in the direction of a guitar shop for Ry.

The taxi driver let us out in front of the shop in the middle of some kind of slums and warned us to be careful, "No seriously. Be. Careful."He even offered to go in and buy the guitar for Ryan to avoid getting scammed. Ry declined, since he could just as easily scam us, and we said goodbye and went to buy a guitar while secretly preparing to get robbed. I kept one eye on the entrance to the shop while Ryan tried out a few guitars. They tried to charge him $200 for a guitar, but when he told them he was looking to spend more like $50, they changed their minds and offered it for $60 including the case. We still don't know the actual value of the guitar, but he got a $140 discount regardless. Being serenaded 24/7: Priceless.