Glimpses

Okay, posts have been seriously lacking in pictures lately, and I know that's what you guys really want in the end.  So, here's a look into the places and people I've been blessed by recently:

Fountain in Granada just at the mouth of my favorite walk - the broad mango tree lined path to the lakeside.

Lots of the churches in Granada were sparkling clean
and recently painted. I liked this one which showed its age a little bit more.

This lovely breakfast joint became a running joke between my friends and me here.  While making plans one day, someone suggested we meet at kahtaywafflayy. I thought  - huh? After several minutes of describing the place to me, my friends then had to sit through a fit of giggles as I realized what they were talking about. 

A marching band performs on the main square in Granada -

instead of a flag corps, they have these guys out front playing and dancing.

Pithaya! Or dragon fruit.  For all its crazy appearance, it's actually got a pretty mild taste to it.

 A taste of the political climate in Leon.

Rawr.

A few of the amazing folks I've had the pleasure of spending time with here. From left to right: Aurora, a friend I met while working at the Oasis and then followed to Leon,
Mainor, a veterinarian and class clown, me,
and Alex, a systems engineer student who will graduate this year and a fellow student of Spanish - he's from Nicaragua, but grew up on the Caribbean coast and so spoke only Creole English and Miskito until just a few years ago.

:)

On Being a Macha/Chela Muchacha/Chavala

As a language nerd, I have had a pretty limitless amount of things to observe and think about over the past few months.  I watched my own progress with Spanish with a weird amount of consciousness, tracking the plateaus and leaps with interest.  I often find myself  in excited conversations with people over silly turns of phrase within Spanish or English.  Over the past month, I've gotten to make a new kind of comparison - Spanish with Spanish.

I've mentioned briefly before that there isn't a whole lot of love lost between Nicaraguans and Costa Ricans.  I experienced this in a new way, though, once I started making friends in Granada and  began hearing over and over that I spoke like a Tica (Costa Rican.)  My friends would mimic what I had said, laying on a thick Tico accent the way people might put on a Boston one, laughing the whole time.   I pronounced my "s" to much.  I  was mushmouthed the way Ticos were.  I used the formal form far too often.   And God help me if I attempted to use every Tico's  favorite, pura vida.  Unacceptable.  So, I started to try and adapt. A couple examples of things I picked up:

cool as in chill
Nicaragua: tuani
Costa Rica: tuaniS

cool as in awesome
Nicaragua: diacachimba, salvaje, bestial
Costa Rica: chiva, pura vida, tuanis

cool as in a cool person, or as in "he's good people"
Nicaragua: buena onda
Costa Rica: pura vida, buena gente

something that reminded me of New Orleans, used for checking  to make sure someone is paying attention while you're talking in Nicaragua: oiste? (i.e. you heard me?)

getting someone's attention 
Nicaragua: a quick whistle (ooooOOOO)
Costa Rica: either a nonsense syllable or, if walking up to a home and announcing your presence, an oopeh

girls
Nicaragua: chavalas, chicas
Costa Rica: guilas, muchachas

people with light skin / hair / eyes (usually foreigners, but not always)
Nicaragua: chela, chele
Costa Rica: macha

Yo No Sé Mañana

  Last post I talked a little bit about songs that constantly float around in the air around here.  Aventura is big, but if you wanna talk really really big, you need to know about Luis Enrique.  He is a native son of Nicaragua who has made it to the world stage as  the prince of salsa.  This song is popular here in a way that I imagine Lady Gaga is in the States at the moment (who also by the way  enjoys a heavy rotation down here in Central America, where her name is hilariously close to the word for, well, poop), or this Justin Bieber person that I've just started hearing about.  In any case, the opening chords of this song will always take me back exactly to the barfront in Via Via, sharing  Flor de Caña rum with friends and singing along.  I will really miss Leon.


Yo No Sé Mañana

In which I lose my mind to the music

Confession: I am newly and wholly in love with latin dancing.  Having spent an entire 6 months in Costa Rica smilling and saying no every time I had the opportunity to dance explaining that I just was too embarrased to get out there, I finally gathered my courage in a tiny bar on the edge of Lake Nicaragua and danced bachata for the first time.  I was bad at it. My date was patient and let me step on his feet, trip over my flip flops, stop cold in the middle of a step, and generally behave as if my feet hips and knees had never been introduced. And then, I wasn´t so bad. And then, a few days later I was washing dishes in the hostel, and the way that the sponge slid quickly around the edge of the soapy dish reminded me of a quick turn I had learned. And I found that as I walked through each pool of music spilling onto the city streets, that I wanted to move.

At first, bachata was really the only flavor of music that I found myself comfortable with.  It has a sultry, slower beat and less fancy footwork and turns than other styles, so it´s a great place to start.  One of the things that always most intimidated me about latin dancing was the subtlety of it all - there always seemed to be a beat within the beat that everyone could hear but me.  With bachata, however, I was able to keep pace with the steps while slowly relaxing into the "extras." 

When it comes to bachata, a group called Aventura is the absolutely uncontested king of the style.  It amazes me the monopoly that they have over the dance scene.  Their music has become as much a  background to my time here much like the homemade fireworks that churches set off by the dozen every day.  So, I wanted to leave you guys with a few of my favorite songs.  Expect more news about dancing in the next few posts!

Disclaimer - general music video / latin music oversexiness applies here. Feel free to ignore the video and just listen.  [Grandmother, I warned you! :)]


un beso

lagrimas

And finally, one of the only songs I hear regularly that´s not Aventura: tu primera vez

Viva León... ¡Jodido!

Greetings from León, Nicaragua!  The college town of Nicaragua, León is known for being filled with radical, party seeking university students, for it`s role in the revolution, and for its heat.  (official spiel here) I came to León after having finishing my commitment to the hostel and spending one last weekend enjoying Granada.

A friend of mine who I originally met in the Oasis arrived in León several days before me, and I traveled with two mutual friends of ours to meet up with her.  I have to say, there is just nothing as good as getting to travel with locals when I am trying to arrive in a totally new place.  The crush of taxi drivers ready with lies (oh, there aren´t any more buses today.....), the auctioneer paced flow of information from the bus men, everything is just a little less overwhelming when you´re with people who know when to listen and when to roll their eyes.

So far, León has been an absolute blast.  While I thoroughly enjoyed Granada and its people, I am excited to be here among new friends exploring new territories.

Am I a Country Mouse or a City Mouse?

One of the reasons I wanted to come to Granada, among many, was to explore living in a city again after having spent so much time in the countryside.  I knew that I had fallen deeply in love with the farming life, that I tended to wax poetic on things that other people found either bemusing or outright silly. (Look at this head of lettuce, I mean, what could possibly be better than this??) But I also knew that my heart at home lay in New Orleans, and that there were times in La Ribera that I yearned for certain things only a city can bring.  So, knowing that San Jose wasn´t for me, I came back to Granada, whose crumbling decadence and worked metal gates reminded me of the Big Easy.

It´s been quite an adjustment living in a city again, I have to say.  I´ve traded muddy paths for trashy sidewalks, whatever was placed on the table for a whole city of dinner options, a steady homebody life for the ever-changing scene of the hostel.  Family for peers.  Safety and ennui for leers and a million new dance steps to learn. Knowing everyone for knowing almost no one.  I´m glad I came.  I can´t tell you that I´ve had some sort of revelation about where I want to spend my time in the future, but I have begun to rediscover city life in a way that I was unsure about a few months ago.

Hostel Oasis, and One Million Trastes

Just after Libby left, I made my way north for the third time since October.  Up and into Nicaragua, to explore a new scene.  When I last spent time in Nicaragua, I was accompanying Kelci and her friend Simone on a visa run.  We spent three days in Granada, and I developed quite a crush on the city.  I noticed as we left our hostel that a small sign by one of the benches advertised a work exchange program  - one month´s commitment of a few hours of work each day in return for a free bed and breakfast.  Sounded good to me.  A few emails later, I was set to arrive in Granada just two days after Libby headed out.

Something most of you probably don´t know about my trip so far: it has been, to a bizarre extent, filled with washing dishes.  At the Chinchillas, it was the first thing I found that I could clearly see needed doing and that I knew exactly how to do.  Later, my fast and thorough dish skills developed into a way to get myself and Luz out the door and into the dirt as fast as possible.  When you cook three meals a day from scratch for a family of six + one, dishes pile up like eggs in a hen house, and there´s a pretty stark definition of who does dishes in the Chinchilla household (got a Y chromosome? Walk away.)   At the farm in Guanacaste, I was sharing volunteer space with a professional chef.  He cooked, clearly, and I cleaned and tried to learn as much as possible. As it turns out, this theme has followed me all the way to Nicaragua.  My job at the hostel: breakfast!  I take and deliver orders, run them to the front to be added to the bill, and pick up after guests who don´t feel the need to bring their dishes to me. [attn guests: this is not the Ritz.] And? I wash dishes.  :)

Honestly, I can´t complain.  I work with some very sweet ladies who have patience with my particular brand of gringa-tica Spanish, who cook me special breakfasts, and who do nothing more that give each other seriously? looks when I remind them that I won´t be eating pork rinds for breakfast because I don´t eat meat.  A few hours in the morning, and the rest of the day is given over to whatever strikes my fancy.

Food, Food, and more Food.

One of my favorite things that I have inherited from my mom is a curiousity and excitement over new foods.  From my dad´s side, I was impressed with the idea that food should be a celebration, and not an obligation.  Both ideas continue to inspire me.  When people look at my photos from my travels here so far, they often comment that I have a lot of pictures of food.  What can I say? On the farm, the food we grow inspires awe in me because I have the priveledge of living alongside it.  Out and about, food inspires me as a window into the people I am visiting.  Following are some recent shots I took while travelling in Granada and on my last days at Finca Chinchilla.

Donut! Bought from an ancient lady slowly waving a horse tail over her wares to keep the flies off. Unfortunately, it tasted like rush hour.  I suspect the fumes of busy Granada had been working on it for a while.

 Jocotes.  A little sweet, a little sour. The perfect breakfast.

The city of Granada is obsessed with hot dogs.  Seriously.  I counted at least one hot dog cart for each block in the busy parts of the city.  How could I leave without eating one?

Did you know that cashews grew like this? I had to buy some cashews for the family to convince them that the bottom part was just as good as the fruit.

Rose apples.  Perfect for pulling off the tree as you pass underneath on horseback.

The Chinchillas absolutely war over these, which are called guavas here (very confusing at first.) To eat them, you simply suck off the white furry part and leave the seed behind.

Starfruit, pulled off the tree just behind the kitchen.  These are tiny but sweet enough to eat just as they are.

Granada

Some of you may remember that I traveled to Nicaragua in January to renew my visa.  It was a strange trip - full of wind storms and not much else.  I recently returned to accompany a friend to renew her visa, and had a wonderfully different experience.  This time, I headed to Granada, which can be found on the northern coast of Lake Nicaragua.  (It's the oldest continuously inhabited city in Latin America, for all you trivia buffs.)

I fell in love with Granada immediately.  Where cities in Costa Rica are relatively organized, Granada is riotous, dirty, and thrilling. It immediately reminded me of Peru. I hadn't before realized how much I missed that chaotic river of people feeling until we were wading through the market, surrounded on all sides by people, animals, and wares.  Women called out about their food or merely waved a banana leaf above their loaves of bread.  Men resoled shoes or hawked the latest cell phone charger.  Kids sifted through knees, market bags, horse legs, and stalls, creating their own small river beneath the larger one. 

The other side of Granada´s charm lies in something very different.  As I mentioned above, it´s an extremely old city, and proud of the fact.  The buildings around the main square in Granada are beautifully restored to bright colonial architecture - crisp white plaster details surrounding warm yellow walls, wooden balconies slowly disappearing under determined vines.

The rest of the city shows a more realistic echo of the city´s age in faded homes and occasional details that reminded me of the decadent beauty of New Orleans.  The contrast between the two, though, is what made the city most interesting to me.  I am a person that tends to like contrasts.  Salty with sweet.  Challenging but fun.  New but old.  Granada fed just that part of me.

I found Nicaraguans to be a kind, polite group of people.  They often went out of their way to be helpful to me, patiently waiting as I made a decision or searched for the right word as I spoke.  Here in Costa Rica, there is some cultural tension between "Nicas" and "Ticos," but I am happy to report that stereotypes are just that.  I am already planning to return to Granada during my upcoming travels, and can´t wait to see more parts of Nicaragua as well.

San Juan del Sur

After a quick layover in Rivas and a stop at the ATM to get into the local currency (which is plastic! genius!), I hopped on a chicken bus to San Juan del Sur.  Chicken bus, you say?  Apparently these reapportioned old school buses get their name from the fact that nearly any cargo is permissible to haul on, though all my fellow passengers on this trip were firmly human.

The trip was nice - I got to see a good glimpse of the Nicaraguan countryside, including a famous island in the enormous lake Nicaragua called the Isla de Ometepe, which is made up by two narrowly connected volcanos.

   Stepping off the bus, though, I was greeted by my least favorite part of Nicaragua so far: the wind.  I had really hoped that things would be different than they were in Rivas (pretty silly, as the ride was only about 40 minutes), but I quickly gave that up.  The wind hit me full in the face as I stepped down from the bus steps, carrying dirt and sand up with it.  Sigh.  As I had done the night before and for all of that morning, I reached down and grabbed each side of my skirt in a fist, struggling to keep things modest.  You see, while packing for this trip, I had only thrown skirts into my tiny backpack.  I´m going to the beach, I thought.  Skirts will be great because they are comfortable, cool, and I´ll look presentable wherever I end up.  I did not look presentable.  I looked like a woman at war with her wardrobe.  And still do.  This area of Nicaragua is experiencing a freak windstorm of some sort which has lasted nearly a week now. I keep having people promise me that it´s going to let up tomorrow, each tomorrow that comes just brings more gusts.  The beach is an impossibility - I tried walking along the edge the first day I got here, and could think of nothing other than camels.  The wind was so hard that the sand rushed in currents across the beach, stinging as it found its way into my ears, armpits, and teeth.  Bleh.

Needless to say, it hasn´t been a picturesque beach trip.  I did luck into a great hostel though, where I´ve devoured 4 books and met lots of frustrated surfers from around the world.  Tomorrow, I´ll start my trek back into Costa Rica, having gotten just enough of a taste of this new country to want to come back.  After the storm.

Crossing the Border

As crazy as it seems, I have now been out of the country for three months.  Costa Rica grants Americans an automatic ninety day tourist visa when they enter the country, which I used nearly to the day.  Tomorrow will officially be day ninety for me, but as many of you know, I am chronically punctual, and this apparently extends to visa deadlines.  In order to renew my visa, I simply need to be outside of Costa Rica for more than seventy-two hours.  After that, I´ll reenter with another full ninety days to spend.  When I first came down, I was quite worried about the length of time that my return ticket showed.  Surely the Costa Ricans would be on to me, and know that I fully intended to skip out of the country and skip right back in!  As it turns out, there are people in Costa Rica who have been doing just that for years on end. My probably two or three times is hardly worth batting an eye at. There is some level of gossip circulating that with the elections coming up in February, the visa laws are due to change and become more strict, but given the amount of money that tourism brings to Costa Rica, I´m not putting all that much weight on it.  In any case, the point of all of this is that I am writing to you now from Nicaragua!

I headed out of the country Monday after saying goodbye to my mom and brother (clearly something you´ll hear about in a flashback soon!) alongside a big busload of Nicaraguans.  Having never crossed a border by land before, I was anxious to see what it would be like.  Honestly? Sort of underwhelming.  Lots of coyotes (local citizens offering a range of legal and illegal unoffical services) trying to convince me that their fanny pack stuffed with bills was certainly the most secure way to change my money, lots of long lines, and a sadly dusty and rundown office.

    I did get to witness a clumsy bribe go down, however, which provided enough entertainment to last me most of my time waiting in line.  As I lazily peered outside while waiting my turn, an American outside held an animated conversation with some of the coyotes, and then edged into the office building.  He ambled in what I´m sure he thought was a casual way past everyone waiting in line and stood beside the processing window, shifting his weight nervously back and forth.  And then he waited while the next person got processed.  And the next.  Meanwhile, the coyotes, who I can only assume are not very welcome inside the building, banged on the window from the outside and ethusiastically mimed their wishes both to the American and the immigration employee.  Finally, after about three minutes, the border employee grabbed the man´s papers, slapped a quick stamp on, and shoved them back through the slot.  As I reached the window, a coyote sprinted into the room, flicked a bill through the slot in the glass, and sprinted impishly back out.  I realize this was all supposed to be rather a serious, slick deal, but I couldn´t help but laugh a little.  Especially when, 20 minutes later, I was standing by the American, hearing him explain to a friend that he had paid those guys twenty bucks to get him through and was still standing right there with the rest of us.

Otherwise, the crossing passed a lot like a birthday - I knew that something was different, and that it should seem different, but to me, any real change was intangible as we crossed that imaginary line.  I found a hostel at the nearest travel hub of a town and collapsed gratefully into bed.  What would be different, and what the same, about this new country?