One Last Waterfall

I spent, in all, about six months in La Ribera.  But I never stopped discovering new things in and around the area.  Example: the stunning waterfall I visited my last weekend there.  It plummets 125 meters  - way beyond anything I've seen in the States.  And it does so not twenty minutes from the home of a family friend.

View from the tippy top - check out the road below!

All Good Things....

Coming back to Finca Chinchilla before I travelled home was always my plan.  My experience in Costa Rica was shaped more by my family there than by anything else, and I couldn't imagine not ending my trip in their company.


I will say, however, that I ended up making things harder on myself.  As I wrapped up my wandering travels, I had begun to feel a little tired of lugging my backpack around, of the same sort of conversation, of spending money, of any number of things that wear on a traveller.  I had started to think "Well, when I'm home, I can..."


Coming back to the farm erased all that in an afternoon.  Walking back up to my family's home, surrounded by mist and mountains, I felt a sort of sigh of relief - a homecoming.  A beautiful feeling, but one that can be a little bit problematic when you have a flight booked in three weeks. 


Those three weeks passed in less than a heartbeat.  I woke up every morning feeling a bittersweet pressure to soak in every drop of each moment I had left, but still felt that the sun set before I could catch my breath.  I'm can't let this blog go without recounting a few more of these moments...

Back to Ticolandia

For my last stretch of travelling time, I wanted to be on the beach.  I have seen a lot of gorgeous places over the past few months.  Breathtakingly green forests, lush farms, gritty cities, windswept cattle fields.  But I have yet to find a place that duplicates the feeling I get when I am at the beach.  Something about the hugeness of the ocean paired with the great big open sky, epecially when set against almond trees and sturdy palms, just moves me in a way that no other place does.  I couldn't imagine a better spot to spend my last days as an independant traveller.

Since I went to Dominical, I had been hearing from beach bum after beach bum that Santa Teresa was one of their favorite beaches.  So, I set off from Nicaragua toward the sand. More on what I've been up to in the next post, but for now, take a look!

 Lots of driftwood around here for perching and lounging.

 Millions of teeny shells.

The hostel.  They know what they're doing regarding hammocks here - you can never, ever, have too many.  Friends in the background decided that my picture was too boring without them.... acting like they were on a rollercoaster?

Posing with a big thorny tree while on our quad expedition.

Break from exploring the unknown to gaze out at the ocean? Yes please.

:)

And finally, this is how I look when asked to do anything legit with a surfboard. 

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