To Nicaragua and back...

I took the bus to San Ramon with the other participants (they continued on to San Jose) and then found a connection to Liberia. Alber, who is from Nicaragua, gave up his plane flight and joined me for the bus adventure. We got on the bus and were greeted with traffic jams and a heavy downpour. There was just room for us to sit (at turns) on the front steps. Although we’d planned to get off in Liberia and catch a tourist bus through to Granada, we arrived in Liberia far too late to make the connection, and realized that the terminus was Penas Blancas, which was the border town on the CR side. Things would work out from here, we reasoned, and as it turned out, very mas y menos, they kind of did. We were stranded there for a little while as we gradually came to find out that there were not much in the way of towns on either side. We had managed to walk our way through the various CR and Nicaraguan official places and the street money changers (not an easy task), and suddenly our trail stopped as a muddy road not meant for pedestrians continued on. This was Alber’s first real trip, so although he had the language and culture skills, he was unsure how to proceed. We went back and forth between paying a high price to a tourist bus to paying a high price for a taxi (and a dodgy taxi at that) until a quiet woman finally approached us in the crowd and told us we’d better share the taxi with her and get out at Rivas, the nearest town up from the border. That we did, and after a nice pizza we took a constitution of the neighborhood, and I got another whiff of not being in Kansas anymore… totally different from Costa Rica!

The buildings had high ceilings and the doorways were also enormous, of cafés, restaurants, homes, hotels, everything. The colors also seemed to be either a shade brighter, or in some cases faded tones, both bringing up images of colonial times. The poverty level was certainly a tad lower and the skin of the locals was darker, and election posters and paintings were just about anywhere you looked (Alber explained a brief history of the country’s civil war between leftist Sandinista and the conservative dictatorship, and pointed out the multitude of red and black flags that marked the Sandinista). Horses, mules, and donkeys were common sights, either pulling a car behind them or being used for manual labor or debris or concrete. It was still Latin America with the large squares marking the center of the town and usually fronted by a church, designed to be in front of a spectacular sunset. We came across one large green building, a kind of pavilion, and found out that a boxing match was going on. We heard the bells and the cheers of the crowd, and young boys who couldn’t afford the ticket peering in through the gate (see photo, taken in morning). Later down the block at least half a dozen kids were standing—standing—on bicycles that carefully balanced their weight as they could look over the gate.

The next day we bought some fruit and yogurt from a supermarket and took a bicycle taxi pedaled by a young boy to the bus stand. I watched a number of buses go by, and from the yellow school buses with MONROE JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL on the side to other buses with kanji characters in the windows, it looked like most of the Nicaraguan fleet had been donated from the US or Japan. After a little while a guy in a car stopped by and asked if we were going to Granada, Alber said yes and we negotiated a price of $10 for us to take the backseat. He drove at a speed that must have doubled the local bus, and after a brief police stop we found ourselves in Granada. They were having a huge festival, and the streets were so packed it was hard to walk on them, let alone drive. The driver let Alber and I off although by this time his previously-new and very large (and insanely heavy!) bag had been deemed almost entirely useless. One handle had clean broken off and the wheels had self-destructed, making us totally immobile. I stayed with the bags for some time while Alber went off in many directions to do many things, and when he came back we still had no idea what to do.

Eventually he phoned his girlfriend’s family, who lived in Granada, and so we took another taxi to the outskirts of town and they made some calls to hotels to find a room, as I sat by the grandmother rocking in her chair, knitting, and occasionally muttering to herself que caliente! Two young boys roamed the living room looking for scrawny kittens to throw in the air, one dressed in a nice Sunday church outfit and the other in underwear. Eventually they got a single for me at The Bearded Monkey and we took a taxi out there, only to discover the question had been not to “reserve” an actual room, but rather finding out its cost, ah, semantics!

The clerk took pity on me after I’d said it had been a long day (a long two days!) and called to find another room elsewhere for me. Alber and I had another meal and he went off to see his girlfriend as I wandered around the huge fiesta celebration, with music blaring from all sides, packed streets, dozens and dozens of cowboys and cowgirls, foods, etc., a celebration of “hipicos”. There were parades and shouts, and I wandered around and took part in all of it before turning in.

The next day I explored the city of Granada, a beautiful and famous colonial town with old churches, architecture, and a general feeling… a very nice place, I found. I went into many of the churches and saw the harbor where the lake was, and ate some good food outside of what I can find in El Invu. It was kind of strange to suddenly be transformed from that tiny Costa Rican town and its intensive work atmosphere to the heart of a backpacker scene that could have resembled anything from Bangkok to Varanasi to Paris. Many of the restaurants were trendy for this crowd, cheap DVD showings were featured in places, trips were planned that seemed to fit this lifestyle and some of the hotels I saw were real hangout spots—even the conversations could have been in any of those places!

On Tuesday I made my way into the capital city of Managua and went to UCA, the famous University with several branches in Latin America. I met some English teachers who had taken the SIT course and was able to join them for a lunch and talk about what changes the course had affected in their teaching… was very interesting. And it was great to suddenly find myself in a University environment, to walk around a campus that was enclosed from the outside hustle and bustle, with large trees and big fountains. I was pointed to a vegetarian restaurant (!) just off campus and actually was able to get a veggie burger there. The owner reflected a kind of health and radiance that I suppose many people start to get when they give up eating animals, and I understood enough Spanish to get how happy she was being a vegetarian, but how rare it was in her country—there were only a couple other semi-veggie restaurants she knew of in the city.

I went back to my hotel and had a sit, only to be interrupted by a rustle in my backpack. It was only an inch open, but when I jabbed it, a mouse squirted out and ran under the bed! I zipped it up (I had just bought some food) and hung it on the wall. About 20 minutes later I heard a plop sound, and several very loud noises followed by a squeal… I turned the light on to find the mouse had scaled the wall, fallen off the bag and into the fan, and after getting highly bruised had retreated for under the bed again… I quickly took the food to a refrigerator and that was that.

So, with a wealth of brand new and exotic bug bites (I counted over a dozen on one side), I prepared to leave Granada. I was up before 6.00 a.m. on Wednesday morning, and I walked to the TicoBus station. On my way was an old hospital (called the Old Hospital, incidentally) that looked more horrific than anything I could imagine in a genuine horror film. The stones were dirty grey and white with black specks, grass and trees and weeds had taken over everything—fountains, windows, rooftops. The feeling there was still very much hospitalish, it just felt like overnight everything had stopped and no one dared set foot anywhere near it for ages.

I got on the bus at 7.00 a.m., and found myself in air conditioning for the second time since arriving in Latin America (the first was the day before at the University). After a very prolonged stay at the border, we were off again, a DVD popped into the TV, showing of all things “United Flight 93”. A very interesting movie to watch when one hasn’t seen any movies or TV in over 2 months, and doubly interesting to see on a bus having to make many curves on rainy roads. I got to San Jose in the afternoon and after some horchata ice cream managed to walk with my bags across town to the bus. The bus went to Cuidad Quesada, where I then waited another 2.5 hours while eating some mediocre veggies, watching part of a terrible Cinemax movie and making conversation with a cook who had lived in Montreal. At 8 p.m. I boarded the bus and was dropped off in the middle of nowhere by San Isidro, where I then walked the final 2-3 miles home… over 18 hours of travel, home again! Home again, and, well, busy again, much and much work to do this time around!

Activity flurries in the land of La Dulce Vida

Here are the traditional in-front-of-the-spiral pictures taken after the last two courses… the first one is in July and the second in August, where I was working as a Trainer.

I just have a moment to write a few lines about what I’ve been up to lately, actually it is a moment I really do not have but I will try to take it anyway! The last course—the one month SIT TESOL Certificate intensive month course—was quite the challenge, complete with 12 (and even 14) hour days and looming deadlines and much else. My responsibility was running workshops, looking over lesson plans, observing teaching sessions and taking notes, responding to participants' papers, leading post-teaching Feedback meetings, and a few other things here and there as well.

It got off to a rather slow start though, or at least a slow lead-up. After the previous course ended I was invited to go fishing with Mark and his host family, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Costa Rica who was a participant in that course. I passed up the opportunity to take life but was going to go anywhere for the walk and the nature until fatigue combined with downpours set in. So I still managed to make it to their home that night, where they ate the fresh fish, and I was then invited to come to their mother’s farm (everybody’s family seems to live just around the corner in El Invu!) in the morning. It was here I milked a cow for the first time and also drank fresh cow milk as well. For someone who is not too into dairy it was absolutely delicious! As we walked around the farm a large green parrot followed us from branch to branch and tree to tree, and then back at the house (where we drank the warm milk and put it into our coffees) the parrot flew inside and around the house, until I realized it actually belonged to the old woman, and it began to eat angrily by the sink. Another Gabriel Garcia Marquez moment here… Oh, check out the starfruit litter outside her house on the ground!

The next course started up and I went to the San Jose Airport (an exhausting all day trip to start out an intensive 6-day first week with the eccentric Pipa as driver) to pick them up, 3 Americans and 2 Latinos who won grants from the US Embassy to be able to come here. It was a very busy month and so much happened that as I sit calmly (or not so calmly as I am thinking about my present work ahead) here at the computer I kind of come up blank about what to write about! Ron and Ellen, the supervisors I had in Chicago, came to assess the course and we went with them to a hot springs in Cuidad Quesada. This was especially nice for me as the scheduled hot springs trip during the first weekend I had been left behind due to a miscommunication! Here is a picture of all of us over at Mary’s house after a swim in La Pechuga, the local river.

We did get a lot of use out of the river this course, it was a great cooling-off mechanism. Sometimes Anna and I (the other trainer) took a brief swim before a Sunday meeting at Mary’s house to dive into work, and once we even decided to all play hooky for an hour and rearrange the workshop schedule to plan in some more swim time during a very intense and muggy week!

Another party at Mary’s house featured a couple of birthdays to celebrate, and we all got to experience the Costa Rican style of piñatas. They tie the piñata on a string and blindfold someone who then tries to swing at it—up till now, pretty much the same thing in either hemisphere. The difference is that they have another person who pulls on the string to make the piñata swing up and down as well as to either side, so the blindfolded one has little idea of not only where he is standing in relation to the piñata, but even when he manages to make contact, it surely won’t be there the second swing… it could be above the head or at the feet, eliciting big laughs from the crowd as the stick goes flinging in all directions.

And so the month ended, and we cleaned El Centro Espiral Mana and I locked my cabin and joined the crew heading back to San Jose, to make my way north into Nicaragua for visa reasons (with Alber who is pictured there with me)… Here's another shot of that parrot munchin away...