Day 2 in Granada
Trip Start
Nov 2007
1
7
33
Trip End
Dec 2007
Granada,
Nicaragua
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Yesterday started off with some strangely nicaraguan events. First, i was awaken by what sounded like gun shots but ended up being fireworks. I never found out why, but it's appearantly a regular thing because they started shooting them off again at night and no one seemed to care. So i got up and meandered out in front of the hotel just to stretch. As i stood there, a cop drove by and honked and glared at me. Not sure what that was all about. In general, the police are much more visible here, but they seem friendly, honker dude excluded. Unlike the US you tend to find police meandering around the neighborhoods, just keeping an eye out.
Next i had breakfast with a toucan. No i wasn't eating fruit loops :). I sat at a table in the 'restaurant' in our hotel (a few tables set up in the lobby). This hotel rocks! A simple breakfast is included with your stay: scrambled eggs, rice & beans, toast, juice. While my order was being cooked, a toucan flew over to my table and perched on the chair directly across from me. He stayed there for the rest of the meal, hoping for a handout. At one point, he got down, walked over and attempted to climb up my leg to my lap. smart guy! I gave him a firm "no" and he slumped his head and returned to the chair.
After that, i woke mel up and she went down for breakfast. As we ate a crowd of young boys collected outside the hotel waiting to try to sell us something. Occasionally one would slip in and make it to our table, but we would say no, gracias and they were immediately gone. It was really sad to see 10-12 year old boys working on a friday morning. :( But they, like everyone here were so friendly. In fact, that has been a universal of our experience, friendly, generous people. At that moment, i was eating my 2nd breakfast which the hotel gave to me for free just because they didn't want to see me sitting without food while Mel ate.
After breakfast, we walked through the center square of town. Wow, was i suprised. I expected it to be filled with tourists, like a european city center. But instead it was filled with Nicas. There were kids playing soccer on a make shift field (chalk on concrete marked the field, bookbags marked the goals) during the lunch break from school. There were vendors out selling food and drink... a juice sold in plastic bags tied at the top around a straw were very popular. Groups of old men were gathered chatting animatedly. There were taxi and horse drawn carraige drivers waiting for the tourists. And ther were many people just meandering around. And a large church service was in progress in this highly catholic country.
In Europe you feel like you are surrounded by tourists and if you look hard you can spot locals like finding waldo. In granada, you have to 'spot the tourists' among the locals. And the art to finding the tourists is easy: Go in a restaurant or cafe. Because the tourists tend to stick to the 'safer' restaurants (and they can afford them), they congregate there. but outside that, tourists are tougher to find. You truly feel like you are meandering through the locals lives as you meander through the city.
After lunch we went in search of a spanish language school, which took us around the city and down to the waterfront. The main street to the waterfront is nicer with small colonial houses surrounded by rich greenery filled with birds. A small river of sewage flows between the houses and the street though. It is this type of sewage that spilled into the streets during the recent torential rains in north western Nica that have caused a bacterial infection outbreak that has killed 10 and sickened 7,000.
On the way back from the waterfront, we took a back street through a barrio. Small houses line each side of the street. They tended to have corregated roofs, no a/c and 3 rooms... The front doors were almost always open to create breeze so mel and i peered in. There was usually a TV in the front room and a few rocking chairs, a small kitchen in back and maybe space for a bedroom. Every once in a while you would pass the wreckage of a house which usually still had a family living 'in' it. On the way, we pass an old woman lying on the street who startles me by asking not for a cordoba (the usual request; 6 cents american) but for a sip of my water.
Kids here seem to be having soooo much fun. They were out in the streets playing catch, throwing tennis balls off the house fronts, kicking soccer balls, racing around on bikes and just generally being kids. Melissa often laments that our neighborhood seems so sterile and dry. You never see kids just out in the street playing. We missed this. I wanted to play catch with the kids, but didn't have guts to do it. Maybe next week...
Eventually we found the perfect language school. It's a non-profit boys home that runs classes to raise funds. The boys come in the morning to study and eat breakfast. Then after school they return to eat dinner. The guy we chatted with said the boys usually go to his house after school to sleep there. Classes run 4 hours per day from 8am till noon. After that they have optional excursions to all the typical tourist places like volcan mombacho and the isletas. They also teach salsa lessons at night! We'll be staying with a Nic a family next week too.
The guy we were chatting with was young, my age probubly and super nice... a gentle friendly soul. He asked about our lives and we asked about his. He told me that he befriended an american once who invited to fly him to boston to see a red sox game, all expenses paid, but he could not get the visa :(.
To get all this and information about the classes, family stay, etc. i had to use my spanish. very few people speak english here outside the restaurants, cafes and tourist spots. It's been so much fun finally, actually using all that class knowledge. You take classes for so long that you think of a foriegn language abstractly like 'math' or 'science' and you forget that people actually speak it! When you say something and the person across from you understands it and responds the hair on my arms stand on end!
Well, today we think we are going to hike out to Laguna de Apollo. Hasta luego. Time to wake Mel up ;) - Steve
