Weekend Update

Another good weekend in Managua, another weekend update. It’s a long one to make up for the slacking last week, and also in anticipation of the same slacking this week.

Friday wasn’t too exciting – I survived my bus ride home from Estelí without incident, thankfully, and then I slept off the last of my bug for about 14 hours.

Saturday I was feeling much better – confirmed by the fact that I had ice cream for a mid-morning snack at about 10:30 am. During the day, I caught up on some work from Friday and opted to stay around the house because there was a march for democracy going on in Managua so downtown was crazy. Kelly went though, and it sounded like quite the scene – not really in a good way. While I won’t pretend to fully understand the politics here in Nicaragua (mostly because there is a long history to learn), I do know that the march, while originally intended to be peaceful, ended up dividing along party lines and, based on how Kelly described, it disintegrated into chaos. She and her friend left when people started throwing rocks and lighting fireworks at other people (probably a smart decision).

Saturday evening some of the kids from the neighborhood came over and we had an impromptu dance party, which was really cute. Some of our little neighbor girls sure know how to dance! I guess it shouldn’t have been a surprise to me though – they live in the house where the reggaeton starts blasting at 6 am every school day. I’ll have to try to get some pictures of the congo line I was leading from Kelly because it was pretty funny.

After the kids left, we headed out with one of our friends from Fabretto, Rosario, to a concert. It was a Nica band that Joe and Kelly had seen here before, and it was at a place called Art Café. There were a few things about getting there that were funny and typically Nicaraguan. First, I was worried because Rosario didn’t come until about 8, and the show was supposed to start at that time. However, she later told me that she did that on purpose, since shows never start on time here. She was right – the band came on no earlier than 10 pm.

Also funny was how we went about finding the bar. As you know, addresses here are based on landmarks, something which is always challenging if you don’t know where the landmark of reference is located. For example, last night the Art Café was located ‘in front of the Las Palmas park’…okay, but where is the park? 2 blocks south of the Catholic church…okay, but where is that? You get the picture – it can be a bit like a scavenger hunt. Fortunately Rosario knew roughly where we needed to be, but once we got to the neighborhood, we were a bit lost so she asked some people at a gas station for directions. As I’ve learned, Nicas love to give directions, but they are very bad at doing so and often just tell you that you’re going the right way even if you’re not. We followed the directions from the gas station attendants and had no luck so we asked someone else. It took three more tries from there to actually get it right, but we made it eventually.

The show was pretty good – chill environment, and we met up with some other volunteers that Joe and Kelly knew, so that was fun. After the first concert, we went to another bar that had a very cool atmosphere. It was mostly outside, with lots of big old trees that had hammocks hanging in them (which I loved!). They also had wine, a special treat here in Nicaragua. All in all, I was in heaven. However, you can imagine that with the combination of me, wine, and a hammock, I also got pretty sleepy pretty fast, and that’s when the night ended.

Sunday was a pretty standard day of working, going to the market, and getting ready for the week. It was also really hot (like, 95 degrees), which I think will be the norm for the rest of my visit. On Sunday there were two food related highlights. For lunch, we bought Sopa de Res (beef soup) from the neighbor that normally sells fritanga. It was really good, but difficult to eat. That’s because soup here is a little different than at home. In Nicaragua (and, I think, some other Latin American countries), soup is really broth with a whole meal sitting in it. For example, today the beef soup had a half a corn of cob, whole vegetables, and a huge hunk of beef on the bone. You need a fork and knife for soup like that. The other food highlight was dinner – a nice summer meal of hotdogs, cucumber salad, potato salad and plantain chips. Mmm.

At any rate, it was another nice weekend. Now for another busy week - I am supposed to be running a training on Thursday with all the cooks and administrators. Should be interesting!