Nicaragua

Well, I´m currently in Nicaragua, whoo! I like it a lot here so far, I´m in a nice little beach town called San Juan del Sur on the Pacific coast. In a way all these little beach towns I´ve visited are similar, but they all seem to have little quirks of personality and character, call it a vibe if you will, that is decidedly different in each one. The general demeanor of the residents, the night and day scenes, the preferred items that street vendors sell (here it´s hot dogs and pistachio nuts), whatever it is they all seem unique in a way that pictures don´t do justice to. This town seems to have daily celebrations of some kind, fireworks shot off and a hilarious parade of cowboys on horses, townspeople strolling along and people standing in the backs of pickup trucks singing and dancing. Had a fun night out on the town the first night, a group of us played a rousing international game of flip-cup and then went to the bar. There was an extremely drunken Australian girl who kept getting up on stools and tables, dancing suggestively and flipping up her skirt...awesome right. Well, the inevitable happened and as she was dancing among three stools with some guy they suddenly both went crashing down to the ground. He came up bleeding from his head, she from her nose. Ta da! I spoke with her the next morning and she actually went to the hospital to see if it was broken, it wasn´t though.

Spent the day trying to learn how to surf! Got an hour lesson and the board for the rest of the day for 20$ Definitely a tough learning curve, but I understand the appeal now, it´s an awesome feeling to be standing up on it and cruising along a wave. Made some real progress, can easily stand up and ¨surf¨the already broken waves, but catching them before they are already just wash is tricky. Think I´ll try again though soon, after I recover. Completely exhausted from the day of surfing: arms are sore, knees scraped, battered, bruised, and sinuses flushed completely with water and sand. It was worth it though.

No picture this time around, sorry, will try to take some good ones soon. Going to the island in the middle of Lake Nicaragua on Tuesday for some hiking and relaxing and next to check out the colonial town of Granada. Should be fun and I´m looking forward to it.

Notes on travel by bus in foreign lands. So far it´s been amazingly smooth and easy getting around, as long as you accept as inevitable certain delays and roadbumps (often literal ones). Apparently at some point we sent a large portion of our school buses from the sixties to Nicaragua, which for reasons that are guessable are referred to ¨Chicken Buses.¨ My major hassles so far have been two strikes in Costa Rica that screwed up bus service. The first caused us and a huge line of cars and trucks to stop and sit in the middle of the highway for almost 2 hours. When we finally got going and passed the protestors I divined with my limited Spanish from reading their signs that it was a protest related to indigenous rights. The other time, the bus I was trying to catch was delayed almost four hours as another strike, never found out the cause exactly, but sounded like a labor strike of some kind, shut down all traffic through the major port city of Limon. Blocking the roads in a country with basically one major highway to each region or city is obviously a very effective tactic. On the way over to Nicaragua I was sitting in the back of the bus and trying to write in my journal, but every few seconds the crappy road caused me to literally shoot up out of my seat (almost hit the roof one time) it turned into a freeform drawing session instead.

That´s all for now, gonna go find some dinner here. Oh yeah, everything in Nicaragua is amazingly cheap compared to Costa Rica: a lunch of chicken breast, salad, rice and beans cost me 2.50$ and a big hearty dinner is not much more. Miss you all, keep safe and hope for the success of the Iranian protestors for me. Bye for now!