Highlights and Mixups

Just tonight we arrived safely back in Costa Rica. It was much more exciting going from CR to Nicaragua than from Nica back to CR, since everything is twice as expensive here, but it is what it is and there are reasons for that. We're only here to rest a bit before making our way east to Panama.


We took some Spanish classes in León, Nicaragua for a week, which I know isn't nearly enough time, but there were many indicators letting us know that we needed to move on. Spanish is sort-of easy, until you realize that all the words are like chameleons and each one can change into a similar-but-different word given the context, like it blends in to its surroundings... For some reason I understand it well in my mind and can construct conversational sentences, but as soon as I open my mouth I get distracted by the sound of my own voice and suddenly get lost. Also, eye contact does not help the distractedness. So I find myself staring up at the ceiling as I concentrate to slowly form sentences or even remember words, and even then I have a 50% success rate at getting across my intentions... The non-successful interactions? Well, one time in particular at a market in León, we asked to see some aprons and the women (a mother and daughter duo) dug around for a while in their piles of merchandise and nonchalantly presented us with their collection of thongs, pulling each one out so we could see it in further detail. We all had a good laugh about it afterward at least.


Nicaragua has a good bit of spirit and it seems any reason is a good reason to celebrate something or another. Michael and I were fortunate enough to see four firework shows in the span of three weeks, and I bet we would've seen more if we didn't spend one of those weeks tucked away in the wilderness of Isla de Ometepe, where things move more slowly than the mainland.


While taking spanish classes, we stayed with a family in León who had two kids, a dog, a pregnant cat and a rabbit. The family was nice, though we didn't really get to talk to them much. They hosted more people than us and so it seemed more like a guest house than anything, and I got the feeling that we (the foreigners) seemed to impose on the main spaces of the house while the family hunkered down in other rooms, then we would trade places and back and forth. Their youngest son though, Hildebando (8), was all about talking and I'd say that his level of English comprehension was comparable to my level of Spanish comprehension and in the afternoons we'd work on our homework together, like learning the names of body parts and singing our ABCs.

In the cities, we would walk around the streets and admire all the old colonial style architecture... and suddenly realize that within 20 feet our sidewalk that could've supported four people comfortably suddenly shrank to a tight squeeze for one person, like there was no 90 degree angle in the entire city (which ironically all are laid out on a grid).

We happily found ourselves in the middle of an international poetry festival on our return visit to Granada and sat for hours listening to poets from mostly Latin America, but many other places as well. We sat down on the edge of the Central Park at night, eating our street food served in banana leaves and trying to make out as many words as we could in these fiery and dramatically-spoken poems; though without rational context, I couldn't use my powers of association and I eventually gave up and simply listened to the rhythm and play of the sounds in the words.

I'm leaving with a fondness for Nicaragua, for all its beauty, quirks and richness. Our experiences were sometimes bizarre and usually memorable, or vice versa.