Granada

I wasn't planning on blogging on this trip (because I think there may be about 3 people who actually like reading other people´s blogs) but I´d be writing all this in my journal anyway, so for the sake of those three people who might actually get a kick out of this, I´ll make it public.  I tend to write too much, sorry for those of you who might be interested if it was a briefer synopsis.  Once I take some pictures you can just look at those instead.

I got to Granada today after an unnecessarily long trip down here.  Total flight time was in the neighorhood of 5 hours but I booked my flight to have an overnight layover in Houston so I could get to Nicaragua during the daytime.  If you´re ever planning to sleep on the floor in the Houston airport, bring earplugs. 

Nicaragua is a lot like Tanzania and Kenya.  So much so that when I arrived it was initially Swahili coming out when I tried to talk.  Luckily I got over that relatively quickly, and I´m getting by pretty well with my moderate Spanish skills.  It´s the rainy season right now, so everything is very green and lush.  There are mango trees and flame trees and banana trees and palm trees, all mixed in with the usual assortment of shanty-type houses that most Americans wouldn´t even consider to be houses.  There are horses and cows tied up by the sides of the roads all over the place, and stray dogs to fill in the gaps.  It´s hot and ridiculously humid.  Feels like breathing in a fishbowl compared to Denver.  When it rains, it does so abruptly and dumps buckets and buckets.  The streets in Granada are narrow and soggy and crowded with the type of traffic you´d expect in a developing country - beat-up pickups and taxis, bicycles with two or three people on each, motorcycles, pedestrians - all with almost no sense of order whatsoever.  By some unspoken (and apparently unwritten) system, most of the streets in town seem to be one way, but I think you have to know the secret handshake before they´ll tell you which ones go which way.  Some streets aren´t even streets any more, but outdoor markets of the type that I grew up with in Tanzania.  It makes me smile to walk through them and see the same things and smell the same smells even though I´m a few continents away from the ones I grew up in. 

I spent some time checking out Granada today, browsing the shops, buying groceries (cereal and powdered milk, because goodness knows I can´t survive without my cereal), getting a feel for the town.  The entire center of town is a combination of indoor and outdoor market selling everything from limes to motorcycles to cell phones to jewelry.  The merchants are friendly but not pushy, so it´s a pleasant exploring experience.  Granada is a colonial city that was founded in 1524 and the history really shows.  There are colonial-looking buildings all over the place, mixed in with the houses and the shops.  There seems to be very little distinction between indoors and outdoors.  The streets are lined with unbroken walls, with doors every 10 to 15 feet leading into residences, but once you´re inside they seem to almost all be built around a central, open-air courtyard.  Most doors are just wrought iron bars, which keep people out but still make you feel like you´re outside.  Hammocks are everywhere. 

When I got hungry during my exploration I stopped at a cantina and ordered the first thing on the menu, which was something called vigoron.  I had no idea what it was but figured that I´d be adventurous.  When in Rome, right?  When it first showed up I had a moment of panic, thinking it was some sort of deep fried intestine.  I ate it anyway and then looked it up once I got back to the hostel.  Turns out it was yuca topped with pork rinds and a type of coleslaw.  Apparently this is a really common dish, and Granada is known for having some of the best vigoron to be found anywhere.  It was good, but probably not something I´ll be dying to recreate when I get back to the US. 

I´m happy to be on the road, out of the country.  It´s sort of strange traveling solo, and being somewhere that feels so similar to where I grew up, yet is very fundamentally different.  I´m excited to start to get a feel for this new place and the people here over the next few days before I head to my next spot.