Numero Seis...

Hola again! Okay so this blog is just going to be about what we did in Nicaragua, and unless you´re feeling adventurous I´d skip the blog entitled "Open at your own risk", for obvious reasons I think. :)

So we left for Nicaragua (which is a awkward word to type so from now on I´ll address it as N) early early on a Monday morning. We rode a big tour bus for nine hours with only one stop and two border checks that weren´t too big of a deal. (It´s amazing how powerful you realize just being a U.S. citizen and having a U.S. passport is.) The first three nights we stayed in a outdoor dormitory style housing (it´s reallyhard to explain so if that´s confusing, ask me to explain better later) in the capitol city Managua. Managua is known world-wide as one of the top...two, I think ugliest capitol cities in the world. And it earned that title. It´s dirty in a typical big-city way, but also it´s just not pretty in other way. But we talked to a politician and got to visit the National Assembly, so that was pretty cool. We also went to a restaurant called Dona Blanca´s (dona = lady or ma´am) owned by...Dona Blanca of course and served traditional Nicaraguan food. I discovered a fruit that is only found in N that they only use as a fruit drink called Pitaya and it was awesome!

Then, on Thursday morning, everyone split into groups of five or six students and went off on their own to different communities literally all over the country. I went with 11 other people because five of them lived in a community farther north than my group, so when we got off the bus they went on for another hour. So we all hopped on an old school bus and rode non-stop for three hours with three people to a seat and some even standing in the aisles. Oh, and it was raining so we couldn´t have the windows open. Yeah. Finally, we got off in my town called Condega. This was by far my favorite part of trip. I spent six nights with a host family in Condega, this "big" town with a small town feel. It was so cute. There were couble-stone streets where real cowboys rode their horses around and everyone walked and said hi, God bless you to everyone else even if they didn´t know them. It was safe for me (even as a blonde woman) to walk around at 1 in the morning, although I never tested this, my host mom just said that I could. And I´ll talk more about the community later but I´m just focusing on what we did for now.
My host mom, Julia Maria Tercero, owned a little store at the front of the house that random cousins were constantly working for her when she wasn´t around. The dad was Marvin, the 12 year old son was Marvin Jr, and the 4 year old girl was Mili. They were incredible and so generous, which was actually a theme in everyone´s Nicaraguan experience. Just to give you an idea of this I´m going to go off on a little tangent. We all brought our host families gifts, and I brought the kids some pens and little cute post-it pads (thanks, mom, by the way) and when I gave them their gifts, the mom said, oh wait! I have something for you! And went to the store and just pulled out a cool necklace that her friend had made and gave it to me. Later, she had a really cool shirt on and I complimented it. The day we left, she brought me one just like and said she had a few that she had bought in El Salvador and this one was for me. THEN, later on the way to a different part of N we were in a taxi and there was a woman selling little animals to hang from your rearview mirror. The taxi driver just knew her from always driving by and she came over to show him the stuff. He was looking at a little deer and I said some comment about it being cute and he just bought it for me! Okay, back to my adventures, but it´s really important to realize that practically all Nicaraguans are just like that! They don´t care what it is, they´ll just give it to you.
After my amazing six day adventure with my adorable family (especially the little girl who was so patient with my Spanish and couldn´t say her "r"s so that was an adventure in itself), I met back up with my group of 11 people and we headed back on bus for four hours to Managua. Then, we got the taxi to the other bus stop where we rode a large van to Granada, a really old city. Old in the cool, antique kind of way. The buildings were incredible and beautiful, but we were only there in a hostel for one night.
Then, we went to Masaya, another fairly large town with some really cool artisan markets. I was walking around with a small group of friends and we decided we were going to get some ice cream. We went to the little vendor and as we´re trying to buy our stuff, there were a few little kids asking us to buy them some. We thought, ok, we can do that. But then we looked past them and saw another ten kids playing at the playground, and then even more on the street beyond that and we realized that news would spread fast and that we´d end up buying ALL the ice cream, so we told them we couldn´t. But then we ate the most guilty-feeling bowl of ice cream I´ve ever had in my life.
Then, we headed back to Managua to that same dorm-type place for our last night in N. The next day, last Friday the 19th, we left really early back to Costa Rica and got home late that afternoon.
I spent the weekend pretty much just relaxing and hanging out with my Costa Rican family. Now we have this week and weekend and next Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday pretty much entirely dedicated to finishing our big opinion essays and group presentations. Then, we have the next Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday off for fall break. A lot of groups of people formed to go to the beaches or things like that, but my family is planning to come back later for vacation so I didn´t really care to do any of that. I was going to just spend time with my family, but then I found out about a girl going to volunteer with a turtle conservation group on the west coast, so we formed a group of four of us and we´re going to do that! I´m so excited and the program directors said they´d be willing to fund a lot of our expenses, so it´s a double bonus!
After that break, we break into our concentrations. There are 51 students here from universities all over the U.S. and we´re broken into 3 concentrations: business, cultural studies, and Spanish literature and language. I´m in the lit. and lang. part. So we´ll have four weeks of that (which I´ll explain more about later). Then, each concentration goes to a different country for the last 8 days of the program. Then, we all meet back in Miami for two days. THEN, I´m on my home for Christmas break! It´s so close, but I don´t want to get excited yet and miss this. I´m loving every second here, but also missing you all, so it´s hard to stay focused on the moment.
So that´s all for my basic life schedule, but here´s some things you can pray for!
·That I will be able to stay in the moment no matter how close home gets.
·That everyone will stay healthy and in good spirits.
·That I will have patience with my family here in the next six weeks that we´re together. (They ask me how I´m doing every five minutes and it´s starting to irritate me...) :)
·Also, pray for my friend Emily. She´s a student at Northwestern studying in Uganda right now and it´s way more rough than we have it here. She´s loving it, but pray that it stays that way!

Thanks for reading and sorry these get so lengthy! I´m trying to be concise and tell you everything and it´s practically impossible to do both! I love you!