Wendy "What day is it?" Debbie "I think it´s Wednesday." Wendy "It feels like Friday." Debbie "It can´t be Friday because I´m sure yesterday was Tuesday." Wendy "Yesterday couldn´t have been Tuesday. I´m sure we´re closer to the weekend than that." Debbie "We can´t be that close to the weekend because we still have two more nights here and that left two nights before I was leaving back to Managua." "What day is it?" we ask in unison, to the group in the room. "It´s Thursday." they answer. "I´m glad it´s not Friday," I said. "So am I." said Wendy. An [View Full Entry]

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One of the local attractions close to Granada was Laguna de Apoyo, which is an extinct volcano crater which has filled with water over the years. This place was beautiful and we stayed at craters edge Hostel (www.craters-edge.com) check the website out. It was such a carm and relaxing place and right on the waters edge so you could swim, kayak, sun bath on the floating dock or just sit back and relax in the hammocks or swinging chairs. We spent hours just lounging around and chilling out. In the evening we would spend our time chatting to other travellers or [View Full Entry]

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Met up with a couple of english guys from huddersfield who were spending a month travelling through central america and we decided to go see one of the fresh water lakes about 45 minutes from Granada where a lot of well to do Nicos & Nicas have their holiday homes. The taxi driver was great but spoke very little english so I had to act as translator for most of the day because the english lads spanish was so poor.anyway.....great day was had by all....the water was hardly salty at all and really welcome in the heat of 32 to 34 [View Full Entry]

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Christmas day was perfect. The school had a huge lunch party and 40 people showed up, mostly staff and their families from a primary school that was built by Proyecto Ecologico (the spanish school). I spent most of time time with my Swiss and English friends, and a couple from the Netherlands that are doing an environmental project in a different region of Nicaragua and came to see what kind of progress was being made in this nature reserve. Most of the afternoon and evening consisted of drinking rum and watery Nicaraguan beer and talking about politics and Borat. The school [View Full Entry]

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Even when traveling I can´t stop thinking about transportation modes. The highways to Managua are in surprisingly good condition, it´s as if they were just paved last year. Even though they are plenty of cars and trucks speeding through, they have a lot of competition for lane space. In addition to the cars there are chicken buses, pedestrians of all ages, taxis mostly without license plates, bicyclists (with your wife sharing the seat and child side-saddle over the top tube), people on horses, oxen or horses pulling carts, packs of stray dogs, and pick-up trucks filled with their beds crow [View Full Entry]

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I have been at Laguna de Apoyo for a week. It is a beautiful and endangered nature reserve surrounding the crater lake of an active volcano. If you dig in the sand by the shore of the lake, steam rises out just a few inches down- the earth by the lake is so hot that you can hard boil eggs by burying them. Before arriving here I was most excited about seeing and hearing the many howler monkeys that inhabit the reserve. Actually what happens it that every morning at 3 or 4 a.m. I am awoken by the monkeys screaming [View Full Entry]

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After 3 days of class I was feeling really good about how much spanish I have retained from last year. I was really proud of myself. And then I had this conversation with Flavia, my teacher: (in spanish) (to me) "You know, if you are going to be living in Nicaragua for 4 months you should really learn the vos verb form." "Oh, you use vosotros here? No problem, I know that already..." "No no no no. Not vosotros. VOS. We don´t even use the tu form in Nicaragua, only vos." "What?! Oh my God." "Vos sos loca." "What?" "You are [View Full Entry]

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First, check out entry from Granada, I added some photos of the church that I walked past everyday to get to Spanish School. Second, thank god for getting out of Granada! On Friday, I headed out in the back of a truck (the ¨shuttle¨ if you will...) to Lagua de Apoyo. What heaven on earth.... The water was beautiful, a clear teal. The sky, slighty overcast and cloudy, the wind blowing.... Each and everyday I spent most of my days either in the water, or in a hammock. A nice vacation from the real vacation! On Saturday night, the clouds finally [View Full Entry]

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We decided half-way through our lessons that we needed a day off to absorb and take a break. So we decided to head out to a crater lake nearby. A friend of ours from UVic named Sophie has a cottage on this lake and urged us to go out there and check it out. So we got up early one morning and rented a little motorcycle. With the two of us on board we cruised out to the crater and attempted to find our friend´s place. After some wrong turns and some really rough gravel roads that we should not have [View Full Entry]

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We went for a walk down the road in the morning - there wasn´t a lot too see as this is a pretty quiet area. The rest of the day was spent reading, relaxing, swimming and kayaking in the lake. After dinner, we headed down for a swim under the full moon. Night-time at the lake we generally quiet... until a mango falls out of the tree and hits the roof, which sounds like a bomb going off. This happens numerous times throughout the night. [View Full Entry]

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