Where Have We Been?

Folks, it's been a while. March always promised to be a busy month, and it proved to be truly jam packed. Early in the month, our friend Emily came to see San Ramón and to travel with us to Granada. Days after she left a brigade from University of New Hampshire arrived for a little over a week, and then Duncan and Katy came for 10 ten days, and we met up with Sara who stayed with us until yesterday. Anyway, we will make up for our lapse in posting with a rapid fire succession of entries describing our March traveling.

To start from the beginning, on Thursday, March 4th, Emily flew into Managua's Augusto Sandino Airport from Boston. I took a bus from Matagalpa to the Airport and picked up Emily. Managua is huge and unfriendly, so we took a relatively expensive taxi from the airport to Mayoreo, one of the many Managuan bus stations, demonstrated the convenient lack of copyright laws (burnt copy of the [at the time] unreleased Ninja Assassin DVD- $1), and got us onto an express back to Matagalpa. Another taxi, another bus, and here we were in San Ramón. Friday we had a tranquillo day touring San Ramón. Saturday we went to Matagalpa to check on some postcards with the host mother in charge of them, Juanita, had a small lunch at the very cheap smoothie-oasis Don Chaco's, separated from Juanita and drifted around a bit . We made a lengthy stop in MegaBoutique, a huge used clothing store, with three floor- the higher you are, the cheaper the prices. Ciara and Emily both got some kind of clothing, or something, and I found a Kanye West concert T shirt for just C$25 ($1.25). At the Picoteo cafe, we split a liter of Toña, and at La Matagalpa, we did some food shopping. On Sunday we taught swim lessons in the morning and hiked to the top of a steep hill in the afternoon.
On Monday, we left for Granada; Ciara has already written about this some, but I will add a bit. We stayed at the smelly backpacker haven The Bearded Monkey in a stuffy room with two beds. We took a long walk around the city, which is very beautiful, and very full of white tourists. We ate at the pricey, but delicious Tercer Ojo, and returned to the hostel to enjoy some exceedingly incompetently made mojitoes (you can stay at The Bearded Monkey for free for a few weeks if you work as their bartender, which means that most of the bartenders have never mixed a drink before arriving and are constantly consulting a recipe book). On Tuesday morning we ate at Kathy's Waffle House, which is an incredible experience after having the same few panqueque, gallo pinto, and oatmeal breakfasts for a month. We stopped at Palí, a grocery store where we brought fruit, snacks, and a fateful knife, to make lunch and breakfast at our next hostel.
We then caught the Bearded Monkey-run shuttle to Laguna de Apoyo, a beautiful and pristine lake situated in the top of a volcano. We stayed at the Monkey Hut; we were one of only two small groups staying and it was basically deserted. While unpacking, I examined our C$20 ($1) knife, and, while resheathing in its cardboard sleeve, cut through the cardboard and into my hand between my thumb and pointer finger. The cut was pretty deep, and it sure bled a lot, but, because of the improbable sharpness of the knife and the hours spent swimming that day and on Wednesday morning, it healed very quickly. We spent all day swimming and had a delicious and reasonably priced Nicaraguan meal for dinner.
On Wednesday we caught a truck back to Granada that left us off right across from the Bearded Monkey at Hotel La Libertad, which, while paying, we realized was much nicer and slightly cheaper than the hostel it opposed. Our room there was huge, with tall ceilings to alleviate some of the heat of the area, and an included bathroom and shower. While there, we got to know the temporary bartender, Gina, from England, who had been traveling for months and was about to return home (in June she's returning to work on a hostel a Volcan Mombacho with her boyfriend) and Chepe, the oddball owner of the hostel who kept insisting we try his very high quality tequila.
Thursday, we went to Masaya, where we stayed in the vaguely motel-y, but pleasant, Hotel Mi Casa for only $5 each, and enjoyed on-site smoothies. A trip to the old market, where two hammocks were purchased, and to a grill restaurant, where we each got a huge strip of grilled meat and a plantain. By chance, we met up with another traveler who had a flight at almost the exact same time as Emily, and they got to split the cab fare early on Friday morning.
Later on Friday, we made our way home, and on Sunday the group from UNH arrived in San Ramón.

No more pictures; see Ciara´s recent post for some good ones.