Nicaragua

Slightly straying from the title of this blog, it's the time to record Mi Vida en Nicaragua! Or more like Mi Viaje (trip) a Nicaragua. Our group first voyaged via bus from Las Cruces to San José, and the next day, we left at 4 am, embarking on a 8ish hour journey to Granada, Nicaragua. The goal was to get to the border before 8 am, which is when the Tico Buses (think Chinatown or Vamoose bus, but between two countries) makes it there and the border ordeal can get real slow real fast. The journey was a blur of sleep interrupted by things like stepping off the bus to get passports stamped, casually spotting a volcano out of the window and deciding it might be a good time to eat a peanut butter sandwich but not summoning the energy to fully wake up, thus eating a peanut butter sandwich with your eyes closed (still delicious).

Travel Route! (más o menos)

One of our tourist destinations was to the main market in Managua (the country's capital), which was slightly similar, yet definitely, drastically different from my experience at the Mercado Central last month in San José. Grids of stands compose the structure of this indoor market, but it's more of that convoluted grid style of the nonsensical DC streets than the crisp New York City grid. But this ain't no odd Mass. Ave. moment when it does that weird jog in the street where you always get lost near Union Station. Oh, no. This is a poorly ventilated, enclosed market where about a dozen potential health hazards pop out at you per minute. Some stands show off large slabs of meat, but with no cooling mechanism in sight. There are pieces of livers or iguana meat straight up chilling (or...the opposite of chilling. More like straight up incubating E. Coli) on the counters. Sickly looking chickens wander about. Workers walk barefoot or with un-protective open toed shoes.

Probably not more than a few kilometers away, we ate lunch at a high-end mall with shops like Lacoste and lunch venues where you could indulge on baked brie and snack on sushi. I feel like this contrast from mercado to mall signifies the gasp-inducing, gaping gaps of wealth evident in Nicaragua. Basically, half of the country's population lives below the poverty line. The vast majority of the population is poor, the middle class is essentially non-existent and the upper class is sparse but disproportionally powerful (basically, the complaints of #occupy but on steroids).

If you have the luck of being one of the wealthy citizens, you might find yourself  locating the nearest Nicaragua pay phone in order to dialthe above number to purchase your very own island! 

Even while getting our touristy groove on, the economic disparities remained in your face. It's hard for me to describe the jaw-dropping natural beauty, the eye-popping colors of buildings that we saw without first premising it with my personal qualms about how we as tourists interact with the situation of poverty we see. How can we can turn on our blinders, photoshop the poverty we see out of our vision? The children that follow you down the street, asking for money are so real. Do we push it from the front of our eyes to the back of our minds because during our five-day séjour we know we can't turn around the economic development of a country in which we are merely visitors coming in with our cultural biases? These are some of thoughts doing their whole action-potential nerving firing thang through my brain through our stay there. That being said (there we go again, readjusting the focus so that striking, uncomfortable issues become blurry in the background), we saw some awesome things in Nicaragua.

We went on a boat ride on Lake Nicaragua, the largest freshwater lake in Central America. The water glistens, a still mirror with the reflection of trees and clouds. There are small islands abound, created by the string of volcanoes in the region. Remember that one-percent-esque population I mentioned? They have houses on many of these islands, which are some ritzy looking houses featuring pools and grand-looking columnar architecture (is it just me or do columns always give houses this air of importance?). But the sewage from these island-homes, goes right back into the lake, so I wouldn't recommend this for your next open-water swim journey (unless you want to get some pretty neat parasites!).

We also went to the Masaya Volcano, an active, steaming one, emitting oh-so-lovely sulfur fumes into the air (you can't stay up by the rim for too long at a time). The landscape around it, a marriage of lava fields and meadow fields, is beautiful.

Getting steamy! 

A nearby crater where a volcano once lived.

The section of Granada where we stayed was definitely geared to tourists, but the town square by the church was always lively with music or what seemed to be political activism (or a combination of the both!). The bright, vibrant colors of buildings bring me such joy! They've been everywhere that we've been on the trip thus far, but they continue to be a delicious treat of eye candy for my eyes.

We are now at the Soltis Center, a beautiful field station run by Texas A&M, and it is more of a rainforest environment than the cloud forest of Las Cruces. The facilities here are so nice, and I'm very excited and hopeful to see amphibians and lizards, and I've already spotted some large, leaf-looking bugs!