Today is a quiet day for me, since the high school preparation sessions are over and so, apart from my work with the women's group, my other jobs haven't really got started yet. Therefore, I'm finally able to catch up with what I've been up to in recent days/weeks.
I think I have to go back to the weekend before last which was a good one for getting out and about, and also for socialising. On the Friday night we had a party at our volunteer house, inviting all the other volunteers around, plus any Nicaraguan friends we had made, and any other random people passing through. Granada being a small town, with quite a large proportion of travellers stopping off for a few days' rest here (plus a lot of longer-term visitors and volunteers on various projects) it's very easy to keep bumping into the same people time and time again. In the town itself there aren't really any discotecas as such, just a handful of bars, a couple of which also have music and possibility of dancing. Which means that everyone in town - locals and visitors alike - ends up in Cafe Nuit (with live salsa/merengue/bachata band and piped in reggaeton music - extremely annoyng for me stuck in my hiking boots and unable to dance properly because of my ankle!) But it's a great place to meet new travellers or other people and we all went there both Wednesday and Thursday night before our party to try and gather together enough men to invite to the party to make up for the great proportion of women volunteers here at the moment!
The party was a grand success, and went on until the early hours. That weekend (in fact until this most recent Sunday) we were just six girls living together in our volunteer house, which is by far the nicer, bigger and better party venue than the other volunteer house, so I lucked out there. Chris (from Germany) and Fiona (from Ireland) have been here the longest. Becca and Jo (from Washington DC) arrived the week before me. And Torey (from Montana) arrived the same day as me, as I think I've mentioned in a previous post. Chris and Fiona are good friends with a local Dutch bar owner who provided with ice and mint for us for the occasion. There are really only two things to drink in Nicaragua - local Toña or Victoria beer, or the Flor de Caña rum. So as long as you provide ice, limes and maybe some mint and sugar, everyone's happy!
The next day a British TV producer from the Discovery Channel who'd been at our party invited the whole house out for a huge, hangover-reducing breakfast at Kathy's Waffle House (one of two big breakfast locations in town). Later that afternoon I took a taxi down to the shore of Lake Nicaragua with a couple of new volunteer friends (you can walk down to the lake from town, but it's not really nice for swimming in the water there, as you need to go further along). And that evening Torey and I had dinner with another survivor from the party, an American guy who runs a boat doing tourist trips along the Pacfic coast and who invited us to go to the beach (Pacific coast) one weekend and that he would give us a boat ride.
I had previously read that that weekend was when the San Sebastian festival was on in the town of Diriamba, and so on Sunday three of us went on a crazy bus trip to visit it for the day. Getting there was easy enough, with just two and half hours by "chicken bus" and a single change. However the return journey was altogether more complicated (more later). The festival itself on the Sunday took the form of a "hipica" or horse show, Nicaraguan style. It was quite a crazy party in the streets, with spectators lining the streets and hundreds (literally) or horses riding and dancing around the course, interspersed with brass bands playing for the horses to dance to. It was probably a little dangerous with street vendors weaving amongst the horses and no barriers seperating us from the mass of animals, but in usual Latino style we all just went along with enjoying the day... You could tell that this festival was also celebrated by the richest levels of Nicaraguan society (just check out the photos to see what I mean in terms of well-kept and well-fed horses and humans!)
For our return trip we had been informed that our best bet was to take a taxi (hard enough given the traffic, crowds and mayhem for the festival) to the next along bigger town of Jinotepe and from there catch the last bus at 5.30pm to take us back to Granada. Alas, we got to the Jinotepe bus station to find that we'd been misinformed and that actually the last bus had left at 4pm. But we saw there was another bus leaving for Masaya (a biggish town halfway between Granada and the capital Managua) which probably gave us our best bet of another way home. We jumped on that and managed to get seats, which turned out to be a huge relief, because this bus then took us directly back through Diriamba, except that now the traffic was so jammed up that we had no hope of actually getting through. The bus filled up to bursting point and beyond (there were even chidren passengers sitting with the driver on his seat!) as well as people hanging out of windows and sitting on the roof. Then we had to make a detour through some local villages (down mud streets not wide enough or made for a bus) being directed by a local man sitting up on the front bonnet of the bus (yes, in front of the windscreen) as it got dark. There were branches coming in thorugh the windows and everyone lurching around as we battled up and down potholed hills, not really sure where we were going. Eventually about an hour and a half later we made it to the main (i.e. paved) road but coudln't get onto it correctly at the angle we joined it, so actually we turned onto the wrong lane and drove for another 5 mins backwards the wrong way down the road until we could turn around. I was actually very impressed with the driver's skills! From then on the bus journey to Masaya and then shared taxi back to Granada was a mere nothing... And so ended the weekend.
P.S. My next post will be about Becca's birthday on Monday and then last weekend's cigar launch party excesses with the crazy Canadian posse. But my camera batteries have just died, so I can't upload any more photos right now. However, before I sign off, for anyone reading this today I would very much appreciate a nice birthday email tomorrow, please!
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