Pizza and Cheeseburgers

I don’t like spiders. I don’t like the way they look, I don’t like the way they move, and I especially don’t like the way they hide in the crevices of my windows:

This spider may not look big, but he is…or, uh, was, the size of my outstretched hand. I didn’t have the heart (guts) to kill him so I had to ask the woman that cleans the house for help. I was standing on my bed screaming while she was attacking it with a broom.

I went to San Juan del Sur last week for a few days with my girls, and we had such a good time. None of us have had any type of break since we started in May, so it was amazing to sit on the beach and do NOTHING. San Juan del Sur is the most exploited beach destination in the entire country of Nicaragua, with specific beaches for surfers (we hung out there a lot checking out the Australian boys). Because I’m so far north, it takes me at least 7 hours by bus to travel down south to enjoy the beauty of tourism, but it was worth every minute (standing on an over-crowded school bus).

The second we got there, we immediately went for mushroom and swiss burgers with curly fries. I can’t buy hamburgers in Ocotal, so I was in heaven. After we ate, we decided we should probably look for a place to stay considering it was the weekend of the Nicaraguan Independence Day and we didn’t have reservations anywhere. We ended up at a little hostel in a room with a beachfront balcony (there was barely enough room for 2 chairs on the balcony, but we made it work). We headed to the beach with full stomachs and our swimsuits and got a ride with a Swiss couple who had a car and a house close to one of the beaches. They dropped us off and we walked to the beach expecting to see it full with young vacationers, but there wasn’t a soul. Since we’d semi-hitched out to the beach, we had NO idea how we were going to make it back to town (it’s about a 25 minute car ride). We decided we should start walking up the beach to try and find people, and after about a kilometer, we discovered Playa Madera, or ¨the surfer’s beach.¨ We tanned for a while and once it was close to dinner time, we got a ride back to San Juan with some surfers.

The next day, we expected two more girlfriends to join us but we didn’t want to miss out on valuable beach time. We went back to the same beach and tanned until the last shuttle was heading back to town. We met up with our friends and went to this Italian restaurant that one of my Nica friends had recommended. It was a great suggestion – the pizza was fantastic! The pizza would’ve been great anyway, but it was especially delicious because pizza in my city is made from bread, ketchup, bologna and Nicaraguan cheese, so this was quite a step up.

More beach time the next day...and more pizza for dinner.

All in all, it was a much-needed escape from the realities of Nicaraguan life. Unfortunately, we still couldn’t spend money like tourists…

Funny story: there was a guy that offered me $200 US dollars for sex. Regardless of the fact that this is more than my monthly salary, I declined.

Miss you all!

I never thought I’d be riding my 6th grade school bus again...

Here in Nicaragua, the public transportation is oddly reliable, especially the punctuality of the buses. Nothing is on time in Nicaragua (yeah, make the joke, I fit right in), so this phenomenon is still beyond me. Along with the time-wise reliability, the buses really hardly ever break down. And this is strange why, you ask? These buses are retired school buses from the States. On short 30 minute journeys, the ride isn’t so bad, but when you are hungover and have to be on these buses for hours with no restrooms and it’s at 45 smelly people beyond capacity, like many prescription drugs, it can result in nausea, vomiting and blurry vision. Here’s a joke I heard the other day: Q:How many people can fit on a Nicaraguan bus?
A: Two more!

So needless to say, the bus rides can be really interesting…

Washing clothes here takes so much time. Like…to do an average load-size amount, it takes a minimum of 2 hours. It’s not easy work either – my arms are always super sore after a day in front of the stone washboard. You can look at an entire family and immediately determine which woman washes the clothes by the definition of her arms (notice I said “woman,” because men don’t do any work around the house in this country). As I’ve mentioned before, the food here is really unhealthy (triple-fried EVERYTHING), and I find it comical when I see women with arms that could clearly win just about any arm-wrestling match, with big round bellies to complement.

Just when I thought I could get away from Wal-Mart, they go and buy out Pali. It is just a grocery store, but you cannot walk into this store without seeing the sign for the lowest prices...ugh.

I think I’m going to move houses. I was out of town this weekend and when I came back, someone had gone in my room, worn one of my shirts (it smelled of beer/BO, there was glitter on it, and it was hanging the wrong way on the hanger), unplugged anything I had plugged in, and, what’s worse, is someone had eaten some my food. You all know how I feel about my food, so besides living with the racist dog, I think I have plenty of ammunition to dip out. Unfortunately, it’s far too expensive on my “salary” to live alone, so I’ve been in search of another room around the city, and I think I’ve found one. It’s on a dirt street that acts like a river the second it starts raining, but the room is really cute and I think I can paint my walls. I keep telling myself that I’m not turning into my mother, but I can no longer deny it: I’m excited to paint.

Here are a couple of other pictures of Ocotal:

Miss you all!