He mentioned yesterday that he used to wonder why cultures like this took a siesta in the middle of the day. He thought it was kind of ridiculous to stop everything in the middle of the day and then start it again. Now he understands :) The heat just sucks everything out of you. You really can only survive half a day at a time if you're out in the heat. And it's not that it's really that extremely hot -it's just constant. Utah is hot, but we're used to getting nice cool breaks. It's hot walking outside to the car or to school or to the grocery school, but when we reach the building or the car, we can cool off again. Not so in Nicaragua. It's just hot and then hot and then hot. So we tend to go out into the town in the morning and at night after it gets dark, but during the day we sit inside by the fans and Joe works and I work :) These natives are amazing - most of them don't even have fans to sit in front of!
But aside from learning to accept being hot and sticky all the time, we have loved the last few days! So much to see and discover and learn!
First of all - a tour of our apartment. This is the street we live on. It's a main street that goes right into town through the market place. So as we get closer to town it gets really, really crowded, but where we live it's not so bad. It gets really loud in the morning as trucks and taxis go by on their way to the market and a lot of kids pass by on their way to school and ring the bell and knock on the gate (the landlord likes to give cookies to certain poor kids who he knows don't get cookies at home).
My favorite is hearing all of the horse-pulled carts pass by. It makes me feel like I stepped back in time 200 years...
Right next to our apartment are areas that look like this:
with little make-shift shacks that families live in with kids running around outside. Joe's biggest amazement with this culture is how intermingled the rich and the poor are. You will see huge, beautiful, colonial houses surrounded by poverty and vice versa. It's like every other house is a different social class. My theory is that it's because land usually stays in the family. It's too expensive to buy land, so families pass it down and some families become rich and some families remain poor, but they all keep living in the same place. Just a theory.
This is the beautiful pink wall around our compound and our gate. I love how almost every house is painted some bright color. You can see the one next to us is blue, and you'll also see that our apartment is very very blue :)
Here it is - home sweet home! The gate back to the left is where we enter the compound and the blankets hanging in front of our porch are drawn most of the day to keep the apartment as cool as possible.
Here's the view when you walk into the front door. We have a little kitchen area and the couch has a tv in front of it to make our living room. Then a bathroom and a bedroom. It's all nicely tiled, we can flush toilet paper down the toilet, and the two fans on the wall are really good - so we feel blessed to have found this cute, clean, little place.
Plus, we have great neighbors. Three houses share the little courtyard in the middle. This is the view out of our front door - the landlord's house. It is an absolutely beautiful house. A lot of it is closed, but a lot of it is open air as well. You'll notice that there is nothing in their windows but curtains and they have trees growing in their bedroom and bathroom - so cool! The back half of their kitchen is also open with no roof. I love it.
To the right of us is the third house that is being rented by a Swiss couple - Alanzo and Sonja. They have spent most of their lives traveling and have recently decided that they want to start living more like the locals of the countries they live in. They will be leaving at the end of May to go back to Thailand where they have spent quite a few years. They mostly sit on their rocking chairs on their porch and read. We all leave our doors open during the day and live very close together so they always know what we're doing and we always know what they're doing! It's a fun little group :) Joe enjoys speaking German with them and they have been a big help helping us figure out our stove and laundry, etc.
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