Joseph and the Chocolate Factory

 Ever since Joe discovered that we could buy cocoa beans in bulk at the market, he has been wanting to try to make his own chocolate. Cocoa beans come from cocoa pods that grow on trees in cocoa plantations.  The cocoa beans then have to be roasted and cracked to get all of the shells off and then they are ground into what's known as cocoa liquor - a thick substance kind of like clay. 

 We weren't sure how we would find the equipment needed to turn the cocoa beans into something usable, but after asking around, we just recently found someone who sells the cocoa liquor.  So we decided to see if we could make some chocolate sauce.  We broke off some chunks and put them in a pan...

WHOA! Some moonlight must have gotten through the curtain cracks...it happens once in a while...

We added some water...some sugar..some butter...some soy milk powder...some salt...and then boiled it. 

Very interesting.  Edible? Yes.  Desirable? Not sure.  It just has a different taste.  It definitely cannot be used as a substitute for cocoa powder because the taste is different.  We learned it's because it still has the cocoa butter in it. Unsweetened baking cocoa is what's left after all the cocoa butter has been pressed out.

It tasted better on bananas.

So we made up some crepes and they were actually quite delicious!  

We have since tried making a chocolate banana smoothie and it was ok.  Better when frozen. I'll keep you posted if we ever try a chocolate bar...

One Year Anniversary!

Joe and I were one year old last Friday! Happy anniversary to us!  Thank you to all of you who remembered and called or emailed - it meant a lot to us.

We had planned to spend our anniversary doing and seeing some fun things on Ometepe Island - an island in Lake Nicaragua made up of two volcanoes that we've heard some amazing things about.  But I got sick on Wednesday night - sore throat, stuffy/runny nose, headache, etc.- and didn't feel well again til Saturday :( So, no Ometepe.  But it was a wonderful day nonetheless, and Joe did a fabulous job treating me like a princess even though I definitely didn't feel like one and I know I didn't look like one with a tissue to my nose all day! :)

We woke up around 4:00 am because my nose had stopped working and Joe was just up - that happens a lot in this country.  We sleep in chunks and we don't seem to get a very big chunk at night.  We blame the highway outside our gate.

Since we were both up and couldn't seem to go back to sleep we got up and watched some Jeeves and Wooster and then headed into town because Joe wanted to buy me some flowers and I didn't want to get left behind. 

We got there as the food delivery truck was making its rounds.  Traffic jam in Granada! :)

The guy on the back hands out the baskets to the different vendors depending on what they've ordered for the day.

The flower lady and the beautiful flowers Joe got for me.  Such bright, happy flowers.

On our walk back home I saw this little boy taking a bath and couldn't resist getting a few pictures. So cute!

Joe made me a delicious all-you-can-eat pancake breakfast! Yummy!

For dinner that night we tried out a restaurant run by locals and mostly visited by locals, which is our favorite kind.  A couple of expat women had told us about it, but the dish they raved about was only sold at lunchtime we found out.  We were definitely the only ones there, and the flies were pretty bad.  That should have been our first clue...

I ordered a hamburger because it was the only thing I recognized on the menu, and Joe ordered what he thought was an enchilada, but was a salad (ensalada) instead. (He's been eating his papaya seeds faithfully since then to get rid of any unwanted parasites :)) And instead of the side of fries that he ordered, they brought him a side of hard, rolled-up, cold, fried corn tortillas with cabbage on top - which ended up costing as much as the rest of the meal combined :) So, I guess we'll go for lunch next time, but it was still a fun dinner.



We walked the mile home in the pouring rain and stopped by our favorite bakery to get a piece of cake to eat, since we didn't have our frozen top layer of our wedding cake.  What do ya know - they were all out of cake.  That's the first time that's happened since we got here, but they had chocolate muffins! Which is just cake without the frosting.  So we got one and ate it to celebrate while we sat in our rocking chairs on our porch and enjoyed the rain.  Perfect ending to a perfect day.

Business meetings

So we had another meeting with Hotel Alhambra about their website, and again we came away just shaking our heads and laughing.  It is so unbelievably difficult to get anything done with these guys! I have sat through a lot of classes and participated in a lot of role playing in business school about things to be aware of when doing business with people from different cultures, languages, and demographics - but this more than anything has taught me how difficult it can really be.

This is our 4th meeting with them.  All we are trying to do is improve their website by getting them a wordpress site and including the pictures and wording that they are going to send us.  Easy.  Or so we thought...

It takes us 30 minutes to walk to the hotel from our apartment and 10 more minutes to stop sweating once we get there.  The earliest anyone else has shown up to the meetings is 20 minutes late.  The longest they will sit in a chair talking to us during the meeting without getting up and doing something else is about 5-10 minutes.  Have they agreed at every meeting to get pictures taken and emailed to us before the next meeting?  Yes.  Has a single picture been taken yet? No. 

After this last meeting where we were hoping to have the pictures uploaded and be able to go over some of the wording, the only thing we accomplished was to establish a username and password for their site.  When the payment page popped up, the manager said he didn't have the credit card on him - it was at home.  He asked if we could come back the next morning to take care of the payment for the site.  Joe explained that it took up a lot of our time coming back and forth for such little things, so Juan asked if we could wait 30 minutes.  We said yes and assumed it was going to take him 30 minutes to drive home, get the card and be back, but we saw instead that he had another meeting to go to.  So we sat and waited for it to finish.  After 30 or 40 minutes Juan came back, said we could go get the card, and then walked us 30 feet away to his front door, opened the door, got the card, and gave it to us.  2 minutes max.  No way.  We waited 40 minutes for that 2 minutes.  Haha, awesome. 

But - we got to see his house.  And it was gorgeous! I've heard Granada referred to as the city of doors, because that's all you see from the street.  And most of the doors look the same - but you never know if behind that door is a dirt-floor shack quartered off for multiple families, or a beautiful courtyard with tropical plants, pool, and hammocks.  

This blue door was his door, so we weren't expecting much...

...But we walked into this beautiful sitting room!



With sitting areas lining their garden courtyard. In the back room on the left I could see 3 maids in their starched white dresses going about their work, but didn't manage to get a picture of them.

 There were probably 7 or 8 different sitting rooms off the main garden area.

They let us walk through to their other garden area as well in the back where all of the bedrooms are located.  Amazing.  This is a picture of Gabriel and Joe.  Gabriel is the president of the hotel.  This house was his parents' house and he was born here, but now his brother Juan (hotel manager) lives here with his family. 

I probably won't get over how incredibly beautiful some of these old colonial Granada houses are.  Joe and I have already decided that someday we're going to own a house with an indoor courtyard in it.  Must include tropical plants and pool :)

Always when Joe and I walk back from these extremely unproductive meetings we verbally write up a case that would be read in business school.  We've decided that any team's conclusion would have long ago been to drop the client - but it's providing way too much entertainment for us to do that :)

As time goes by

Another week has passed and we continue to feel so blessed to be having this experience in such an amazing place!

Random things that I haven't posted about yet:

Nicaraguans celebrated Mother's Day on May 30th - starting at around 4:oo am. Yep - A.M. We woke up to firework explosions and extremely loud music which continued throughout the entire day.  Joe went to the market for me that morning and said that on his way he saw one group of about 15 people singing to a mom outside her door, and another mother was getting played to by a mariachi band.  These people certainly know how to honor their mothers! :)

When Joe got back from the market he not only had bananas and mangos - he brought me some beautiful lilies to celebrate the holiday! Aaaawwwwwww :) 

To celebrate Mother's day, a group in Granada put up pictures on some buildings of women that had been influential for good in Nicaragua, so we took a walk into town to look at them.  We had no idea who any of them were, but I think it's cool that the city did something to honor them.



The ward celebrated Mother's day at a Relief Society activity the Saturday before and it has got to be one of the funniest things I have ever seen.  I so wish I had taken the camera.  Joe didn't come with me because obviously it was a Relief Society activity, but when I walked into the chapel 15 minutes late (it was supposed to start at 5:00) there were 2 women there and about 10 men.  At about 6:00 they got around to starting, and as the activity went on more and more people filtered in until half way through, the entire branch was there - women, children, husbands, youth, everyone.  People kept asking me where my husband was and all I could say was that he was at home, and they would look so sad that he had missed out on such a party.  I was so sad that he had missed out on such a party.  I'll know for next time - every activity at the church will be a ward activity, no matter what auxiliary it was intended for.

The whole chapel was completely decked out with red and white balloons and streamers and they had people bear their testimonies interspersed with games for the mothers: a contest to see who could pop the most balloons on their chair, a treasure hunt, and a dance-off.  I have never seen so many mothers willing to participate in games before.  And the whole branch was totally cheering, whistling, clapping, and screaming throughout the whole party.  Wow.  I really can't explain how fun it was to watch - so just believe me - it was really fun to watch :)

We stopped at the Granada DI again this last week to get a better look around.

Their toy section was extremely well organized.

I find little 10 cent coins on the ground all the time.  It seems odd that money of any kind would just be on the ground here, even if they are worth less than half a cent.  So I've decided I'm going to pick them up and try to collect enough money to buy a doughnut by the end of the summer.  That means I will have to pick up 120 of them :)  Joe wanted to take a picture of this one that we saw on the street. . .

Joseph is now writing -  Hey everyone, so I think I've puzzled Heidi as to why I wanted a picture of the 10 cent piece embedded in the asphalt!  Well for anyone who knows the old cartoon "Ducktales" they know of Uncle Scrooge and his lucky dime!  I guess I kind of think about it as my lucky dime.  But instead of being secured in a vault, this one is secured in asphalt in the middle of a busy street.  It took some doing to have a moment in between cars to take these pictures!  Okay, that's all from me :)

 A couple of weeks ago Joe started running in the mornings, and one morning he met the owner of a hotel here called Hotel Alhambra.  I think it's the oldest hotel in the city, and used to be the only hotel until about 10 years ago when tourism started picking up.  He found out that Joe is a computer guy and wanted him to help them with their website.  So when Joe came home from his run we looked up their website : www.hotelalhambra.com.ni.  If you check it out, make sure that your computer isn't muted so that you get the full effect :) 

We have met with them 3 times so far. It's a family owned business, Gabriel is the president, Juan is the manager, and we haven't quite figured out how their sister is involved, but she sits in on the meetings and has a lot of opinions and speaks English better than the other two.  This is my first experience trying to do business with people completely from a different culture who don't speak much English and it has definitely been interesting.  For instance, we think they should put their room prices on their website and have a photo gallery or something.  But those ideas seem to be completely foreign to them.  We have tried showing them websites from other hotels in the city to show them what information is available and the looks and layouts of them, and the only thing Juan is interested in is hearing what kind of music these other websites are playing while their customers browse their site. Awesome. Joe and I would vote to get rid of the music altogether, but apparently it's extremely important to this culture.  It has just been so entertaining working through this with them.  They want their site to be attractive and informative for English speakers, but we just seem to have different priorities.  We have sold them on the idea of just setting up a wordpress site instead of having Joe fix their current site, so at least we're getting somewhere :)  I'll add a link to their new site when we've finished the project for those interested.

It's a beautiful hotel - here are a few pictures of it:

Joe's waiting for them to show up to one of our meetings.  They're located right on the central park - the park in the background that you can't really see - so their terrace is a great place to sit and enjoy people watching.

One of their lobbies...

Another side of the lobby.  It's a beautiful colonial style hotel.

This is just a picture to make the mango lovers jealous - we got these all for $1! And they are DELICIOUS!

 We went on an evening walk to the cemetery a few days ago - beautiful!  Apparently these people go all out for their deceased.

Such incredible work.  

I even found my name!! :) We found Joe's name so often it wasn't even worth pulling out the camera for... :)  It was interesting to see how many of the gravestones had the names painted on instead of engraved.

On the first Friday of every month foreigners living in Granada have a meet and greet to meet new people and to learn about businesses and humanitarian projects that are in the area. This month it was held at a little restaurant near the city center run by a guy originally from New Mexico who has been living here since 2004.  There were probably 40-50 people there and they had everyone introduce themselves and tell where they were from, what they were doing in Granada, how long they had been there, etc.

It was awesome to see so many foreigners there who had made Granada their home.  There were a lot of retirees who spent 6-8 months of the year here, some retirees who live here full time, a lot of people who owned homes on Laguna de Apollo - the crater lake not to far from Granada, a guy from Denmark who does real estate and has lived in Granada for 7 years with his wife and two kids, a young guy from Italy who came to Granada about 10 years ago and started up a project teaching women to make lamps out of old fan parts and purses/bags out of old rubber boots and jeans that they sell around the world.  The woman who started the meet and greets and runs them is probably in her mid 30's, from Connecticut, and has lived here for about 11 years.  It was just really cool to meet these people and get to chat with them for a while.

They announced at the meet and greet that the city had just finished the tourist street that goes out to the lake that has been under construction for a few years.  The street is beautiful and lined with restaurants and hotels for tourists.  It's pretty much where the only tourism in the city happens.  They had a celebration at the end of the street out by the lake that night that we walked to to check out.  They had a big stage with some incredible traditional dancing from all age groups.  It was just dance after dance after beautiful dance.  Eventually the mosquitoes were getting us so badly that we headed home.

We found out later that Spain paid for that street to be built to help the city's economy :) Kind of interesting living in a country where so much financial aid is just given to help improve circumstances.

As we were walking by our church on the way home we saw some youth gathered playing soccer, so we stopped and watched for a while.  I love the basketball hoop/goal combos - ingenious. 

They played 4 on 4 with teams standing on the side ready to replace a team as soon as it was scored on.

We were totally aware that last Friday was Doughnut Day and we certainly put in the effort combing the streets of Granada trying to find a bakery that had some - but to no avail :(  So we had French toast instead to celebrate. Yummy!!

But our doughnut bakery came through for us on Saturday! So we celebrated a day late :)  Heaven.

These doughnuts even had a surprise filling of brown sweet stuff.  hmmm....

We continue to enjoy torrential downpours of rain at least once a day! It was fun to see everything turn green almost overnight when the rainy season started.  What used to look like dead fields of grass are now luscious green meadows. Craziness.

Video of a rainstorm from our door. Try not to mind that your head turns sideways at the end. Not sure exactly what Joe was trying to capture :)

 Our new food discovery of the week is Guacamole!  Avocados are in season here right now, but neither Joe nor I have ever cared much for them.  They just have always seemed so tasteless to be worth the effort and cost of eating them - same goes for guacamole.  But I decided that since we're here and they're so cheap (5-8/$1 depending on size), we should probably just try them.  So I made some guacamole the other day to go with our rice and beans and tortillas and it was delicious! We are now huge fans of the stuff and I've made it already a few times since then.  Love it.

Yesterday evening the branch president and a pair of missionaries came over to visit and see where we live. It was a great get-to-know-you chat and we were just impressed that they would make the effort to come over.  The branch president would like Joe to accompany the elders in singing in church this Sunday or the next, so we'll see how that goes :)  Thanks for reading!