Well, Sunday was the day that we had originally planned on flying home from Nicaragua when we first made our summer plans, but we're still here! :) We had thought we needed to be back in the states before school started for Joe's work, but about a month ago his colleagues said it was ok for us to stay through September. And because of the money we'll be saving on flights and rent by staying, we can go on a cruise!! Woohoo!! So we have officially gotten flights to Fort Lauderdale on the 15th of Sept., booked a cruise til the 21st, and will be flying back to Vegas that same day. We are pretty excited to say the least. So now when Joe starts to get his unbearable meat cravings, he can dream about all of the luscious steaks that he will get to eat on the cruise and it gets him through :)
Because we are staying another month and a half, we needed to renew our tourist visas because the 3 month mark was up two days ago. So a week ago we did a border run! The process was a little confusing at times, but we survived :)
The bus to the Costa Rican border took about 2 1/2 hours, we all filed out of the bus, filled out exit forms, paid the exit fees,
then walked down the road to the Costa Rican border.
We checked into Costa Rica,
Then walked around to the other side of the building and checked out. Good bye, Costa Rica! The 45 minutes we spent standing on your soil was far too short! Sometime we'll have to go back and give it a real visit.
Then we walked back to the Nicaraguan border, paid the entrance fees, and got a new tourist visa! Bingo!
On the way back we took a detour out to San Juan del Sur, a beautiful beach on the southwestern coast of Nicaragua. This is Joe standing on the side of the road waiting for a bus to take us there.
The bus that we got onto had a flat panel TV with a DVD player! Wow! We have never seen a chicken bus here with those kinds of accessories. Pretty impressive.
The beach was gorgeous!
And pretty empty, I thought. Joe and I had a whole section of the beach just to ourselves. A lot of surfers come here because it's cheap and still pretty undiscovered. Apparently one of the popular things to do in the town is to hike up to the huge Jesus statue that you can see on the hill behind Joe. We didn't have time to do that, but we were surprised at how big it was.
After a few hours in the water we decided to dry off by walking around the town.
We found some delicious muffins for lunch.
In our meanderings we found a beautiful church.
I think I liked it so much because most of it was made of wood.
A few days ago my brothers sent a picture of themselves at the Golden Gate Bridge - well, we found one here too! :)
The hair scrunchie I'd been wearing got lost in the ocean when we were swimming and my nasty, frizzy hair was driving me CRAZY! So Joe tied it in knots and I was a much happier person for the rest of the trip :)
The trip home became a bit stressful when we arrived back in Rivas and found out that buses from Rivas to Granada were done running for the day (it was only 4:30 pm!). But thank goodness not all buses into Granada had stopped running. After a few unplanned transfers we made it safely back home. The end.
Yay for rain! Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, were almost a constant downpour and it has been absolutely marvelous! We didn't turn on the fans at all on Sunday and enjoyed the quiet we didn't realize we were missing when they were on. Not only did we enjoy the quiet, but my hair enjoyed being able to stay in one place instead of being constantly blown into a lion's mane :)
Yesterday morning I woke up to find Joe like this:
We will take towel blankets over sweating any day :)
So I decided to dedicate this post to food because I couldn't think of a more worthy thing to dedicate it to :) Discovering new food, eating good food, and trying to figure out how to make food have all been a big part of our experience down here, so I thought I'd write a little about it. And it's going to be really random - so I'll just apologize for that up front...
We LOVE the street food down here! It really is just like pouring oil into our stomachs, but it's tasty oil! There are hot dog stands and fruit stands everywhere, all day, but the Nicaraguan street food starts to come out around 4ish. Some evenings Joe and I decide that it will be a street food dinner and we just walk the streets and try things we haven't eaten before.
There's not much variety - the stands sell tacos and enchiladas, or you can get the "complete" which is fried plantains, rice and beans, coleslaw, and chicken all wrapped up in a plantain leaf. But each place has a slightly different serving size, price, or ingredient, so it's always a new adventure.
Here are some tacos: meat and rice rolled up in a cornmeal tortilla and fried, then topped with coleslaw and cream.
Their enchiladas are fried tortillas with fried rice pocketed inside, topped with coleslaw. Sorry it's so blurry.
A couple Saturday evenings ago Joe and I headed into town to find out what was going on. We had seen on Friday that a big stage was being set up in the town center, so we decided to check it out. On the way we saw different groups parading through the streets with matching shirts and bands playing, and when we got to the center, the place was packed with all of these different groups. They were all from different parts of Nicaragua and Honduras, with their shirts telling what city they represented. A lot of people had Honduras flags, scarves, and jerseys, but we never really figured out what the big event was. A lot of Catholic leadership was on the stand and eventually a cardinal showed up and was robed and sat on the "throne" in the center of the stage. There were speeches and choirs that performed.
The tour buses that had brought all of the people were scattered around town. We liked the back of this one :)
We didn't stay for long, but the event gave us an excuse to try some more food from the numerous food stands everywhere. This is Joe holding a little bag of fried plantains - like potato chips. When someone buys a bag, the vendor opens it up, spoons some coleslaw into it and squirts hot sauce on top. Then you eat it with your fingers. Delicious!
I also tried a quesillo - a tortilla with a large round piece of cheese, caramelized onions, cream, and hot sauce on top. Probably a one-time try, but at least I felt cultured while eating it :)
This is a picture of a woman cooking her family's dinner. A lot of people cook their meals over wood fires. Amazing.
Decided to try a choco banana. We've seen signs for them everywhere so we finally bought one. Frozen banana covered with wax chocolate. I tried to eat it, but when I couldn't feel the inside of my mouth anymore for all of the wax, I just threw the chocolate away and ate the banana :)
S'mores! We discovered marshmallows at the grocery store and we had some square cookies on hand that have chocolate on one side, so we gave it a try. Delicious!! The marshmallows aren't quite the same quality as we're used to (who knew marshmallows could have a lower quality??) but when it's all melted together it's yummy sugar goodness and it doesn't matter.
Sad ending to the story though: we bought the marshmallows and made s'mores about a month ago
and just two days ago I decided I felt like eating a marshmallow, so I got
them out of the cupboard and the bag was full of huge, juicy, red ants
busy making their colony in there - complete with larvae. Pretty nasty.
I thought I had tied off the bag well enough, but I guess if I've
learned anything here it's that if we have anything sugary that we don't
want to be sharing with a lot of other critters, we had better keep it
in the fridge. Lesson learned again.
So, a while back our landlord and his wife went to Costa Rica and Panama for a week or two and they left a supply of cookies for us to hand out to the kids who came by (they give cookies to kids who they know won't get them at home because they're too poor). So for the time they were gone we had to go out to the gate every time the kids knocked and hand out cookies. As fun as it was to see the kids, we were glad when Jerry and Debora returned and we could disregard the constant knocking at the gate again :)
But, the next time I saw those cookies in town I bought some to try and LOVED them! They're not what one would expect from a cookie, they're kind of bland with a hint of molasses, but the taste has definitely grown on me. They're now one of my favorite treats, and the best part is - Joe doesn't like them! Score! So if I buy some I get to eat them all :)
For breakfast for Father's Day I tried my hand at making stove top biscuits. Definitely not oven biscuits, but not bad. It was just so nice to have warm "breadish" anything that we could put butter and jam on.
It's been so interesting for me to see how slowly I go through margarine
and sugar here. Back home I would stock up on margarine and would be
constantly transferring it from the freezer to the fridge and throwing
away empty boxes, but here, I'm still working on my fourth cube of it.
And same with the sugar - we used to go through sugar like nobody's business,
but here I've used a total of 2 cups (one cup for the cobbler, and one
cup for the "brownies" which will both be pictured later, so start
getting excited :)) I guess I've never realized before just how much of that stuff is used up because of the baked goods we consume. I've just been surprised at how not having an oven has cut back on our use of those two ingredients.
Anyway, this was the other half of the Father's Day breakfast...gotta love omelets!
Speaking of Father's Day, we hardly knew it even came in this country. Mother's day was such a big event here, we were excited to see what they would do for Father's Day. It was celebrated here the Sunday after it was celebrated in the states, and when we were walking to church we saw this mother and son carrying Father's day gift baskets. That's the only sign of it we saw all day. Not a word was said about fathers in church, no music, no fireworks, no store displays, nothing.
Kind of sad, but we have heard quite a few times that a lot of the people here don't really have fathers. That stick around, anyway. Most have mothers that they live with, but not many have fathers that they know. So maybe that's why it wasn't such a big deal...
Jerry and Deborah invited us over for homemade pizza one night. Jerry is a vegan, so it was just crust and sauce, but Deborah has definitely perfected the sauce. It was heavenly. She did put Nicaraguan cheese on half, and it worked. Joe usually won't touch the cheese here, but on the pizza it was perfect.
Dragon fruit is now in season, so we decided to try it.
Hmmmm....reminded me of a kiwi. Probably because of all of the seeds. It was good, but we probably won't buy another one. It cost us 25 bananas!! Joe's and my new system for deciding if something is worth the money is asking if we're willing to give up that many bananas for it. "Would you rather have this taco or 15 bananas?" "The bus trip would cost 120 bananas, do you still want to go?" Yes, I know - we're pathetic.
And the dragon fruit juice turned our mouths pink!
Another night out for street food. Too bad we remembered to take the picture after the food was gone :)
Our 4th of July was pretty uneventful, but we did what we could to make it a special day :)
Started off the morning by watching this video my sister put together for a Relief Society presentation once. Pretty inspiring, I thought.
Then spent the day playing patriotic music online while Joe worked. We made sure to blast Neil Diamond's "Coming to America" a few times to make the day legit.
I tried to think of a 4th of July food I could make and thought of a mango pie, but couldn't find a pie tin, so the idea turned into mango cobbler instead because our landlord said he had a casserole dish I could borrow.
It was quite an accomplishment for me since I've never used a gas oven before. The oven temperature knob has no numbers on it, it just turns up the flame on the bottom of the oven. Plus I made it without any measuring cups or spoons, which I'm not very skilled at either. But it was edible! It tasted more like mango corn bread than cobbler, but it was sweet and that's all we needed.
So this street food experiment was quite the failure. I've read online
about Nicaraguan nacatamales and have seen them sometimes being sold on
the street, so I finally decided to get a couple while I was at the
market. It's cornmeal and lard mixed together to create the "dough" and
then meat and vegetables and seasonings are put inside, it's wrapped in
a plantain leaf and boiled. I was pretty excited to get home from the market and try them with Joe.
We unwrapped them from the plantain leaves...
And took a bite. There was nothing inside :( Just two big hunks of lard and cornmeal. It's probably the first food we've thrown away since we came here. I'll have to try again at another stand and ask what's in them before I buy them :)
Who knew there were so many kinds of bananas in this world?? It took us a while to figure out which were bananas and which were plantains, but now that we've got that pretty much figured out, we're still coming in contact with crazy looking bananas. Skinny ones, fat ones, long ones, short ones. So these are the squat ones and they are packed with sugar. Wow, I think I had five different canker sores in my mouth after sharing one with Joe. Ok, that's an exaggeration, but my mouth could definitely feel the sugar. And the cool thing was, it was the texture of a banana, but it tasted like a pear. How's that for a weird fruit.
I was on the phone with my sister the other day and she mentioned that they were making BYU mint brownies. It was like she had stabbed me in the stomach. As soon as I hung up I googled how to make brownies on a stove top. Someone suggested you make the batter like normal and then add water to cook them like pancakes. So I did.
Definitely not brownies. But a nice, sweet treat nonetheless. I think having cocoa powder that we're used to would have helped, but we still use the stuff we found at the market which is quite a different taste.
Joe got a twin pop banana the other day! Definitely worth a picture :)
And that's the end of the random food pictures! Thanks for reading! :)
A few Saturdays ago Jerry and Deborah invited us to go with them to a park by the lake and play croquet with them. Joe rode on the back of Jerry's motorcycle and I rode behind Deborah on hers - that was the best part of the whole evening :) SOOO much faster than walking and a lot cooler and breezier too!
We rode out to the lake and were amazed at how many people were out there! Joe and I have walked along the lake many times and have seen all of the parks and walkways and playgrounds that have been built, but it's always empty when we go. We've even commented to ourselves sadly that, "they built it, but no one came." Boy were we wrong. Apparently on the weekends it is the place to be. That place was packed. Families everywhere, picnics, soccer games, bikers, the benches were packed, the sidewalks were busy, the playgrounds were crowded, and most of the grass areas had been claimed too.
We found a small area to set up our game and played for a couple of hours. Within minutes of starting we had quite the audience watching us - apparently they had never seen anything quite like croquet. I didn't get a picture of all of them, but there were probably 30 people gathered on the sidewalk watching us, and about 10 kids crowded around us - laying their heads down by our balls and picking up the balls to play with them every once in a while. It was kind of hard to play trying not to hit their heads or their shins and asking them to please leave our balls where they were. But eventually they all found more exciting things to do and we were able to play in peace and take a few pictures.
Then we drove through the town because they wanted to buy some popcorn for us. We were stopped by a parade - they have these every few weeks for different saints - so we stopped and watched and took some pictures. There were a lot of school kids in uniform, some nuns scattered throughout,
a lot of traditional dancing groups with bands playing music for them,
and of course the saint that was being honored, carried through the city by some men.
The best part was that when it was over and we were getting back on the motorcycles, I saw two moms carrying two little baby girls, probably about 18 months old, that had been dressed up like nuns. You know when you see little girls dressed up in BYU cheerleader outfits at football games? Yeah, these people dress up their girls like nuns. Awesome! I so wish I had had the camera ready for that one!
We stopped at a popcorn stand, they bought us some popcorn, and then we rode to the cathedral and ate it sitting on the steps and enjoyed some people watching. It was such beautiful weather and a perfect way to end the day.
On our ride home it started raining, which made the ride that much better :) Speed with water (when I'm not the one driving) has got to be one of the best combinations around. It was such a fun evening and so nice of them to invite us!
