A proper post

Ok, so, Nicaragua.

After a smooth day of traveling and almost hassle free border crossing, we arrived in Nicaragua. Although beautiful and full of things I have never seen before, we were anxious to get out of Costa Ricafor the sake of our bank accounts.

Although CR and Nica are neighbours, they are much different.

Nicaragua has a more genuine feel to it. Almost immediately when we entered this country you can feel it. Calm, less busy, ox carts, people riding horses b/c that is their mode of transportation, pigs, stray dogs etc.
I love the vibe that this country and people ooze.

We share a taxi ride into San Juan Del Sur (where we will attend Spanish school for a week and wheremi amiga Heather has spent a significant amount of time. I was really looking forward to finally seeing allof the places she has talked about for years and to meet some of her friends) with this dude from the UKwho turns out had his passport stamped with ENTRY instead of EXIT as we were leaving Costa Ricawhich caused us to wait about an hour and a half at this grundgy waiting area.

We find what is probably one of the nicest places we've stayed in so far for a good price and meetanother traveling couple. They are from Alaska and quit their jobs and are traveling for a year. Very cool and super awesome people. Annnnnnnnnnd, they play Scrabble!!! They brought the travel board with them. We spent several nights looking for the best word we could make with the 7 tiles we had while practicing Spanish and swapping stories.

The next day we had to leave our sweet little hotel and moved to what was suppossed to be a homestay. I had this romantic idea of what it would be like to stay with a homestay family for a week in my mind. We would share meals together where we could only speak in Spanish, the parents would teach us about their culture while I practiced English with their young kids etc etc.
Haha, yeah. That is definitely not what we got. Our school picks us up at our hotel and drives us over a few blocks. We meet Marta, I thought of her kind of as the Madam of the house, and are taken to our room. We're not in a sweet, typical local style home, we're in some big 2 story boarding house kinda place that can sleep about 20 people at least. There are noisy kids running around and you know those guys who attach big speakers to the top of their trucks and advertise or promote their business throughout the streets while playing crappy music? Yeah, Disco Movil lived at our place. One day he was just parked in the lot right beside our room playing his crappy music nice and loud.

We were SO sad to see the flat tire on his truck one day. Disco Movil was all Disco and no Movil for a few days.
So yeah, not exactly the romantic image I had in mind. In any case, we met some cool people and Marta was a bad ass cook. I loved every meal she prepared, even if it was rice and beans 95% of the time. Randy grew a little tired of it but I loved it.
Spanish school was good. 4 hours a day for 5 days. 4 hours a day is a lot but overall I learned a lot. I want to study more.
Aside from studying and playing Scrabble with Laura and Max we checked out a few nice beaches, had an afternoon of photography, some great pizza, yoga, sunsets, stars, lots of ice cream and got familiar with Ron, Flor de Cana, the local rum.

Since finishing our week at school, we spent a few days at a muy tranquillo hotel on Maderas beach. The beach is literally out the door. Amazing. I have always dreamed of staying in a place like this. The area is beautiful and when there are actually waves (which there hasn't been the past couple of days) there is good surf here. We are practicing. Lots of cool rock formations and tide pools to explore, yoga and running on the beach, reading, napping, playing games, sunsets, stars, NO ice cream unfortunately, howler monkeys and just doing whatever it is you want to do.

So this is where we're at. Loving Nicaragua and planning to spend a lot more time here. Next week we will meet up with our Alaskan buddies on the island of Ometepe where 2 volcanoes exist. 1 is active. We'll hike and play Scrabble.
After that we'll either move onto one of the historic colonial cities of Granada or Leon or hit another small beach town.