24/10/2008

Bold as Love, Hendrix

I’m not sure if you guys ever pay attention to the music or song that I happen to be listening to while blogging, but they are usually important for setting the mood, tone, feel, or what have you of my posts. With that said, I don’t expect you to look’em up and purchase them on iTunes—just a sort of clarity that I wanted to present.

As you may know, I spent the last two weeks in various places in Nicaragua. I only have a short amount of time to write this and if you are anything like me, you have a short attention span when it comes to articles pertaining to ideas, issues, and etc. which are foreign to your own interests. With this in mind, I plan on making it brief, and just know that no matter how I describe it; the experience exceeded what is written.

Trans Nica, good for long bus rides across Central American countries. Managua is the first city that we went to, it also happens to be the capital city as well. We stayed as a group here for the first three-four days. We listened to several speakers and learned a little bit more about what we had gotten ourselves into with this whole CCCU/ Latin American Studies Program… We did many things from going to the dump and watch people gather food, talking with political representatives, eating lots of food, going to the mall, and frankly I cannot remember too much from that period. I got really sick one day and went to the hospital. It was a fun adventure. I’ll write that story out in way more detail next week; it had to do with the movement of bowels and the like. The hospital trip was only to ensure a pleasant home-stay the following day.

The home-stay is hard to write about and I haven’t really recovered enough to do it. There was an amazing amount of input overload. The communication is no longer a problem and it didn’t bother me, but the dozens of people and chickens and puppies and servings of food and thoughts about life did. A quick rundown of the structure of my stay is as follows: I was in Masaya, the barrio was Monimbó. Cesar (host dad/grandpa) owned a shoe factory. Mama Gloria made artisan dresses, shirts, and the like. The two aunts, or daughters of Cesar and Gloria, helped sell shoes while one of their husbands worked on the largest exporting coffee plantation in Nicaragua. That man and his wife also taught folklore dance lessons (the dance of the native people) in their spare time. That dance proved to be a very common occurrence throughout my time with them. One son drove a taxi. The other son worked in the factory and helped run the business.

Tomorrow I’m leaving to go to the cloud forest and might climb the tallest peak in Costa Rica, Cerro Chiripó, 3,727 m (12,228 ft). I’ll be back on Tuesday in order to write more and explain myself, for now, sleep must come.