The fireworks started at four o’clock this morning. Four. O’clock. In the morning! By six in the morning the marching band was coming by. Welcome to life in Nicaragua. No sleeping in here. Almost no sleeping at all. Fireworks from four onward is a bit ridiculous.
And the fireworks never stopped. Nor did the marching band. The band played until well into the afternoon at the very least. And the fireworks continued for the entirety of the day.
One of the “dangers” of living in a home that has no roof and being continuously exposed to the outside world is that there is always the clear and present danger that animals will decide to enter the house uninvited. We have seen this one cat walking the roof lines for some time and have discussed for weeks what a problem it would be if the cat decided to come into the house because it would be so difficult for it to leave again.
This morning when I got up at six I walked out of the bedroom and there it was, on top of the “laundry room” roof, looking at me. It is a young, relatively healthy looking tiger car. Quite young, I assume, probably an adolescent. It was timid and immediately jumped into the rafters where it attempted to hide in the shadows for the rest of the day being too scared to move.
We opened the front door so that if the cat was to come down and walk around it would easily find a path outside if it so chose. But, of course, it never chose to do that. I put up a bowl of water for it very close to where it was hiding so that it would know that there was water if it needed it. Late in the evening I put some tuna fish up there too as that was the closest thing that we had to cat food in the house. If the cat is still here tomorrow I am going to have to consider getting a bag of cat food at the corner store as we have nothing to feed it and that was all of the tuna that we had.
So we have a cat in Granada. That was unexpected.
Today was exceptionally hot. Hotter than it has been for a week or two, I think. Bright sun, warm air, high humidity. We pretty much did nothing today. It was too hot to really do anything. We were really just interested in sitting around and trying not to wind up being too warm.
Dominica sent me out for donuts from the bakery around the corner. I could not go straight there because we were out of cash so I needed to go to the ATM downtown first. I ended up getting down to the bank right as the police were closing off the streets for the big parade to come through there. The same parade that had been going since at least six this morning.
It was a huge parade. It just went on and on, quite surprising for this small city. From what I could gather this was another Sandinista political celebration. About half of everyone attending was wearing the 2015 Sandinista t-shirts and tons of people were carrying the FSLN (Sandinista) flags and many others had the Nicaraguan flag. There were trucks with speakers, people dancing, marching bands (including the one that plays in front of our house all of the time), banner carriers and all sorts of things. It was quite a party and massive numbers of people marching down the sidewalks with the main body of the parade.
The parade went on and on, I never saw the end of it. I marched along with it for a while because it was between me and both the house and the bakery. So I had little choice. But it was a fun parade and I joined in. I managed to take some video as well, even though my phone was nearly dead.
The parade ended up going into the afternoon. It probably lasted for eight hours at least. From what we could tell, they were making laps of the city.
I got to the bakery and today they had donuts, so I stocked up getting nearly all that they had as they tend to be hard to get our hands on. I also got my croissants de queso, which I like.
Did a bit of posting and just a little writing today. Dominica played Fallout on her laptop for a while today. The girls made a Minecraft day of it and both of them played nearly all day.
Dominica made dinner at home tonight. Thai spices, local veggies and quinoa.
Our plan for tonight is more Fallout 3. We had a good time playing that last night. That game has been on our pending lineup of games to play for a very, very long time and we are very excited that we finally have a chance to play it. It is a huge game so it going to be something that we are going to be playing for a very long time.
Dominica’s bruise is still horrible today. It is starting to turn yellow in the middle. She is walking much better, though. She is guessing that she is going to have this one for at least a month. This is the worst bruise that we can ever remember her having.