Sheep Guarding Llama

One of the big challenges that you face living in a super poor country and living outside of strict tourist areas is that people are constantly begging from you.  It really is everywhere.  What makes it much, much more difficult here is that because of the design of the homes and the fact that the house is wide open to the street at all times.  So we have started to have beggars coming to the door on a regular bases, calling into the house where they can see us (there really is nowhere to hide) and asking for money.  It was bad enough when it was an older woman once in a while.  But now it has started being punk kids, often well dressed and clearly just begging and annoying residents as they try to live or work, on their way to school or whatever.  And they just hang around outside of our door.

We lost power for a little while today, but less than an hour.  We could see the guys working on the pole down the street so were not too worried about it.

This afternoon I walked over to Cafe Isabella and picked up a lunch, rather than a breakfast, order to take back to the house with me.  Their lunch and dinner menu is huge, which is awesome.  They are rather like a diner with lots of different options and so close to us.  We are pretty excited about that.  So I ordered a fish burrito and a veggie burrito and a tuna melt (which in Spanish is called a “tuna melt”) and some fries to take back to the house.

The food is never super fast at the cafe so I sat out on the deck and got invited to sit with the retired expats who hang out over there.  I had at least half an hour of hanging out with them.  I learned a lot about the area and places that they thought that I should go visit and how they were living here as long term residents.  It was very informative about life in Nicaragua.

Quiet evening tonight.

We must have been pretty tired as even I did not get up until after eight and Liesl was not out of bed until a quarter after eleven!

We got a lot of rain today, the most that we have seen since we have come to Nicaragua.  It rained for a very large portion of the day.  Mostly we have gotten short bursts of rain but today we actually got long, sustained rain which was really nice.  It was mostly pleasant to sit out all day, no risk of sweat which is a nice change.

Dominica and I ate leftover pizza for lunch today.  We overestimated two nights ago and got way too much for the kids. So now we are eating it cold.

I wanted to go out for another walk today but it really did rain nearly all day.  Some of it was light and if I knew that it would stay like that I might have risked it.  But sometimes it would turn into a torrent and I really did not like the idea of getting caught in that so decided to stay in.

This evening was a family video game evening.  Last night we played Dominica’s video game which was not child appropriate so they were not able to hang out with us while she played it.  Tonight I played Back to the Future also from Telltale Games, like the game that Dominica was playing last night.

Liesl and Luciana came in and snuggled in the bed with us while I played.  We played for probably two hours.  It was a lot of fun.  The Telltale games are so perfect for people to watch you play, it really is like we are all watching a movie together as a family, but one where we get to interact with it all of the time.  I am looking forward to finding more and more of these Telltale games, although we already own nearly their entire collection (some titles twice via both Steam and GOG) so really we are mostly waiting on them to get off of their butts and write some new games for us to play!

I woke up, completely on my own, at five forty this morning!  It is nice when you can get up early because that is the coolest part of the day.  So I came right down to the dining room with the laptop to enjoy having some time with the nice weather.  Today is Saturday making this our second weekend in Granada.  We had talked about maybe going somewhere this weekend, perhaps Matagalpa in the highlands in coffee country, but we were not really feeling it so decided on a quiet weekend at home.

Dominica was up around seven and Luciana right after her.  Liesl slept in until well after nine.

Finally this morning I managed to get all caught up on SGL.  That makes me very happy.

Before noon we went out to Chepapo, the hamburger place that I had discovered yesterday but we had not made it to for lunch.  We all went today but apparently on the weekends they turn into a breakfast only place.  This worked out well for the girls who were interested in pancakes, one of their main sources of calories in general, but Dominica and I really wanted to try their veggie hamburgers.

Thankfully we made sad faces and they explained that they could make burgers but only veggie burgers.  We explained that we were vegetarians and everyone was happy.  Two veggie burgers with fries and a pancake for the kids to split.

We were the only people eating at the restaurant the entire time that we were there.  The food was quite good and came to just 330 Cordoba after tax and generous tip, almost exactly $12.  So cheap here.  We even had two coffees.

After lunch we stopped at El Burrito Loco for some pineapple and banana smoothies and then hit the ATM to pick up the rest of the cash that we needed to pay our rent here in Granada.  Then we walked home.  It was a very hot walk.  While out we ran into a guy that I know from a previous walk that I had taken.  I am already starting to know people around Granada!

We made it home just in time.  It was hot and sunny all day.  Five minutes after we were home it turned into a major storm.  We would have been very unhappy had we been out in the storm when it hit.

Liesl wanted to spend the afternoon swimming so we just relaxed and let them do that.  I did some SGL writing, did a little work on setting up my laptop and did just a little posting.

We got several little bouts of rain and a major lightning storm this afternoon.  I had been planning on going for a walk as soon as we had gotten back from lunch but thankfully I did not.

In the late afternoon, while the girls were still swimming, it looked like it was safe to head out on foot so I got ready and went for a walk to the south.  I went south on the main road through town, the Calle Atravesada, which we use every day but never take it past the mid point of town.  Immediately on the south side of town but is a pretty typical, nothing odd street in the north, turns into a completely insane street market that would remind you in many ways of the market in the medina in Fes!  Not as crazy and certainly not as big but full of cars too, which they do not contend with in Fes.  This was not something that we had any idea existed here in Granada.

I walked all of the way south out of the city and into the countryside keeping to rather a direct southern path as much as I could ascertain that I was doing.  I ended up going through lots of little barios and into other villages.  I managed to leave Granada and get to see a rather different part of life in Nicaragua.  It was an interesting walk, for sure.

I made it far out into the country.  One of the intriguing things that I found was that even ridiculously far out into rural and very poor countryside the road was not just paved, but brick paved and recently.  In fact the road was quite a bit nicer than it was in the city and way nicer than any road in the US.  Very strange.

About six kilometers out from the house I stumbled upon the end of the road, where it turned to all mud, and there was a bizarre, otherworldly housing development going in!  All little, tiny, identical four hundred square foot boxes in all different, bright colours which all, except for one, appears to be empty.  It had all of the look of a major housing development anywhere with a giant, welcoming entry gate and even a guard sitting out front.  But instead of giant McMansions there were among the smallest homes I have ever seen.  But they seemed to be brand new, still under construction, well built little concrete homes that I am sure are quite nice, just very small.  In the whole place I saw only one car and just one family sitting out in front of their home enjoying the evening air.  It was all quite surreal.  This place was so far removed from Granada that I cannot imagine who would be interested in living in this development, even though it seems very nice and I am sure it is incredibly high end for the region.

The sun was getting low and I was as close to Mombacho Volcano as I was going to be able to get going via this route so I turned back after exchanging pleasantries with the security guard (what he was guarding I have no idea, the place was empty, no one was there and there was no fence around the place so he would never notice someone actually going into the complex.)

Even as far south as I went, a few times I ran into the road full of cattle being led from one place to another.  And many people riding horses passed by.  And at one point there was a group of girls playing soccer, or something like kickball maybe, in the middle of the road.  No car traffic down here.

On the walk back I made it maybe one kilometer back towards Granada when suddenly something flew up between my glasses and the brim of my cap and stung me, hard, just above my right eye.  It hurt, a lot.  This is, from my memory, the worst sting or bug bite of my life.  The pain was intense and lasted for more than an hour!  It was so bad that I got a headache and my right eye socket began to hurt.

It was getting pretty dark when I made it back home.  I had made a little loop so that I was not doing entirely the same path the entire direction.  I definitely know Granada far better than I did before.

I ran into a guy that I know once back in town and he told me that my sting wasn’t visible so I was probably fine.

Before getting all of the way back home I stopped at the corner store and picked up a cold drink for the walk back and a beer for the house.

Got home and we decided that we were going to call it an early night.  We needed to look at my sting and figure out if it was okay and it was pretty warm and Dominica really wanted a video game night.  But we wanted some food too.

So we walked directly across the street (all ten steps) and checked out the lady there that sells asado from her from sidewalk.  We asked but she had nothing vegetarian except for papas, which we bought two of.  They came packaged in a banana leaf.

The local papas (literally just is the word potato) is a little bit of cheese encased in a big ball of mashed potatoes and then fried!  Yummy.   It comes with a big of on the dry side coleslaw as a topping.  We got two, went home and Dominica and I ate them at the dining room table.  They were pretty good.  And at only ten Cordoba each they are around thirty five cents!!

After eating we went upstairs and spent nearly two hours trying to figure out how to get either her laptop or my laptop to hook to and work with the television in our bedroom so that we could use it for Dominica to play her video game.  We eventually gave up as there was always one problem or another, the big ones being that the television was so small that we could not read the words on the screen and the other being that nothing we did would let the sound go through so that was pointless as we could not hear anything and hearing the dialogue was pretty much a requirement for the game to work at all.

Eventually we gave up and just set up the desk at the end of the bed, put my laptop with the 17″ screen and the Beats Audio on it (it is an HP Envy) which we could both see and hear pretty well.  The Logitech gamepad worked just fine and Dominica was able to play her game from bed.

She played about two hours of Telltale Games’ “The Walking Dead: Season One” which turned out to be amazing.  It is from 2012  and I cannot believe how great that game is.  We are only partway into Episode One from Season One but the storytelling is phenomenal as are the graphics and acting.    This is totally not a subject matter that I am into but it is exactly the kind of game that I love.  Watching her play it for a few hours was just like watching an intense movie.  I am so impressed with the work that Telltale did on this title and I am very excited to play many of their other titles since we bought their collection the other day.  They seem to be doing some really great work.

We were off to bed around eleven.  The girls spent most of the evening in their rooms.  At first they were just playing as they have been two days without iPads but around seven or so Dominica decided that since they were in bed so early that they could have their iPads in there.  They were so excited to get their iPads back.

It is Friday, the end of our second full week in Nicaragua.  It is amazing how quickly Central America feels very much like home.  It is quite comfortable living here.  We are enjoying it a lot.

So far we have no plans for our weekend.  It is looking more and more like we will just be spending the weekend here rather than going anywhere.  It is a bit of effort to arrange travel when we do not have a car of our own so we tend to not do it lightly.  Maybe sometime next week.

I managed to do a lot of catch up on SGL today.  Should be fully caught up by tomorrow, I think.

This morning I made a trip to the Quick Stop down on the corner for a few needed supplies.  Just a quick trip, it really is not far at all, just about three blocks away.

Today ended up being a really tough day for the kids.  We can’t figure out if there were just way too tired or what the deal was, but both of them were just insanely grumpy nearly all day.

We tried to go to a new burger place that I had discovered on my walk to the corner store this morning for lunch.  I ended up on a call for two hours in the middle of the day so that took us until about two thirty to go out for lunch.  The girls were so grumpy that Dominica would not go anywhere with them so I had to go on my own.

I found the restaurant was already closed by the time that I finally got to it.  So no veggie burgers for us for lunch.  We were really looking forward to that.

We ended up having to send both girls to their room for naps at three in the afternoon.  It was that bad.

Until six or so, Dominica and I had the living room to ourselves as the girls were mostly quiet upstairs.  Around six Luciana came out and asked if they couldn’t spend time with us – they wanted us to go to bed early and have family time watching The Nanny.  They are adorable, it is hard to resist.

Dominica wanted pizza and talked me into walking up to Pizza Vale, getting two pizzas, going grocery shopping at La Colonia and bringing back food for everyone to the house.  So I did a bit of walking alone and bringing back dinner.

Once I got home the girls FaceTimed grandpa for maybe twenty minutes.  Their first time talking to him from Nicaragua.

Then Dominica and I did some video game shopping on Steam’s weekend sale.  Dominica went a bit crazy and had me buy her the entire Telltale video game collection which turned out to be more than thirty five games!  One of our largest video game purchases in a very long time.

We watched The Nannny as a family for a while and were off to bed on the early side.

I felt like I was sleeping in late when I woke up this morning but when I looked at my phone it turned out that I had only slept in an extra ten minutes!  Weird.  It felt like a really long night.  So, up shortly after six for me!  Dominica slept in till more like eight.

I made my way downstairs and set up in the dining room like I usually do.  It was bright and sunny most of the day but it felt cooler today than it has been feeling and by later in the day both Dominica and me had been commenting on how nice it was today.  There wasn’t that overwhelming feeling of sweating constantly.

I had a very productive morning of writing and getting Dominica to edit the stuff that I was working on.  Did some blogging and lots of posting.  The girls were very engaged in their own stuff between playing with their toys together, doing some swimming and playing Minecraft they skipping doing school during the day and saved it for this evening instead.  First time that they have done that in a very long time.

We stayed in all day, one of our rare days not venturing out  at all.  Dominica often stays in but I typically go out at some point.  Today was totally a relaxing day.

I went out in the early evening to El Carmen Panaderia to pick up some locally made bread for sandwiches.  That was the only time outside of the house all day.

I thought about going out walking around town this evening but just as I was considering it after Luciana decided that she wanted to go to bed at six thirty (no idea what made her want to go to bed so early) it started to sprinkle and then, suddenly, a big thunderstorm hit and it rained for over an hour quite steadily which left me a bit wary of venturing out and being caught in a big storm far from home.

Instead I settled down in the dining room again and worked on my writing.  Liesl did school until after seven then went to the living room to watch her shows on her iPad by herself while Dominica made some dinner.

Dominica went to bed around nine.  I stayed up for a while to catch up on SGL, which I nearly managed to do.  Still a couple of days short but tons has been caught up and I will definitely be able to get fully caught up sometime tomorrow which will be my first time since getting to Nicaragua.

These evening Liesl accidentally caught the end of her headphones on part of the bed while she was walking through her room and it ripped them apart.  Her headphones that she uses constantly with her iPad and really loves.  She was so upset.  She just cried and cried.

Luciana felt so bad that she went and got her own headphones that she had gotten for her birthday and gave them to Liesl and then was crying because she loved her birthday headphones so much but wanted Liesl to be happy more than she wanted to have her headphones.  It was very touching.  Considering how little they own here it means a lot more than it would when we are back home in Texas and they have unlimited toys and we can just replace things.  What they have here is all that they are getting and it was a really big deal for her to give them to Liesl.

I was up until close to midnight even though I was feeling a bit tired around nine thirty.  I was getting so much done that I did not want to stop to go to bed that early.

I also managed to get all of the pictures from my Nikon camera uploaded to Flickr tonight and most, if not all, of the videos up to YouTube.  So there are now quite a few pictures on Flickr for those who are interested in keeping up.  Far more than are on Facebook.  Nearly every picture on my phone is uploaded too.  So all in all, pretty much to a state of being “caught up” all around at this point.