Sheep Guarding Llama

This morning it was nearly frost on the ground back home in Upstate New York and it was in the low nineties here in Nicaragua with a heat index up into the low hundreds.

The marching band starting playing in front of our house this morning around eight or nine in the morning and it continued to play for pretty much the entire day!  They are improving a lot but this is a bit much.  We pretty much could not talk to each other all day long.

For breakfast today we walked downtown and went to Kelley’s Waffle House, which we love.  Their food is excellent, although they clearly cater to the expats and tourists.  But it is still very good and the girls love the selection of waffles, pancakes and French toast.  It is very handy how easy it is to get pancakes and waffles here in Nicaragua after how hard it was in Spain and Panama.

I worked on some Elastix PBX builds today.  Doing projects and documentation most of the day, along with some writing and posting.

This evening we just stayed in and took it easy finding stuff to eat around the house.  We will do a bit of exploring Granada over the weekend, I am sure.  We are still recovering a little bit from all of our travel and getting settled into our new home down in Central America.

And thus October begins.  This is a year of huge changes for us and the time is just flying by like nobody’s business.  It feels like it was just January a few days ago, yet so much has happened to us this year.  From changing jobs, twice, to living in a different country thrice…. what a year and it isn’t over yet, we are only seventy five percent through the year thus far.

This morning Dominica cooked a late breakfast for her and me.  We do not have a lot of breakfast (or any meal) options around the house but there are eggs and bread.

We are really liking Granada still.  Everything has been very good.  We are still a little tired and still figuring the place out but, overall, we are pretty happy and certainly are considering Nicaragua as a potential for our long term “base of operations.”  The location and cost are just really too good to just overlook.

In the afternoon our street turned into a hard core marching band practice that went on for an hour or two.  Because there is no glass on the windows and because everything that we have is open air onto the street we might as well have had an entire marching band playing right inside of the living room.  It was pretty extreme, but interesting.

This evening Dominica was not feeling like going out again, the last two days were just too much and the heat really wears us out, and so she sent me out to Pizza Vale on my own to pick up take out (para llevar) pizza for the family.  Their vegetarian pizza that we discovered last night was just really calling her name and she could not resist it.

Getting take out pizza proved to be super cheap, less than ten dollars for their largest (the family sized) pizza loaded with toppings.

Once I got home we sat on the floor of the master bedroom and put on The Nanny and watched that while we ate our dinner.  A nice, quiet family night in.

After all of the excitement of yesterday, today seemed pretty tame by comparison.

This morning was our first time actually getting around to making coffee!  So this was our first Nicaraguan coffee.  Hard to believe that we have made it this far without having had any of it at all yet.  It was very good.

We heard a lot of horses this morning and poked our heads out to discover that a whole group of maybe eight horse drawn carriages loaded with passengers had pulled up to the “hotel” across the street and people were getting out and filling up the hotel.  It was very odd.  I had heard that people sometimes use the horse drawn carriages as taxis around town but had not expected to see something like this.  And definitely not directly in front of our front door.  Very cool.

We had a marching band wander by in front of the house today.  Odd.  Not something that we had been expecting to see.

I made mac and cheese for the kids today.  We have Costa Rican mac and cheese rather than Kraft and they love it.  I’m much happier making them something local, although it tastes pretty close.

This evening after I was mostly done writing for the day and because we had promised yesterday, we took the girls out for a walk to go up the street to the Poet’s Park to the playground there.

Unfortunately the playground had looked far better from the road that it did up close.  A lot of it was in terrible disrepair and had missing boards, broken metal and sharp edges.  We had to be really careful.  There were tons and tons of kids there too.

The girls played for a while and Dominica watched them.  I went out walking around town in an attempt to find food options relatively near where we were.  I walked far to the east to the chicken factory and found a grocery store that we had not known about before and explored the neighborhoods in that direction, then stopped by the playground and reported in.  Nothing for us to do in that direction.

Then I set out to the west towards the grocery stores that I already knew.  It was getting hot and I was starting to sweat a lot.  It was a long walk and I managed to find very little.  There was an asada place but, of course, we don’t eat anything that they would have.  There was a local bar and restaurant kind of thing but nothing that felt comfortable just popping into with the kids, especially not this early on our stay in Granada.  Finally I found a pizza place next to the far grocery store.  Better than nothing.

I walked back to the playground and let the family know what we would be doing.  Dominica had been making friends with kids on the playground who were all attempting to communicate.  They were struggling but getting by.  Liesl and Luciana were having run even with the dangerous and limited playground.  I think that there were even more kids when we returned there.

We all walked together over to the pizza place, Pizza Vale.  The seating is all outdoors, it is a very interesting plaza (with bats flying around the inside of it!)  It was nice but way too warm.  Very hard to cool down with no breeze and hot, humid air.

The food ended up being amazing and we had a really nice time.  The pizza was great, similar in style to what we found in rural Panama like my mother used to make.  The vegetarian pizza at Pizza Vale has pineapple on it which was awesome.  Liesl loved out pizza too.

After dinner we went to La Colonia, the fancy grocery store that we were told was more expensive but would have more of the kind of food that we would be looking for.  This was our first time going to La Colonia and this was Dominica’s first Nicaraguan grocery store experience.

We shopped for a while but had to be careful how much we bought as we needed to carry everything back with us, we don’t have a car.  We were very thankful to have real food for the house, this will help a lot.

We walked back home and got the groceries put away and settled into the air conditioned bedrooms to cool down, relax and get some sleep.

This morning I was up early and got in about an hour of writing before I had to have a conference call that was supposed to be about half an hour and ended up being more like two hours.  So it was a busy morning.

An hour into the call, so probably around ten thirty, the power went out.  It is our second day here and suddenly the power is out already.  Not a good start to things.  I had to switch from WiFi calling to the cell network and use my battery to do the last hour of the call, which ran me down a bit.

After the call the house was getting pretty hot as there is no AC left in the bedrooms and no ceiling fans anywhere in the house.  It gets warm fast.

We gave it a little less than an hour and figured that the power was not going to be on anytime soon so we rounded up the kids from the pool where they were keeping themselves cool and we went out for the family’s first walk in the city.  Dominica and the girls have not seen anything outside of the house yet, this is their first foray into the city.

We stepped out of the front door and there was a police line tied, quite literally, to our front door and running across the street.  We looked to the west and clearly we were inside the line, not outside of it, as the street right next to us was covered in the power lines that had come down!  No wonder the power was out.  It was going to be out for a long time.  No need to wait around for it.  We are down for the day.

We walked southeast down to Calle Arsenal and past the Parque Centro to Kelley’s Waffle House which we had found on Google Maps, of all things.  On the way there we found an amazing art gallery with tons of stuff that we just loved.  We plan to go back there soon.  There were several pieces from three different artists that we are really interested in.  It was a nice stop on our walk.

Lunch at Kelley’s was really good.  Liesl got a waffle.  Luciana got pancakes.  Dominica got pancakes and scrambled eggs.  I got huevos rancheros with gallo pinto, the national food of Nicaragua, which was very good (it is a form of rice and beans.)  Liesl ate half of her waffle.  Luciana ended up finishing it for her.  We all enjoyed our food very much.  This was our first restaurant in Nicaragua.

From Kelley’s we walked to the Parque Centro and around it a little bit.  Many of the famous pictures that I have seen of Granada are taken right here in the park.  I recognized nearly everything.

We were thinking about taking a horse drawn carriage tour of the city and right as we were starting to think about it a guy came up offering us a tour for $45 (all tourist stuff is done in American money which, as we have already moved over to Cordobas, is rather annoying) for the four of us for two hours.  We had time and we felt that this would actually be pretty awesome – getting a big, grand overview of our city right now at the beginning of our time here so that we would know more of what there is, where things are and how to explore before we have been here for a while trying to figure it out on our own.

The girls thought that a horse drawn carriage ride sounded pretty good.  So we climbed on up and began our tour.  What a great way to spend the day, it was hot, of course, but being in the open air with the movement made it not so bad.  We were covered so not a lot of direct sunlight hitting us more of the time.  The girls rode facing backwards and Dominica and I sat in the back facing forward.  For a while Luciana went up front with the driver and the tour guide and rode between them which was adorable.  They even offered her the reins to let her drive the horse but she was too timid to try that.  She later said “I don’t even know how to steer a horse!”

The tour started by going nearly right by our house and up to the street with the grocery store that I was on last night and past that to the Poet’s Park which, we discovered, has an awesome playground in it that we hope to bring the girls to tomorrow.

We got to see a lot of the city and had a really nice time.  Since we got the big tour it also took us out east to the lake and down south on the road running along the lake.  It was cooler by the lake and very nice.  There is a park that runs along the lake that has one of the biggest playground complexes that we have ever seen.  Liesl could not stop talking about how the playground just kept going and going.

We went to the marina where they give forty five minute tours of the lake by boat. There is a group of islands, 365 of them specifically, out in the lake.  They are tiny but many have houses on them.  The tour goes to about 65 of them.  Luciana really wanted to do the boat ride but Liesl did not.  Dominica and I both wanted to so our votes won.  Liesl wasn’t so happy.

The boat ride was really neat and interesting.  The same guide came along and we just had someone driving the boat.  The ride went out through the islands and we got to see indigenous people fishing out in the lake which was interesting and some amazing homes built on the tiny islands (think New York’s Thousand Islands here) and we went out to Isla Pirata to the Restaurant Pirata (Pirate Restaurant) where we got drinks and Liesl ordered a bowl of fish soup which was excellent (and had an entire fish in it, head and all!)

It ended up being a very enjoyable day.  We had a great time as a family.  This was the ultimate use of a day without power.

After the boat tour we had no carriage as the horse was not feeling well so a car took us back to the Central Park.  We paid our guide and walked to the bank and loaded up on cash so that we could do spontaneous things like this more easily again and we hit the little market that I went to yesterday morning and we got several bags of groceries and even a really interesting comic book about Nicaragua that seemed like an amazing score.  Then we walked back to the house.

When we arrived home, it was about four thirty, the power was back on!  We were very excited about this.  I got right to writing and did that for several hours.  Thankfully we were eventually able to turn the AC back on!  It was very hot today.

The girls swam again and later on they both spent some time playing Minecraft.  I’ve gotten my older HP laptop, the little ultrabook, set up with Minecraft now so Liesl can play on a laptop nearly any time.

Around eight we all migrated to the bedrooms as it was too hot to be in the house.  Dominica and I watched The Nanny for a while before she went to bed around eleven thirty and I stayed up till around one getting caught up on some writing, including today’s SGL post.

This is it, we just woke up in Nicaragua!  We actually live here now.  We are very excited.

We got to actually see the house this morning!  It was very dark and pouring rain when we got in last night so we got to walk around but we really did not manage to get a good look at the place and we did not have any way to take pictures, so we did that today.  Now everyone can see what it looks like where we are living.  If only they could feel how hot it is.

We were expecting a lot of rain today but the sun was out and everything was dry.  This is supposed to be the rainy season but it is sure not what we have been led to believe from the weather reports that we have been seeing from Texas.  Very hot.  Staggeringly hot.

First thing this morning our maids arrived and cleaned the house.  While they were there the water boy brought us five gallons of water, so now everyone can safely drink although I feel fine from trying the tap water yesterday.  The pool guy came today too.  There are a lot of people who keep this house running.  It is amazing that there are all of these people and that they are just included with the house. There is a propane delivery guy too, because we have a grill pool side.

This morning, on the late side once we knew that we really needed to find some food and had looked at the maps for a while, I ventured out alone to see what I could find around town.  I took it easy and was just supposed to find an ATM and scout out the situation.

I found several places that we had been interested in while looking at the map including the Choco Museum and Mi Museum which are on the same block.  I located the farmacia and the licoria and got to a nice bank with several ATMs inside which worked out perfectly.  I took out 8,000 Cordoba and noticed that the ATMs would dispense American currency as well.

Across the street from the BAC ATMs was a little quick stop so I popped in there.  This is one that we drove past last night and had looked pretty decent.  Relatively modern and well lit at night, really stood out from everything else in the area that is so old and dark at night.

I grabbed what emergency rations as I could getting butter, soymilk (they had no regular milk), one box of mac and cheese, a bag of Cheetos, etc.  Then I walked back to the house carrying the groceries.  This was not too bad but getting a lot of groceries will be very hard.

I worked on writing and posting all day, mostly while sitting at the dining room table.  The girls went for at least three swims today!  They are so excited about having a swimming pool in the middle of the house.  It really is convenient in a way we would never have thought to have tried to do before.

The fountain that is part of the pool, we figured out, comes on automatically on a timer.  So this morning when we got up the fountain was running which provides a lot of nice white noise in the house.  It is pretty cool.

This evening, after it was dark which is pretty early, more like Panama, I walked in the opposite direction and went north to La Union grocery store which our driver last night had recommended to us.  That was a very easy walk and I stocked up on groceries and walked home with them.  It is going to be hard to get any amount of groceries this way, but it will force me to take a trip to the store at least every other day.

On the walk there I discovered the El Carmen Panaria is right next to the house so getting bread will likely prove to be really easy.  I did not stop there tonight, though.

This evening I took a quick walk to the Mary Licoria which is right on our block and grabbed four cans of Tona, the local beer that I am told might be the best option, and a small bottle of seven year aged Flor de Cana, the national rum of Nicaragua.  Then I came home and we set up and watched The Nanny for a while on Dominica’s laptop connected to the television in our bedroom.