How to Not Get Run Over By a Horse

Okay so looking back over the cheesy-ness of my last post, I realize why everyone thought I was going to come home having smuggled an orphanage in my suitcase...Anyways..

Top 10 Things I´ve Learned So Far in Nicaragua
1. Washing your own clothes is HARD. In the past hour I embarked on the adventure of "washing by hand" with a bar of Dove body soap and a stone ridged surface, and let me tell you, I have a whole new respect for washing machines. I realized I have absolutely no idea how to wash clothes, and I´m sure my clothes would tell you right now that they are not, in fact, clean. If nothing else, the amount of soap still caked on them while they´re drying on the clothesline will give everyone else the dove scented illusion that I´m not a slob...I´m just glad I escaped the rainy season-that could be a sudsy disaster.
2. People can still get colds in Nicaragua. Two people in the house had colds this week-luckily I escaped. Somehow that amazes me, I thought colds were reserved for miserable times where the ground is grey and slushy and snow got into your clogs so your socks are soaked.
3. People can still get COLD in Nicaragua. Brrrr. Okay I´m sitting here in shorts and a t-shirt but I swear, it can get chilly to mildly brisk out here. Especially at night. Althought I keep being warned that when I move to Leon I´m going to shrivel up and burnnnn.
4. There are so many festivals here that they have to reserve dates for them, so that two don´t occur on the same date and everyone can attend all of them. And everyone does.
5. I´m mildly addicted to quesidallas con pollo. Knowing my eating habits I´ll probably eat them every meal for two weeks and then never eat a quesiadilla again.
6. I love countries where people kiss on the cheek every time they meet/see one another. It´s awesome, I just want to walk around calling everyone "Mi amor" and make them all friendship bracelets.
7. People aren´t always staying at you because you´re the only blonde within a 10 mile radius of the town, sometimes it´s just because your fly is unzipped. Oh how embarassing.
8. To insult a Nicaraguan, call them "Tica" (it´s what Costa Ricans call themselves), to insult a Costa Rican, call them "Nica" (what Nicaraguans call themselves). Hopefully someone is as amused as I am that these rivaling countries have rhyming nicknames.
9. Who needs paper advertisements or festival invitations or obituaries when you have a car with a huge megaphone on top that will drive through town and shout all of the above about 10 times a day.
10. Roosters don´t crow only at dawn. Apparently that´s a myth. Roosters crow from about 1am on...and on and on and on and on.


And now, the eagerly anticipated answering of How to Not Get Run Over By a Horse:

This Sunday there was a horse parade in the town over, Diriamba. Another festival?? Shocking, I know. We got there about an hour after the parade was supposed to start, and of course it would not start for another hour and a half ("Nica time" they call it, and I like it because I´ll probably never be late for anything while I´m here). At first I didn´t see why it was a horse parade, because there were no horses, only people in cowboy hats walking around drinking beer. Once the parade started, whoah. The only float they had was sponsored by one of the two beer companies, Tona, and had a bunch of girls dancing in cowboy outfits. Other than that it was horses...tons and tons of horses. Rowdy horses. Crazy horses. Bumper horses. These horses would prance and dance and swing around and trot into the crowd and bump into each other and walk backwards and walk sideways and anything you could imagine. I don´t know how many times I would turn from talking to someone and BAM nose to nose with a horse, actually most of the time it was nose to ribcage or nose to butt. It. was. insane. Added to the fun of playing mosh pit with horses, to walk anywhere you had to walk withhh the horse parade. Not on the side, but dodging in and out of all the prancing dancing looney horses. Cabaillos en espanol. So how do you avoid getting run over by a horse? It´s not easy and I´m sure many broken foots will testify to that. You can literally push it out of the way, or throw someone else in the way of it, or if you´re agile enough you can zip between them. It was a pretty exciting adventure...until How Not to Get Run Over By a Horse was replaced by How Not to Get Pick-Pocketed. The total losses of the group I was with was one wallet, one camera, and one phone. At one point we were just standing by the side of the road watching the parade when a tornado of fists and bodies struck. Everyone was pushing and falling and after 30 seconds when it calmed down, cameras and phones were gone and everyone blamed everyone else when the guy who took it probably slipped away. Bummer. I´m glad my purse was wedged into my armpit. Safe.