Yumm Conchas

3 Odd things that happened in my life this week:
1. A new girl started working at the Aldea this week, she´s 16 and has a 2 year old son (I´m not judging, it´s pretty standard here). In order to quiet one of the kids down she shoved her breast in his face, trying to get him to breast feed off her. Now, I´m not a mother so I don´t know if that´s standard or not, which is why I´m trying to be impartial and putting it under "odd" things instead of "ewww" things.
2. I couldn´t teach one of my english classes on Wednesday because the kids literally laughed at me for the whole thirty minutes when I said it´s okay for a man and a man, or woman and woman to like each other. I mean hysterical, tears rolling down your cheeks laughing, as if I told them it´s okay for a platapus and a 80 year old woman to be in love. They slapped each other saying "she says it´s normal HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH". This I´m putting under "odd/disturbing" because we´re not just talking about a difference of opinion, whether it´s right or wrong, we´re talking about me explaining something that for them, might as well happen on another planet.
3. An old, drunk, shoeless man called me a whore and tried to beat me up this afternoon. This is not under "scary" or "dangerous" because while his punches were quite accurate to do quite a bit of damage to my face, he was three meters away from me and ended up punching "me" so hard he fell down. Not ironically he was outside of a store that sells nothing other than Caballito, the Nicaraguan version of moonshine, that makes Dubra look like Grey Goose.


So maybe it wasn´t the most interesting week but I´ll live. Jake came last week and it was AMAZING to have him here! I feel the need to document a really pathetic hour of my life right here, just for kicks . I was nervous I wouldn´t get to the airport on time, so I ended up getting there a lot earlier than Jake´s flight. The airport in Managua isn´t very big, and all the chairs are right outside of the gate where people line up to go inside the terminal for their flights. So naturally I decided to sit there and people watch for a little while, but eventually I realized that everyone leaving Nicaragua at this hour of the day was, for some reason, American (or Canadian, or British, or non-Nicaraguan), tan or sunburnt and happy, but looking excited to get home. This led me from that simple curious feeling that one has while people watching, to a rather disturbing feeling of panic, in which I wanted to throw myself at them and say "TAKE ME WITH YOU!!!". This feeling really made no sense as my brother was due to arrive in an hour, but I´m fairly certain that I´ve never looked more like a lost puppy in my lifetime. It´s not that I´m unhappy here, things are up and down and I´m really happy here right now...it´s just being at the airport I started thinking about when I would leave (via that airport obviously) and what it would be like to come home and see everyone, and I got really anxious and excited for that. Anyway, that was definitely the most pathetic feeling moment I´ve had while here...and now you know.

Once Jake´s flight came in my lost puppy moment was over and I was so excited to have him there! We went to Leon, I wanted to spend at least a day there introducing him to my family and the places that I work. He came to Leon at a great time, because the first full day he was there, there was this HUGE Holy Week procession going on. Apparently it started at 6 in the morning at one church, and it went around the city for hours, in and out of other churches, until it ended at 11 that night. It was beautiful to see, we saw it in the afternoon and at night when everything was lit up. My favorite part of the day were these sawdust art pieces that people were making on this one road during the day. I have some pictures up of them but they were beautifulll, so vibrant and incredible. It was a big square of sawdust and the people used bright pigments to make different religious drawings...and at the very end of the night the Jesus float in the procession trampled all of them. Crazy. We went to the beach the next day (everyone had been telling me that EVERYONE goes to the beach during Holy Week, but forgot to mention that everyone goes during the last three days, not the first three...therefor it was pretty empty). We swam a little, and Jake had his first taste of THE Nicaraguan Rum, Flor de Caña. He also had his first taste of Conchas (raw oyster/shellfish type things), and therefor that night had his first taste of what I like to call the Nicaraguan Full Body Flush. Due to rather unfortunate timing of this Nicaraguan spa treatment, we ended up just coming to Jinotepe and hanging out for a few days, instead of the "Spring Break" debauchery we had planned. It ended up being a blessing, for me at least, because the last two days we went to a reserve and a ranch that we wouldn´t have ended up seeing. I had heard of the ranch before, because my friend Dean was in a conservation placement there, but had never been and it´s AMAZING. So amazing I´m going to take time at the end of my trip here and stay there for a week, just to soak in all the awesomeness. The guy who owns it, Umberto, is incredible...so warm and friendly. You would never guess that many years ago he came back from going to school in the States, bought a bunch of guns (including AK47´s), and fought for this farm that the Sandinistas had taken from him. Obviously he won the fight, and "kicked some ass" in his words. It´s an amazing story, and even more incredible how much passion him and his family have for the land. Jake and I walked and walked and probably didn´t see even a little piece of the land he has but it was so nice to be out of the city and in nature. So that was his trip...very tranquilo but I was just psyched to be with my brother (awww) and also speaking english was pretty nice.

So tomorrow I´m off to Costa Rica. My visa expires in about...oh 3 days, so I´m just going to jump across the border and jump back (I´ve heard I´m really "Nicaraguan" now because I don´t want to go to Costa Rica, I´ve mentioned this before but there are some hard feelings between the two countries, but mostly it´s just because Costa Rica is EXPENSIVE!). ¡Hasta luego!

PS Just for general knowledge, apparently when I "withdrew" from UCONN for this semester, I withdrew. So they disactivated my email account, so...if I don´t respond don´t take it personally