Woke-up today and was almost convinced I was sick. Extremely congested and with a bad soar throat. My Nicaraguan mother knocks on the door with a hot cup of chamomile tea at 5am because she hears me coughing. Just the gesture makes me forget about the possibility of being ill for a day. I sleep for another 3 hours and wake up just as congested as before but my throat feeling a bit better - I knew in an hour or two I would be fine.
Breakfast was the same as yesterday and still equally as interesting. A kind-of ground-up granola that actually appears to be a jar full of dirt with some raisons and peanuts. With milk and sugar and some bananas cut in its good enough to get me going in the morning.
My goal today was to visit two agencies headquarters and to do so by walking. Now this seems like a simple task, if there is no time constraint, but directions in Nicaragua are unlike anywhere else. There are no street names; commonly no house numbers, and walking and taxi directions are usually different. Directions will normally be told like this: walk arriba (up), which here means east (for the sun rising), until you hit the main road; make a right and walk until you find the Mercado Union; then turn left and walk to the Lenin Fonseca (this you don’t discover is actually a hospital until you get there), then 5 blocks al lago (to the lake, or north only in Managua) and 75 meters abajo (down, but here west). Once you finally get to the small neighborhood where your destination is you cannot tell what consists of a single block because there are small side roads in between some of the curvy main roads. In my case, for my second location you finally find the place after the fourth person you ask on the block tells you that he once saw a gringo (Yankee) enter the gate of the house he points at; considering I saw not one other person who looked at all like a foreigner during my entire two hours of walking through this part of the city I figured it was a safe bet to bang on the door.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
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So as I'm reading your blog, I am also watching Jeopardy, the final jeopardy question was "What country in the Western Hemisphere's largest lake is named after the country and second largest lake is named after the capital?" Well.... its Nicaragua and Managua. Crazy!
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