Marley-Jester Hoy: Granada, Nicaragua

We arrived in Granada six days ago. What a soulful city with its colonial style houses with pastel colored outsides facing the street and splendid tile and iron work with lush courtyard gardens and fountains on the inside. We are staying at a restored colonial house on a working class street. One of our favorite activities has been sitting in the birdcage window in the mornings and watching a vignette of Granada coming to life and people walking or biking to work or school. I love the scenes of couples or even families mounted on the same bicycle, the person in front sitting sidesaddle on the bar with the person behind intimately close and quietly peddling them both forward. The sound of horses clopping along is a sound that has been here for hundreds of years, and we hear this every day as working people regularly use horses and carts for transport and to do their work.

The house we are renting comes with several turtles and two rescued parrots. Sometimes we find a turtle in the corner of the shower or wandering across the floor. The parrots are a little "bravo" (mean) and one bit Zena on the finger. Needless to say she´s since been more cautious about sticking her hands in their cage.

This is clearly a much poorer country than Costa Rica with street children, run-down taxis, few private cars, and shanty housing just behind the back wall of the house we are renting. How much of this poverty is related to the U.S.'s involvement in the Iran Contra war and related sanctions against Nicaragua? Perhaps more than most Americans know.

(Written a few days later) Nicas were not as friendly as Ticos, but what can you expect after a recent, bloody war and politicians running off with your money all the time? Nonetheless, we felt as safe as we would in any large Latin American city.

Highlights of our trip included a walking tour of the city with Giaconda, a local opera singer who sang us several beautiful songs about Granada in her traditional colonial regalia, one of which was about how Granada, Nicaragua was more beautiful than Granada, Spain. While she was singing, a couple of other tourists happened alon; come to find out they were from Spain but weren't easily offended and gave her an ovation afterward. We even bumped into the same man who used to sell her coconut sweets outside her childhood school, which he was only a block away from. He´d been selling the same confections for thirty years.Other delights: Drinking cold "pinolillo" (a drink of cocoa, toasted corn, cinnamon, and sugar) out of a gourd at the chocolate museum in a beautiful courtyard garden with a fountain. Watching giant puppets play out a story of political and sexual relations between colonists and indigenous Nicaraguans, man and woman in the street after dinner.

And, because of the Lent season, an efigy of Jesus would come through the street holding his cross every morning and night, carried by committed churchgoers and accompanied by a small brass band with a drum, he swaying from side to side with a shiny purple robe. The kids would usually peer through the wrought iron birdcage window at him every morning and got into a routine of "waiting for Jesus" to pass by at night.

We went on a boat tour of las isletas where we saw houses of the rich and then within throwing distance of their mansions, we spent some time with a very poor family on another island who fish out of the lake and sell papayas. They were roasting an iguana for dinner--somehow iguana doesn't count as meat for Lent.

I was also intrigued by these beautiful, short aprons women would wear as they sold their items at the market or cleaned, each with lots of tiered layers of ruffles with trim--perhaps a practical and everyday vestige of the Spanish inspired flamenco dress.