Day 5

The past few days have been filled with visiting friends, and yet I still have not seen my godson or anyone at the villa! That is very, very strange, since usually I go out there the first minute I can. I´m not sure why it´s been that way, but I guess I have just been keeping busy with friends. I´m going out there today though. It is a little difficult to get out there, since it´s farther than the average taxi wants to take someone, plus I don´t really know the proper way to tell a taxi driver where it is, so I´m going to call a taxi driver friend that I´ve made, and just tell him that I will tell him when to turn, because that´s all I know!

Anywho, my last few days are kind of blurring together, but I have gotten to visit a lot with Liza, Karla, and Dina (some friends from the church here), and I´ve gotten to eat some good, authentic food. The strange thing is, at times I have actually just been craving to talk with people in English. Dina speaks English really well (she lived in the States for two years working as a nanny), but when we are all together, we speak Spanish, of course, so that everyone can understand. The exciting thing is, my Spanish has definitely gotten better since the last time I was here, and I can understand more and more conversations, even when people are speaking at normal speed! It has been really nice to go out to eat with Dina and Karla and be able to all speak in Spanish, like normal friends, and actually be able to laugh with them and get all their jokes.

However, like I said, I was missing gringos a bit, I guess. My friend Toney had a group come in two nights ago and stay at the hotel where I´m staying. I heard them come in around midnight, and I was super annoyed at their loud-gringo-ness. They are a bunch of high school kids excited about traveling and and their trip, so I shouldn´t have been annoyed, but I was, because I was trying to sleep. So, in the morning, I got to meet them, and they are really great people. They are a bit odd for a youth group, though. More... ¨free¨than mine ever was. For instance, the boys in the youth group talked all morning (with the youth director, who is a lady probably in her 40s) about how they were going to walk around in their speedos all week at the ranchos, and once we were at the ranchos, the youth director walked around in one of those strapless dress-like cover-ups to go to the shower, and told everyone how she was not wearing undergarments. Strange! Anyway, I had breakfast with them and then walked around town with them, helping Luis (tour guide and English teacher) give a tour of the city. Then, when they were off to Jiquilillo, I decided to jump in the truck with them. It is a long ride (apparently only 40 minutes, but felt like two hours) to sit in the back of a truck on top of cement bags, piled in with 15 other gringos and all their luggage! Anyway, it was great to see what Toney has going on there. He has two great big ranchos with sleeping quarters and then a kitchen and dining area. It is beautiful and so natural out there, and a one-minute walk to the beach! Gorgeous. Except that when it was time for me to come ¨home¨, I realized that Gerry´s wife (who does the cooking here) was not coming back, but rather spending the night there to get up and cook this morning. I didn´t bring anything with me to spend the night, so I was really set on getting back to town, especially because I had dinner plans with Karla and Dina. So, Gerry´s driver was coming back to town and I rode with him. I was a little hesitant, because I didn´t know this guy, and it is a long, dark drive back to Chinandega. There were literally several times when he slowed down that I was afraid he was going to stop all together and drag me off somewhere and, well, kill me. However, he was actually a really nice man (which I figured, if Gerry trusts him enough to work with him daily, he must be okay), and we talked the whole way. He is a former policeman, and he told me all about his two marriages and why they both failed. In essence, giving me marriage advice. It was pretty funny.

When I got back to the hotel, I had about two minutes to get ready before Karla and Dina came to pick me up. They had promised me a good, home-cooked meal with all of my favorites: gallo pinto, maduros, queso frito, carne asada, etc... Turns out they both had extremely busy days, with no time to cook, so they had a surprise for me. We went ¨out¨to eat to a home restaurant. A lot of people make ¨restaurants¨out of their homes, and that is where we went. You go up to the front of their house to order, still on the street, and then you go sit in their front room, usually a sitting room, to eat. It´s interesting, and actually really cute. I had a delicoius meal with everything I was hoping for, including a cacao fresco. These places are funny, because since they aren´t real restaurants, they don´t have names. You just have to know where they are.

While we were walking there, I was telling Dina and Karla how cute the guy is that works at the hotel. His name is Jose Luis (shocking, I know), and he works the 4-midnight shift at the hotel (it´s not creepy-stalkery that I know that; I´ve just been there long enough that I know), and he is probably the cutest Nicaraguan I have ever seen. He dresses nicely, and he is very friendly and polite. His only downside I can see is that he smokes. And he doesn´t speak English, which I could learn to overlook. He actually went to school (college) with Dina for a while, so she thought it was so funny that I thought this, so she talked about setting me up with him and talking to him when we got back to find out more about what he´s like now (it had been two and a half years since they had seen each other, since Dina was in the US). Anyway, the whole thing just made me laugh, because we were really talking just like old friends, and it seemed like we were in the States, talking about guys. As it turns out, he has a girlfriend, but hey... at least we tried. :)

Which brings me to today... I slept in late (there was an awesome but LOUD thunderstorm that kept me up a lot at night. It thundered literally for a half hour straight. It didn´t just thunder at the lightning. It was very strange) and then came here. From here, I´m planning on going to the Amigos for Christ house to visit, and hopefully see if anybody is heading to the Villa, so I can catch a ride. Otherwise, I´ll call my taxista friend.

Over the last five days, I feel like I´ve really gotten a glimpse of what it would be like if I lived here (well, except for the living-in-a-hotel thing, and the I-don´t-have-a-job-and-I-just-do-what-I-want-all-day thing), and it is a pretty neat life...