Nov 14th, 2007 by WanderingDawn |
So it may seem that Sean and I have been missing for a while. Internet access has been harder to find in the last week or so.
We left San Juan del Sur in Nicaragua last Wednesday. I wanted to take a moment to try to sum up Nicaragua. How do you describe a country? By the colors? The people? The food? The climate? I am not sure this is possible, but I will do my best. Nicaragua was fantastic. I would definitely recommend it as a travel destination. Fly into Managua and then get out of there, fast. It is not a place you would want to hang out in. Otherwise, everywhere we went, we were met by smiling faces, helpful people, beautiful scenery, and good food. I think Nicaragua got a bad rap after everything happened there in the 80’s, but there is no strife there now.
There is so much to do there, and your dollar will go far. There is not a lot of English spoken (in comparison to a country like Costa Rica for instance) so a knowledge of basic Spanish was helpful. BUT Nicas speak a kind of slang Spanish….they drop the “s” off words, and sometime skip whole words or parts of words. For example “porfa” would be “por favor” or please. This little variance in the language drove me crazy for days until a Canadian gentleman explained it to me. The further south we went, the clearer the Spanish got.
I told Sean I found it interesting because Nicaraguans are always cleaning. They wash down their stoops, mop floors constantly, and wash the buses and taxis. Yet they throw garbage on the streets as they are walking, throw items out of bus windows, leaving litter everywhere on the sides of the roads. The bus depot in Masaya was more like a landfill. It was like they were trying so hard to be clean, but the fundamental elements of cleanliness were not there.
So to me Nicaragua is a country of contradictions….extreme poverty and litter, with beautiful scenery and beautiful people. I don’t know if this is a fair interpretation of the country, but that is the best way I can sum it up. Nicaragua was a country I was sad to leave.
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