Nicaragua trip, day one

This is going to be a bit boring, but I'm writing it up for the record, and because it was interesting to us!

Like a lot of Americans in Costa Rica, we are on 3 month tourist visas, so every 90 days we are supposed to leave Costa Rica for at least 72 hours. There are apparently ways to just go up to the border, pay someone off (we hear 20 bucks will do it), and save yourself the trouble and expense of three days away, but like a lot of people who haven't done it before, we were happy to turn our visa run into a little vacation to Granada, Nicaragua, the oldest (European) city in the Americas and supposedly one of the prettiest. And it was a good trip overall. As usual, the pictures we take are a random lot.

Before we left, Simone did some gymnastics in her room...

...and Gabriel went to the skatepark, and Nadia and I did our usual this and that--but we also spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out where to stay in Granada. We were trying to decide between a "homestay" and a hotel. We thought a homestay could be a nice way to get beyond the tourist experience and also to speak a bit more Spanish. Homestays are also pretty inexpensive; for all four of us, a homestay in Granada costs $48 total per night, all meals included. The other option was staying at a hotel. The main advantage of a hotel was that our kids wanted it, and after having brought them against their will for a year away from their home and their friends, we do try to take their desires into account.

Nevertheless, we ended up reserving a homestay, and though Simone was a bit worried when the community center that organizes homestays couldn't find us a family without a dog, the kids accepted our decision pretty gracefully.

On Thursday, we hit the road. It was a pretty drive, through classic Guanacastecan (?) cowboy country, past Costa Rica's second city, Liberia, and then up on a nearly deserted road to the crossing. At the border, a muddy stretch of road dominated by long lines of tractor trailer trucks, we parked our car at the house of a guy named Jesus, who lives right next to the crossing (we saw our friends' car parked there too!). Then we stopped at the restaurant for a bathroom and soda break:

Then we had about 45 minutes of showing our passports, filling out forms, walking on the muddy road, showing our passports, fending off guides and touts, walking on more mud, showing our passports, paying a city tax, showing our passports, filling out another form, paying the $48 entry fee, walking through mud, showing our passports, finding a taxi, and paying off the guide and taxi tout we hadn't been able to shake and who had actually been somewhat useful.

The taxi driver, Erwing, drove us fast through the very flat countryside, which was beautiful, and much like Guanacaste: fields and cows. The human stuff was a bit poorer (many fewer private cars, for one thing) and a bit more colorful than Costa Rica--but the big differences were the lake and volcanos and the windmills:

We drove past Rivas, a slightly smaller city that is remembered largely for the two battles that took place there in the 1850s, the first one that led to American Filibuster William Walker's taking over the country, and the second one, when Costa Rican forces defeated Walker's forces, that led to Walker's loss of power. The city was also, Erwing told us, where an important treaty between the Spanish and the Indians was signed in the 1500s.

As we approached Granada we saw the city's impressive volcano, Mombacho whose blown top supposedly created the many islands in the lake near the city:

We soon found ourselves at the community center that had arranged our homestay. Juan Carlos showed us some local kids were getting English lessons in the front room, and we met a guy from Europe who was volunteering at the center this year, and then the mother and daughter from the homestay family came by and we walked with them the five minutes to their house.

At the house we were greeted by a loudly barking little dog (Simone leapt up into Nadia's arms) and a few very polite and friendly children, one of whom, Milton, was reading the same Harry POtter book as Simone. The house itself was long and narrow--pretty much one room wide. It was, surprisingly to me, full of stuff. I didn't expect a Nicaraguan house to be even more cluttered than ours! The rooms were small and dark, and full of stuff--family photos, a TV, clothes, etc. It seemed clear that we were displacing some family members--who, it wasn't clear. Gabriel asked to use the bathroom and the mother showed him, a little apologetically, to a little booth in the hallway. She told me that the next night we could have the room they normally gave guests, a larger room with a private bath, but the first night there were some other people staying in that room.

The house was seemed pretty small for their family of 9 and our family of 4 and the two other guests, and with the little dog yapping nonstop Simone was in Nadia's arms the whole time, but it was all pretty friendly, and we were determined to make the best of it.

We left our stuff in our rooms and set out on foot for the center of the city. The city got more and more clean and fancy as we went. It looked something like this, only with more people on the sidewalks (I don't know how Nadia got this shot with no ife in it but the horse-drawn carriage coming up the street):

When we got to the city's main square, we stopped in a cafe for a snack, and found that those plain and somewhat forbidding doorways can lead to surprisingly spacious and open houses with garden courtyards, fountains, and shady arcades. Refreshed, we went out to the main square and immediately bumped into a bunch of friends from Nosara--the same ones whose car we had seen at the border. They had gotten a hotel room, and their kids were very excited about how luxurious it was, how nice the pool was, etc. They wanted to show us, and our kids wanted to see, so we followed them into another interior of pillared courtyards, tiled staircases, dark wood furniture and leafy plants. We told the kids we could come back for a swim later. They could have jumped in right away:

Our friends had just had a big meal, but we were ready for dinner, so we split up and said we'd meet later. As soon as we left, Gabriel and Simone started talking about how incredibly jealous they were that Nadav and Roy and Tara got to stay in a nice hotel, while we had to stay in a dirty cramped house with a yapping dog and, for thirteen people, a single bathroom with, Gabriel said, a broken toilet that didn't flush. We sympathized, but said we'd stay in lots of nice hotels later on. We were going to have a nice family experience and speak some Spanish, darn it.

For dinner we headed to a restaurant the hotel had recommended, called "Imagine," which turned out to have walls covered with paintings and photos of John Lennon and a menu with entrees ranging from $20 to $40. So we headed across the street to a beautiful restaurant with more normal prices and what turned out to be excellent food. They also had hammocks. 

After dinner, we walked around the city. There were a lot of foreigners, and a lot of fairly fancy houses and hotels. The inequality was pretty stark. People were quite friendly, and no one ever made us feel uncomfortable, but we felt uncomfortable anyway (story of our life here). It struck me that the big beautiful Colonial-style houses in Granada--palaces, really--had been built by what must have been a very rich elite, and that the foreigners who were moving in, well-meaning as they were, were essentially taking the place of the elite.  I thought, Wow, if I had been a Nicaraguan a hundred years ago I would have been a socialist. Then I thought, Well, I'm basically a socialist already, so... And of course I thought, as I often do, that our position as expats in Nosara is basically that of colonizers...

All of this perhaps should have made us all the more happy to be going back to a typical (even well above average) Nicaraguan family house. By the time we got back to the main square, however, where we intended to get a taxi back to our homestay, we couldn't go through with it. Instead, I went in and got a hotel room and Nadia took a taxi back to the homestay by herself to make our apologies and get our stuff. 

So we gave up on living with real Nicaraguans, and accepted our role as colonizing gringos who stay in luxury with our own kind.  Perhaps only spoiled Americans could feel like a yearlong vacation was a lesson in accepting difficult realities, but still, this was yet another ironic lesson in humility.  There are levels and levels and levels...

The next post--about days two and three of our trip--will be mostly pictures.