The Jungle

The market is absolutely disgusting, and these photos do justice to all of its gross-out qualities. Once you get close to this area of the market the smell is overwhelming and you just want to hold your breath and power walk through it.

It goes without saying that in the open-air market there's no air conditioning or sneeze-guarded coolers. The most advanced disease-prevention technology used is the fly swatter. It should also go without saying that we don't buy our meat from here.

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Moises, Katie, and Luna

Katie is another volunteer from our English teacher group who lives about 20 minutes from us. She and her fiancé, Moises, are always there for us to babysit Dora when we have visitors or have to be in Managua, and they really go the extra mile--lots of walks, playing fetch, baths when she needs it, and even a blowdry. Now Katie and Moises are getting married and we couldn't be happier for both of them.
One day in November, Katie and Moises brought Luna to Masaya to play with Brown Dog and Dora. This was near the end of their romping and roughhousing, so they were tired enough to sit still (or collapse, in Dora's case) for a picture. Thanks to Kristel for the expert photography.

P.S. Happy Mother's Day to our moms!

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Prepared

About two months ago when I was at the grocery store to buy butter, I noticed that there wasn't any. When I got home I asked at the neighborhood pulpería if they had any. They did, and though it was a different brand than the Parmalat that we're used to, we were getting desperate. I took it home and it was rancid. I'm not sure if all La Perfecta brand butter is this gross or if it had just gone bad, but this was the beginning of the 2009 Butter Drought that has apparently scarred me. I asked in the grocery store where all the butter had gone, and apparently something was wrong with the machine that does the packaging. Fortunately, the shortage just ended, but I've been stockpiling butter as if preparing for a visit from Paula Deen, and I don't really know if we're going to be able to eat all of this butter in the 39 days we have left.

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40

As of today, we are forty days away from June 17, our Close of Service date and the day we come back to the States!  We decided that we'd like to try and do a post a day for these last 40 days, and in particular we want to focus on pictures that we really like but haven't posted before, or on everyday sorts of things that may seem mundane to us now but that we'll want to remember once we're back in the U.S.

This was taken from our hotel's balcony in León.  I love the tile sidewalk and steps that get really slippery when it rains, and I love that the woman selling her bagged refresco drinks is yawning.

We'd love suggestions for pictures to take or things to post about in these last few weeks, so please let us know if there's something we should take pictures of or something about our time here that you'd like to know more about.

We're in the home stretch and the rain just started this week, so I think we'll make it!

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Stanford

A few weeks after our trip to the East coast, I returned to the US for a trip to Palo Alto ("tall stick"), California to visit Stanford Law School. Though we needed to buy sweaters and mittens for our visit to the East, the only things I found myself lacking at Stanford were sunglasses and sunscreen; the weather was beautiful, in the middle 70s to low 80s every day.

If I were choosing a law school based on weather and asthetics, Stanford would have won hands down. As it turned out, though, Stanford would have been my choice even without those bonuses; it was the perfect mix of all the things I loved about the other schools: it is one of the country's best law schools and will certainly open up a lot of opportunities to me, it had beautiful facilities, a really welcoming faculty, and students that seemed genuinely happy to be there; and it just felt right even in the first few hours of my visit. After talking to Paul on the phone one of my last nights there, he finally confessed that he had been rooting for the bike-friendly, dog-friendly, warm weather, close-to-an-Ikea Palo Alto all along, and we came to the surprisingly easy decision that we'll call Palo Alto home for the next few years.

I can't really capture the sense of community or the academic opportunities or the gut feeling that I got there, but I can express the beautiful surroundings, so here goes. Palm Drive is the famous one mile stretch of road lined with palm trees leading into the Stanford campus and the quad:

Here's the Stanford Memorial Church in the quad:

Stanford has fountains all over the campus, and unlike Truman, Stanford both keeps its fountains full and allows people to enjoy them. On the weekday I was there, there were students in swimsuits sunbathing in the fountains and others wading in to cool off between classes. Over the weekend there were tons of families on campus riding bikes or rollerblading or having a picnic, and plenty of people there with their dogs playing frisbee or cooling off in a fountain:

The law school itself is in one U-shaped building just a few minutes' walk from the student union, bookstore, post office, and the heart of campus. The middle section has the law school café with a beautiful patio out in the back and some conference rooms upstairs, the right section has the classrooms, and the left wing has the library and faculty offices.

Here's the view from the second story of the law school building. The skies really were that bright blue.

Here's the campus bookstore:

And this is the old student union:

Stanford has a tall tower, the Hoover Institute, that houses a think tank, library, and visiting faculty offices (Condoleezza Rice apparently had her office there). You can also ride to the top and take pictures, so I did. Here's the view to the north with the San Francisco Bay in the background:

And here's the view to the south of the law school building and the mountains back behind:

After the three days of admitted students events, I was sold. To make the trip even better, our friends Keith and Erin made the trip up from San Diego to meet me, catch up, and explore Palo Alto and San Francisco. Though the 7-1/2 hour trip is enough of a trek by itself, Keith ane Erin deserve even more credit for coming considering that they made the trip with their dog, survived the LA traffic, and spent seemingly endless hours in Wal-Mart thanks to a tire blowout. They finally arrived, and we stayed up late catching up. They (understandably) spent the next morning sleeping in while I finished the admitted students weekend by having breakfast with a lot of my future classmates and observing a class. That afternoon, Keith, Erin, and I reunited and went into San Francisco to Fisherman's Wharf and took a boat ride around the bay. We went under the Golden Gate bridge:

Here are Keith and Erin with the Golden Gate Bridge behind them:

And we went around the island of Alcatraz:

One of my favorite parts of the day were the sea lions that camp out on the docks of Pier 39. They were pretty noisy, a little smelly, and I'm sure Dora would have lumped them into the monkey family, but I thought they were pretty cute.

More than a year after starting the law school process and beginning to think about post-Peace Corps plans, it's a great relief to know where I'll be studying and where we'll be living. After having no control over where we did our Peace Corps service, it's quite the change to have had full control over where we'll be living next, and to have picked a place that's so easy to be exited about. Just today Paul found a list of 103 things to do in San Francisco; I've got #56 covered, so only 102 to go!

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