Mother's Day

To have been posted May 30, 2009

May 30th is Mother’s Day in Nicaragua, one of the biggest holidays of the year. School is canceled the Friday before, and the Thursday before is a big assembly for all the moms to come and be celebrated. Here’s one of my school’s many murals dedicated to mothers:

Last weekend we finally traveled back to Carazo to visit our Nicaraguan moms and catch up with them one last time. It really didn’t feel like more than two years ago that we first arrived at their houses for training and started our service here, and we were shocked to see how much our host siblings had grown.  Here were Williamcito and Claudia in June 2007:

And here they are now with some bubbles we gave them:

Here’s Paul’s host sister Alejandra two years ago:

And here she is with Paul now:

Happy Mother’s Day to our Nica moms… we really do appreciate all the work they did for us, all the patience they had for us, and everything they taught us.  We will miss them a lot!

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A limerick

We know we’ve neglected our blog and our “40 posts in 40 days” commitment, but we think it’s been justified… we’ve had a pretty crazy week. Here’s what happened:

This week gave us a crazy story to tell
when our landlady said, “Here no more you can dwell!”
She kicked us to the street
in a manner not very discreet
So we said, “With 16 days left, that’s just swell.”

But this story has a happy end.
Our friends came to help and us they did defend.
We found a new house
containing not even one mouse
And here we’ll be until home the plane us does send.

The story is much more complicated, but I think the limerick does it justice. If you want to hear more, the prose version of the events is free, but the epic poem and iambic pentameter versions come at an extra charge.

Alo, last week this blog had is 10,000th visitor! Thanks so much for reading, and we promise we’ll catch up with our neglected posts soon.

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Tacos La Salle

Another dining option for those days when we don't have any dinner ideas, are too tired to cook, or are too poor to order pizza is tacos. There's this adorable little taco truck motorcycle in the central park that makes delicious chicken tacos for C$15 (75 cents) each. They're not the typical hard shell tacos that we were used to, but they're pretty yummy.

When I first discovered Tacos La Salle I would ask first if they had tacos, and then if there was chicken. I eventually figured out that they don't sell anything other than chicken tacos, so now I just ask for "two." They also know me well enough to leave off the ketchup and crema from our tacos.

The chicken is sort of sweet, and while I like to eat my tacos with some chile (a mix of onions and vinegar) and cabbage; Holly prefers to eat hers plain.

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20 - Palí

We could do most of our grocery shopping in the market... it's a little bit cheaper and the produce is a little bit fresher, but it's also an inconvenience and disgusting. Instead, we go to Palí, the Wal-Mart-owned grocery store that is found in most cities throughout Nicaragua. As far as grocery stores go, it's pretty shabby, but it keeps us supplied with the staples most of the time.

Here is the refrigerated vegetables section. I haven't really been adventurous enough to try most of the veggies in here. I can recognize about half of them, but sometimes when you think it looks familiar it turns out to be flavorless chilote:

Once you pick out your vegetables, you have to take them to the one scale at the back of the store to be weighed. Forgetting to weigh your vegetables before you check out is the biggest faux pas you can possibly make at the grocery store. Yet, I try to put it off because most of my fellow shoppers have no sense of line-making or first-come-first-serve, so you have to fight to get your vegetables weighed along with anyone buying rice, sugar, or beans in bulk. This was a slow day at Palí, but trust me, it can get pretty heated.

Most of the food in Palí I just pass by without noticing. There's no way that we're ever going to be desperate enough to buy sardines, spicy vienna sausages, or whatever other abundance of canned meats are deemed worthy of an entire aisle:

Here's a cross-shot of the store. Note the weird prices: I'm convinced that it's a scam because the cashiers don't have exact change to give you so you end up losing 3 or 4 cents every time that you check out. If you buy that 3-liter of Pepsi for C$26.30 and pay with with C$27 you're lucky to get C$0.50 back, but best case scenario is that you lose out on C$0.20 (Palí accepts cash only, by the way). Also, since there's no better place to say it, I'll point out that you have to pay for your plastic bags. There is absolutely nothing "green" about this--it's just the store being super cheap.

About a quarter of the small store is devoted to food. Half is cleaning supplies and toiletries (which is really just a subset of cleaning supplies) and the remaining quarter is rum:

You might imagine that taking pictures in a grocery store was exceedingly awkward. It was, but it was worth it for posterity.

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Showtime: The Small Screen

Though we love our visits to the movie theater, it's not convenient for frequent visits and is too expensive.  That doesn't mean, though, that no one here gets to see the latest movies.  Though there are no Blockbusters or Netflix, there are pirated movies for sale on nearly every street corner, either in wooden display stands or laid out on the sidewalk.

It's important to ask about the quality of the movie and if it's dubbed or subtitled.  The very newest movies are always really bad quality, like handheld camcorders in movie theaters where you can hear people coughing or laughing and someone's head covers part of the screen.  I think that out of this picture, Angels & Demons is in that phase.  Of similar quality are the combo DVDs that might contain three or four movies.  Popular combos are Steven Segal movies, the Harry Potter movies, or other animated children's movies.  Though they're really fuzzy and often hard to hear, four movies in one is a pretty good deal.

After a movie's been out for a while, its quality increases to like an award show preview so every once in a while a notice will come up on the screen saying, "For Awards Consideration Purposes Only."  These pictures are good quality, but I don't understand how non-English speakers can watch them: the subtitles are always comically bad and often make no sense at all.

The jackpot is when it's a DVD "con menú" and sometimes they even include the special features and deleted scenes.  Most movie salespeople are pretty honest when you ask about the quality, and many even have portable DVD players so that you can preview a movie before you buy (movies always cost C$20, or $1).

The movie sellers also keep big stacks of movies that they'll hand to you to browse through, or they'll hand us things they think we might like.  Normally, their guesses are way off and they try to convince us to buy the newest Bratz movie or Anime Combo 2 en 1 or something like that. 

We've seen most of these movies and many volunteers trade movies when they come across a good one ("good" in terms of cinematic value and/or good video quality):

Obviously, we would never condone the purchase or viewing of pirated films.  We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

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