Introducing: Dora

As you may have noticed, we've been a little less frequent in our blog posts the last month or so. We are a lot busier with school and classes, we're less motivated to do anything that requires movement because of the heat, but there is one overwhelming reason that we've neglected our blog duties. Here are a few hints: she weighs five pounds, loves to eat cheese, and hates to get a bath; her name is Dora.

Paul has been wanting a dog for a really long time, and I (admittedly) was the one dragging my feet. Now we've decided that we were both right: I was right that a puppy is a lot of work and requires a lot of middle-of-the-night potty breaks, but Paul was right that having a puppy is a lot of fun and provides a lot of entertainment and comedy for us. Without further ado, some adorable puppy pictures:

This is Dora the second time we met her, when she was 30 days old. We became friends with a lady in Masaya who sells apples and has a lot of dogs, and she told us about a litter of puppies that one of her friends had. We're pretty sure Dora's a mix with a lot of Cocker Spaniel.
This is Dora on the first night that we brought her home, when she was six weeks old. We struggled a lot with a good name for her, but eventually decided on Dora after Dora la Exploradora. Our surprisingly large segment of friends that are six-year-old girls loves to watch Dora the Explorer, and slowly but surely Dora is living true to her name. Dora is pretty spoiled with her toys. She just learned to fetch and is pretty good at entertaining herself by squeaking her own toys.

Dora really doesn't like getting baths, but she's very forgiving; as soon as she's out of the tub, she's always more than willing to run, play, and try to roll in any dirt she can find.
Dora's ears are constantly growing and they always flop around when she runs.She also gets new manchas (spots) all the time. She started with a few on her feet, then some on her nose, and now she's getting some on her back.Gracias a Dios, Dora's doing really well with housebreaking. During the day we just leave the door out to our patio open, and she runs out and does her business when she needs to. In the middle of the day, though, the patio is really hot, so Dora hates having to be outside in the sun.

Overall, Dora's a pretty happy, tranquila puppy. Like it or not, expect lots of Dora posts and pictures in the future! We hope everyone had a happy Easter!

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Festival of St. Lazarus

This coming week is Semana Santa (Holy Week) in Nicaragua and we expect celebrations and fireworks in abundance (but we have the whole week off of school, so we can’t complain). People have already been celebrating a little bit on the weekends to get ready. For example, last weekend was the festival of St. Lazarus, a carnival complete all of the usual carnival trappings--scary clowns, rigged games, a Ferris wheel, cotton candy, and dogs. Oh, dogs aren’t normally there? Well, I think you’ll agree that they made a nice addition. Everyone came to the carnival, which took place at the church just a few blocks away, with their dogs all dressed up in lots of funny costumes. No one can really explain what Lazarus has to do with dogs in clown costumes, so we can safely assume that it doesn’t have anything to do with him.

The afforementioned scary clown. Holly and I were wondering how much money someone would have to pay us to ride this Ferris wheel. We never came up with a number high enough.In case you don't have a puppy to bring to the festival but still really want to fit in, this woman is selling her basket-full of puppies so no one will have to be left out.

These three dogs got the pleasure of wearing people clothes for the day.

This poor dog in the clown costume even had some makeup on.

The bows on this dog's ears were cute but we're not sure we want to know how they were attached.
This is how most people in Masaya get around. One person pedals and the other sits on the frame. Holly and I have been practicing for months and still haven't gotten it but this dog seems to have mastered it with undeniable style and pizzaz.

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Presidential Visit

All around the city there have been signs of something big happening. First, it was the police--a police officer was standing on every single street corner in our neighborhood and Holly spotted a sniper standing on the roof of the Enitel building in the park. Then we passed a truck with a big sign saying something about Monimbó (our neighborhood) and there seemed to be an unusually high amount of chatter involving La Chamuca (the not-so-nice nickname for Mrs. Ortega). Finally, at our English classes tonight we found out what's happening--Daniel Ortega is in our neighborhood tonight. Right this second he's at a church about 3 blocks away and he's supposed to pass right by our house on his way out of town. We'll update later if we can get a picture.

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A Walk in the Cloud Forest

Last weekend we finally made a trip to Volcán Mombacho near Granada. I’d been trying to get Holly to go with me for months and an opportunity came up for us to go with an English class from Masaya. Since we weren’t planning the trip we didn’t really do much research about it before we went but once we got there we realized that it was a really long hike before the hike.

We started at the base of the volcano… about 320 meters.

About an hour into the hike there was a grouping of houses and we thought, “Oh, good. We’re here. Let’s start the hike.” Not even close.This is just one of the many hills that left all of us a little winded.

The winding mountain road provided countless opportunities to hope that just around the next corner we would be at the Visitor's Center where the trails started. Around one such corner we came to see this scene below and thought that there wouldn’t be any way we would have to make it up into the clouds. It’s so steep! It was at about this point that a converted military truck passed by packed with gringos smiling and waving. It also started sprinkling at about this point, and we could see steam rising off our foreheads. We were pretty jealous of the direct bus transportation, but at least we had the moral high ground even though they were quickly and comfortably reaching the physical high ground.

Over the next hour or so I was just too tired to take pictures, but we eventually made it all the way up past those clouds to the Visitor's Center! The house that appeared earlier was just below the white line on this Little Mombacho. The white line to the top was over 300 vertical meters on a very steep road.

At the top of the road we were about to start the trail, which itself really wasn’t very tough, when a cloud descended upon us and it got really cold. All of the students we were with broke out their jackets while we were left wondering why no one warned us.

This made it pretty difficult to see the breathtaking views before us:

Finally the sun came out and we were rewarded for our patience. Everything was just so green a beautiful.

The Reserve was a really impressive display of biodiversity. This one tree has 35 different species living on it, which, as the sign notes, is more than all of the tree species in a typical forest in England or Switzerland.

At the end of the trail there was a section called the fumaroles, which I guess would be something like "smoke holes" in English. There were a few big holes in the ground where hot sulfuric gas escaped from deep in the bowels of Mombacho. The guide said that in the hottest months of the year, the gas can get up to about 115 degrees Fahrenheit.

We could see pretty far in all directions at the top. Here’s Granada, Lake Nicaragua, and the isletas as seen from the fumaroles area.The next part of the hike was pretty steep as well and we got a pretty good view of where we just were. The high point at the end of the path is where the previous picture was taken.

At the very top it was 1,222 meters, which made our vertical climb just over 900 meters in about 5 hours. I don’t know if that’s actually significant but it seemed like a lot.

The top also provided impressive views of… TV antennas and cell phone towers. The nature reserve receives no aid from the government, so these probably bring in extra income to keep it open. Still, they kind of take away from the views.

Far in the distance we heard monkeys calling. I imagined that they would be deep in the jungle and they wouldn’t come close to the trail. Instead, we passed right under them and they posed for pictures. Our guide warned us not to linger too long because they are territorial and have been known to greet guests with golden showers.

Somewhere in this mess of tree is a sloth enjoying his lunch. These were the only animals we saw, but there was evidence of lots of other wildlife. The fact that the main trail is called “El Puma” should be some indication of what you might see on that path.

Even though it was against every pinche (cheap) bone in our bodies, we decided to pay the 40 cords to take the bus back down. Yes, that same bus that tauntingly passed us on our hike up full of gringos. It wasn’t exactly the most luxurious mode of transportation but we justified it because a lot of the students were taking it and they needed supervision. Right? Even in bus, it took about 40 minutes to get down to the bottom.

This was the first smile Holly had shown since we started our ascent and I could see that even though I tricked her into climbing hills, eventually things would be right in the world as long as we stayed on flat ground.

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Lions and Tigers and Jaguars, Oh My!

One of our favorite parts of the Embassy summer camp was the field trip to the zoo. The zoo is right down the highway from Masaya, but we had never made it out there for a visit. One of the students told me not to get my hopes up about the quality of the zoo, but it turned out to be really fun. First, here are all the kids waiting to get inside. You can see me in the picture if you're good at "Where's Waldo?":This is Nicaragua's national bird, the Guardabarranco:

Here was a cage full of very long-tailed monkeys (not their scientific name). You may be thinking, "Wow, they look so close up, like you could just reach out and shake their little hands!" You would be correct; all the animals here were in cages that were definitely close enough to the walkways to just stick your hands inside, including the jaguars, lions, and other ferocious-type animals.
This was a really cute animal. I don't know (in English or Spanish) what it is; all the kids kept asking the English words for the animals, and with all the rodent/weasel type animals, we mostly had to say we didn't know. He was one of the animals I most wanted to reach out and pet. These two little foxes were just hanging out. I'm not sure if it was the time of day (around 5 pm) or just that the animals don't get many visitors, but nearly all the animals were awake and active and doing cute things. Another reason for the animals' activity was probably that it was feeding time. Here are my favorite animals at the zoo, the mom and baby jaguar, getting ready to eat dinner. All the big animals at the zoo just received big, raw parts of calves. Here is another jaguar... there were several cages with jaguars in them. This one was born missing his front left leg, but that didn't seem to slow him down one bit. When we came up to his cage, he started running around, jumping, playing with the jaguar in the next cage, and playing with his food. He was definitely an animal I wanted to pet, but we resisted. Paul did, however, put the camera up close enough to the bars so that you wouldn't see them in the picture. The zoo's male lion has clearly seen better days. He's 24 years old. He shares his cage with a 6-year-old lioness, and she was much more agile. A lot of the kids kept asking, "Teacher, he is dead?" but we did see him move around some. The last of the big cats was the tiger. The tiger started off sleeping, but then woke up, went for a swim, and then paced back and forth a lot. Finally, the zoo had a lot of other tropical birds, including toucans and parrots. Just that week, our zoo was in the news because several birds and animals were stolen by armed gunmen. We had hoped for a highly dramatic picture of a sign that said "toucans" in front of an empty cage, but it turns out they were stolen from the rehabilitation center and there were still a few toucans, parrots, and raccoons left in the zoo.All in all, it was a really fun trip. It's the closest we've ever been to a lot of these animals, so it was definitely worth the 75 cent admission.

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