Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Parasite! Parasite! Parasite!

So i have another parasite, YAY! And yes, it is infact my second one in my nearly 11 months here in Nicaragua. The good news is that my parasites are realtively common ones that you could also contract in the states..so not so terrible, right. The funny part is that I currently have a parasite that Cal Fro and I got to deal with at the pool a few summers ago. The bad part is that parasites make you poo alot. The nasty part is that I probably got this parasite by eating something contaminated with feces. GROSS! So i´ve been trying to be really good about only drinking purfied or boiled water and I´ve sworn myself off of fritanga. :( So sad. I love fritanga, which is the food your can buy on the street and is bascially an assortment of deliciously fried, Nica food. I love tajadads (thinly sliced and fried plantains with salad, vinager and chile) and I´m kind of sad thinking about never eating them again. Maybe once my parasite is all gone I´ll try getting some again. Maybe.

Its been a 4 day weekend due to the 31st aniversary of the revolution popular of the sandinistas. Yesterday, EVERYONE and i pretty much mean EVERYONE in my site went to Managua for this big rally thing. I didn´t go and instead went hiking and swimming, but when all the buses were returning from Managua there was a huge crazy party in my central park complete with real fireworks. Pretty exciting. Another exciting part was that I was eating quesillo with some friends in the most famous quesillo restaruant in all of Nicaragua, that happens to be in my town and every single bus full of people was stopping and buying quesillo. Thats a lot of sandinistas and a lot of quesillo. But I have to admit, I love that my town so well know in all of Nicaragua..it makes my life pretty easy.

Otherwise, its back to teaching and gardens at school. I´m starting to get a bit annoyed because I make plans with teachers to work in their gardens and then when I show up there is always some excuse about why we can´t work on them. Sometimes the students don´t bring their tools, sometimes school gets our early, or once I showed up at 10am just like my teacher told me too and she looked at me and said, oh we were waiting for you earlier. What? You told me 10am, I´m going to come at 10am becuase sadly I can´t just read your mind and realize that 10am actually means 7am. Oh, well. Hopefully, this week things will go smoother because its just so frustrating! But I guess this is all part of working in devlopment and you just have to go with the flow. Just sometimes I wish development work wasn´t so freaking slow. And i´m also wishing (well more like hoping) that my gardens actually grow.

So, thats life right now. I´ve been loving the weather the past few days, cool and rainy. Not sweating is making my life heaven. Oh, last week I had a sweat moustache..which is really nasty. So it makes me even more happy about this bought of coolness. It also makes me realize how Nica I am. I´m freezing at night and its probably still in the 80s.

I´m going to freeze to death when I go back to Ohio.

Sunday, July 11, 2010

Hamburgers, Hot dogs &&& Horse Parades...Nica 4th of July

My first Nicaraguan 4th of July has come and gone, along with my first dia del maestros, and semester break. All in all the past two weeks have been wonderful and full of great memories with my friends, both nica and american.

Dia del maestros was unlike anything I could have expected before coming to Nicaragua and exactly what I imagined since I´ve arrived. After living here for 10 months I knew enough that I should put on my best outfit, do up my make-up and rock some heels. So I got all decked out in my nica finest, met my counterpart and off we went! The party was being held by the alcaldia (mayors office) of LPC at one of our town´s discos. It started off with the normal actos, speechs, dances, , more speeches and some more dances, including a really funny one where the guy dressed up like a girl and the girl like a guy. Ok. it was way more funny if you are watching it then I can describe. But trust me, it was a good laugh. Following the acto, was lunch and then the dancing began. Of course being the token gringa EVERYONE wanted to dance with me and I´ve loved to learn here that no matter how ridiculous I look everyone still thinks I´m a good dancer. :) So we danced and then the rum came out and my teachers took on the mission of insuring I always had a full class of rum and coke. Have I mentioned how much I love this country? By the time I left at 5 (the event had started at 10), I was a little bit drunk, decently blistered and convinced I would move permently to Nicaragua to be a teacher, just for this party every year.

Happily, though the partying wasn´t over for me as the past weekend was the 4th of July! And we took it into our hands to show off the 2nd goal of Peace Corps and throw a good old 4th of July party Nicaraguan style! Nagarote (the town next to mine) was having a hipica (horse parade) and thus this became the site for our celebrations. So I bought streamers in red and blue (couldn´t find white..but then one of the neighborhood kids suggested we use toilet paper...haha) and we put up a huge fleece american flag blanket. I made deviled eggs, Rachel brought some chips and made french onion dip and Chris went all kinds of culinary and made soy burger and banana cream pie. So good. Bascially, we ate a ton of food, drank some beer and rum, watched the horse parade and did this all in the dark, since the lights went out! Then like true Nica-Americans we (well I) donned our (my) red, white and blue and went to the party in the towns cancha. So maybe we didn´t have any fireworks in Nicaragua, but heck we did have a mariachi band and that was almost as good.

So partying it up. I can´t complain at all and after a week of no school and a nice little vacation, I´m ready to get back to life. I was so excited to return back to LPC on Friday and even more exctied when I started playing kickball with my neighbors. It was an absolute blast even though I got placed on the boys team because they were short players and they were some of the worst kickball players EVER. But it was still really fun and the boys seemed to love me so much that when I asked them to pick up there trash, take it home and put it in the basurero (trash can) they did it with a smile. WIN!

And this week is going to be another great one! I can feel it! :)