Nicaragua Dispatch 2/21/2012 or ¿Where am I? -- bits and pieces

This morning Elia and I took off to see the Volcan Mombache that looms over Granada.  A bus from the tour company came to pick us up.  It was, surprisingly, full of ecotourists from Raleigh and Cary, North Carolina who had been to the finca in San Ramon (a sister city of Durham, NC.)  One of them even wore a cap with the insignia of the source of much evil in the universe -- Dook!  Did I come to Nicaragua to meet a Blue Debbil? I don't think so.

After the tour of the amazing cloud rain forest on Mombacho we came back to Granada and went shopping for dinner groceries.  It was my turn to cook dinner and my menu was chicken chipotle paprika, broccoli con sillion y pimientos negros and arroz con pimientos verdes. It all came out well in the end but shopping in a supermarket in an unfamiliar country can be a bit of a challenge.

The chicken broth Elia brought turned out to be a powder, so a Toña beer gave its life as liquid for the braised chicken. The pimientos verdes turned out to be pimientos verdes muy picante (as I found out unpleasantly when I bit into one) and so had to be seeded and demembraned before being cut up and put into the arroz integral before cooking.

Before going to the supermarket I needed to go to the cajero automatico (ATM) to get cash.  It offered me transactions in cordobas (the local currency) or dollars.  I chose dollars because I didn't want to have to do the exchange math in my head and I figured it would give me cordobas anyway. No such. I inserted my SunTrust card, asked for $200, and got 10 $20 bills from the cajero automatico.

As some know, the cats in Carrboro I live with are invisible cats. I'm the only one who sees them and even then only on the run. Last night as I was finishing up here and going to bed I walked through the kitchen and flushed a cat prowling through the garbage who ran in panic up the stairs and out across the roof.  I figured it had heard through the feline grapevine that I missed Charity, Joey, and Gedda and was just trying to make me feel at home!

We're off to Ometope tomorrow for three days at an Eco lodge I don't know what my connectivity will be so I may only be here on the flip side.