Nicaragua Dispatch 2/20/2012-2 or Street Music, Street Animals, and Stuff

Somebody is having a birthday tonight.  It is 8:30 P.M. and what sounds from a distance like a Mariachi Band has been playing the Central American version of "Happy Birthday to You" endlessly.  Most of what I can hear are the trumpets, snare drums, and bass drums, which are more than sufficient. There have been no firemust go. The kids are ruworks,  but I am assured they will happen.  It just isn't an event in Nicaragua without fireworks.

Living in Nicaragua is living very close to your environment.  I've written about the bats and the cats and some of the birds but it goes further. The houses in Nicaragua are open to the air and the elements, so there is no escape from the realities of the neighborhood, both for good and for bad.

There are at least two roosters in the neighborhood somewhere behind our house who, before the crack of dawn, enjoin in intense crowing competitions. These must awaken the ghosts of hens long laid to rest. There is no end to this competition. it goes on for hours.  I fell back to sleep at about dawn and was awakened again at 7 am by them still going at it with unreserved abandon.  There is also a burro, somewhere, who frequently protests his plight to the donkey gods and an endless number of dogs protecting their property from potential invaders,  both real and imaginary.

During the day. street vendors ply their wares, loudly, not always taking no for an answer. They stop at each open gate, or seemingly so, and sing the seller's songs of "frutas," "pan," "dulces," and I am told even "vino."  Restaurants post guards or keep their front gates locked so as to keep the street vendors at more than arm's length from the clients.

The smells of the street are also always with you in Nicaragua.  Though the streets of Granada are clean by Central American standards there are still families who illegally burn garbage out-of-doors and there are still open sewers and street drains. To be fair, this is also the case in most parts of Latin America where I have been.  We, in the Estados Unidos, use our homes as a way to isolate ourselves from the reality of our neighbors and our environment.  I suspect that's something we inherited from our Dutch and German ancestors . Latin homes seem to embrace and become a part of their environment, their neighborhoods and their neighbors. This has both its good and bad sides.  The neighborhood is your barrio.   Your neighbors are vecinos.  You learn to know them well, sometimes better than you'd like. 

I need to leave. The kids are running up and down the street outside, setting off fireworks.

¡Feliz cumpleaños!, whoever you are.

Nicaragua Dispatch 2/19/2012-2 or Do I Have Bats in my Belfry?

Well, maybe not in my belfry but in my bedroom?  Well, maybe not in my bedroom but living in the ceiling?. Well, maybe not in the ceiling but under the Spanish tiles that cover the ceiling.

I was awakened at 4:30 this morning by a curious rustling.  I turned on the light and saw nothing unusual.  I turned off the light, sat in the dark waiting and the rustling returned along with squeals and high-pitched squeaks. I quietly realized that I was listening to bats returning from their nightly hunting adventure.

Five years ago,  when I visited Granada,  I enjoyed watching swallows hunting at dusk. Their artful dives in search of bugs that I couldn't see were the stuff of aerial ballet.  As darkness fell, however, they and their powerful but delicate glides, turns and swoops were replaced by free-falling daredevils who climbed and fell in impossible aerodynamic maneuvers that boggled the mind. The bats were on the wing!

I imagine the bats, coming home to their families afterward and talking about their prowess and their kills like old fighter pilots, then settling in for a good day's sleep (upside down, of course) dreaming of moths, grasshoppers, and mosquitoes.  Maybe there are bat bars where old veterans hang around, drinking bat beer, smoking bat cigarettes, and swapping war stories.  

I was in my room again, changing for a dip in the pool this afternoon, when I heard them rustling; squeaking, sounding, testing their radar in preparation for another night's hunt. They've been doing this for eons, part of the eternal war between mammals and insects, long before there were countries or cities or houses or Spanish tile roofs or tourists to listen to them.

It makes me proud to be of the order mammalia.

Nicaragua Dispatch 2/19/2012-1 or Getting There is Half the Fun

I am spending this week with my father and our friend Elia in Granada, Nicaragua at Casa Diamante, a house owned by my sister.  I arrived last evening in Managua, about a fifty-minute drive from Grenada.  Plans for this trip have been afoot since at least last August and I was  led to  understand that Gustavo, our hired driver, would  meet me on arrival in the passenger arrival area (presumably holding  one of those embarrassing signs with my name on it.)

Before finding the passenger arrival area, however, I had one of the most pleasant and fun encounters with an immigration officer that I have ever had. Usually, immigration officers are bored civil servants who check and stamp your passport and paperwork with a kind of tolerant resignation.  In Egypt, the immigration officer kept impatiently rapping the inside of his plexiglass bubble with his pen.

his immigration official was, however,  different.   He was alert, knowledgeable, and had a sense of humor.

Backstory:  William Walker was a Tennessee Filibuster who, along with his henchman and sponsor, a failed San Francisco newspaper publisher named Byron Cole, tried to take over Nicaragua, and admit it as a slave state to the Confederate States of America.  Walker was actually recognized as the  President of Nicaragua by the Franklin Pierce administration until he was ultimately defeated and expelled by the Nicaraguans, Hondurans, and Costa Ricans.  This is an important event in Nicaraguan history and is commemorated by a plaque near the cathedral in Granada. 

Now,  my middle name is Cole and I am possibly distantly related to William Walker's henchman. The immigration official took one look at my passport and laughed. "Byron Cole?" he asked in surprise. I laughed and said "Yo lo se! Yo lo se!"  (I know!  I know!)  He looked again, laughed, and with a mock scowl gestured to the departing gates and said "Byron Cole -- Out!".  We laughed together as he stamped my passport.

When I finally did get to the passenger arrival area, however, there was no embarrassing sign, and presumably no Gustavo.  I waited and waited, and waited for about 45 minutes, and still no sign and still no Gustavo.  I began to panic.  While I knew how to get to Granada, I had no idea of how to get to Casa Diamante (this was my first visit since my sister bought and restored the house,) nor did I know the address of Casa Diamante and I had no telephone number!

I called my father's mobile phone.  No answer.  I called my sister's mobile phone. No answer.  Finally, I called my sister's home and talked to Leo, my brother-in-law, who gave me basic directions to Casa Diamante (assuming you were in Granada, some 50 minutes away.)  I also managed somehow to connect to free Wi-Fi at the airport and to send my father an SOS by email describing my predicament.

I attracted a covey of interested and opportunistic taxi drivers when I made it known that I needed to go to Granada but didn't quite know where I was going.  One, in particular, seemed most enterprising and allowed  that he could take me to Granada. We wrote down the directions that Leo had given me and off we went.

In the meantime my father had received my email, responded to it, and had also posted a message on my Facebook timeline to the effect that Gustavo was waiting for me at the airport.  By that time I was long out of Wi-Fi  range, however, and was quite literally bouncing along the roads from Managua to Granada with terrifying abandon at equally terrifying speeds.   I did try to call my father's mobile a couple more times, but still without an answer.

Finally, and breathlessly, we reached Granada and made our way to the center of town.  We tried to find Casa Diamante by following Leo's directions and by asking questions at every turn, to little avail.  Just when I was on the verge of entirely giving up hope, my cell phone rang.  It was my sister, in Seattle!  She had seen my father's posting on Facebook and had decided to intervene.  She talked us, street by street,  to Casa Diamante, revealing to me in the process that my enterprising taxi driver had absolutely no clue where he was and no familiarity with Granada in general.  Casa Diamante, as it turns out, doesn't have an address, just a location (which is why, I suppose, addresses are direcciones in Spanish.)

Four things I learned from this experience:  (1)  My Spanish, while not yet fluent, is now good enough for me to make my wants and needs known and good enough to negotiate complicated problems.  (2)  It is a testament to technology that my sister could guide me through the streets of Granada, Nicaragua while in Seattle, Washington. (3) Make sure you know the house cell phone number of the place you're going (there was a house number, but nobody had bothered to give it to me)  and that your father hasn't left his cell phone at home in Seattle. Finally, (4)  make sure you have your times of arrival agreed upon!

I am here.  I am drinking a cervesa and life is still good.