It's been awhile...

So it's been quite a while since I last posted an entry and while I am actually no longer in Nicaragua (cue the tears) I feel that it is still justified to give some updates on what went on during my last weeks in Nicaragua - and there was a lot of stuff that happened!

I guess I will start with my birthday party/depedida(going away party).  By some luck my birthday happened to coincide very nicely with the date when I was going to leave El Sauce.  Then by another stroke of luck, one of best friends from med school and 2 other friends were going to be in Nicaragua and able to swing by El Sauce.  So I wanted to host a despedida in style - and what better way to do that than with a big pig roast.  I had done one the year before in Rochester but it was just a little pig, about 80 lbs or so.  This was going to be big - both for effect and because I had no idea how many people from El Sauce would be coming - I wanted to invite most of the people that knew me and the hospital made that number quite large. So I planned and planned and talked and talked and so there was a lot of hype and a lot of skepticism - in Nicaragua you dont cook pigs whole and you certainly don't do it with the skin still on - you can't make chicharrones if you leave the skin on!  Bottom line - the stakes were high...

It doesn't look it, but this piggy weighs 210 lbs!

The day before the roast was a lot of work.  Tons of stuff the buy and arrange and when you don't have a car it can be a challenge.  But beer is a neccessary part of any pig roast and if you need to borrow a campoñera to get it to your house - so be it.  Turns out they are more difficult to steer than I would have guessed!

Building.

Fiona put her architectural skills to work to construct the oven - granted it was my design...

The fantastic crew getting the pig on the fire.  In order to have the pig ready by about 4pm the next day we had to start the fire at midnight and the pig got on the fire at 1am!

And then we spent the rest of the night stoking the fires, chatting, drinking cold beers and eating delicious chicharrones, cuajada and other Nica delicacies!  Not a bad night.

Nacatamals...with beer!  By far some of the best nacatamals that I had in El Sauce and a cold beer at 8 am trumps super sugared up coffee...just about any day I think.

The sunrise was phenomenal!

Just chillin' - cookin a big pig affords a lot of time for chillin

With Claudia my neighbor - Nicaraguans generally don't trust gringos and especially male gringos to cook things that they like - such as frito (sauteed organ meat).

That pig cooked itself very nicely!

Less than 4 hours after taking the pig off the fire even that head had disappeared.  I have never seen so much pig consumed in my life!

And then the people danced!

The gringo crew.  4 doctors, 1 architect, 2 peace corps, 2 nursing.  I think was a novel thing for so many gringos to be in one place and to be serving all the Nicas, but it sure was fun and delicious.

Mac got along well with everyone.

Fiona was a popular dance partner.  This doctor was really serious that we needed to have some 80s ballads but given our stereo options we were not able to oblige no matter how much we agreed.



Overall, it was a great party!  I was exhausted by the end of it, but I had fun and I really hope that everyone who came, Nica and gringo, also had a good time, ate some delicious pig and got to dance to their hearts' content.  Next posts will center on some of the people of El Sauce and also the travels that took Fiona and I around the southern and eastern parts of Nicaragua.  Hasta la proxima!

¡Visitantes!

The past few weeks have seen an influx of gringos into Nicaragua and most importantly gringos that I know!  The first visitors I had the pleasure of hanging out with are three fellow med students.  As it turns out the month of April is a great time to be a 4th-year medical student.  The vast majority of my friends are travelling all over the place, visiting friends, foreign countries or enjoying the peace and trangquility of a stay-cation.  My friends Mac, M Catherine and TR originally planned to go to Guatemala to do some Spanish learning but due to the drug related violence that was changed to Nicaragua and they have been in León for the past 3 weeks.  So, of course, I made sure to meet up with them. 

Fellow med students and my sister.  Fiona's flight was 2 hours late arriving into Managua so we missed the last bus back to El Sauce and had to spend the night in León.  We took full advantage and found ourselves a cool bar with a legit bartender, free mariachi and some strong and delicious mojitos and Nica libres!

This past Thursday was a full moon and there is a tour operation that does full-moon night hikes of a local volcano that are supposed to be super-cool.  Fiona and I decided to do the hike and Mac and TR thought it sounded pretty cool too.  We met at 930pm had some dinner and then at 1130 started our hike up to the volcano.  We took our sweet time and arrived at the crater at 4am-ish.  We saw LAVA!  It was super cool and although it wasn't a boiling and bubbling red sea (no Mount Doom) there was a lot of red lava and there was this noise...imagine pressurized gas esacaping and then magnify that many, many, many times.  It was super impressive.

The Telica Volcano.  We were standing right on that rim you can see.

Proof we were there!

But then we had to get back to León.  The hike down took us about 2.5hours and then we had a 30min ride back to the office.  Needless to say, we were all exhausted and this was the general picture all over the van - those were some sleepy tourists! 

But even though we were all exhausted we didn't sleep the day away but rather took some naps and then headed back out to enjoy the Good Friday celebrations.  A neighborhood in León does sawdust alfombras, much as they do in Antigua, Guatemala and I made sure we went to check it out.  According to M Catherine and Fiona the ones here in León were neither has brilliant nor as varied as those in Antigua - but I was still very impressed.  The families started at about 10 or 11 am and the procession that came by to ruin it all passed by at about 7 pm.  Crazy and cool tradition in my book.

After the procession ruined the alfombras we wanted to get in on the action!

They might look like statues but those are kids!

 On Sábado Santo we then went back to the beach near León, enjoyed some sunshine, cold beer and whole fried fish.  Very nice and felt very Nica as Semana Santa is the biggest week for travel in Nicaragua with the beaches, rivers and lakes throughout the country beckoning to the general populace.  Needless to say the beach was packed.

Then on Sunday Fiona and I returned to the Sauce because we had made plans to make a soup and spend the afternoon with one of my friends.  As I might have mentioned before, Nicas love their sopas. They make beef soup, chicken soup, chicken soup with chicken dumplings, pork soup, sopa de mondongo(still not sure what the mondongo is but I am not a fan) and although the protein source may change the soup nearly always has yuca, squash, potatos, plantains, onions, tomatoes and then a packet of Sopa Maggi, a noodle soup seasoning packet.  So even though they may call the soups differently they have similar tastes.  Nonetheless they can be very tasty.

During Lent, Nicas make a traditional soup called Sopa de Cuajada/Queso.  A cheese soup.  They add a few fruits that are in season in April but everything else is the same.  And the cheese bit are little disks of corn, cheese and eggs that are fried before being served in the soup.  I like it and it's traditional so I figured Fiona should get the opportunity to try it as well.

Frying up the cheese disks.  Yum!

Fiona making some cheese patties.

Enjoying the fruits of her labor.  It was delicious!

And we had the good fortune that our live entertainment for the afternoon was none other but El Sauces own philharmonic group!  Pays to have well connected and involved friends...

Fiona is now off to Matagalpa and hopefully when she returns her Spanish will have come flooding back and she will enjoy being placed in a ton of non-english situations!  Vamos a ver.

Chocolate...!

Oops.  It appears that quite of bit of time has passed since I last updated the ol' blog.  And it's not that I haven't been doing anything are having any fun down here.  In fact, I recently returned from a 'visa run' to Costa Rica.  Turns out that US visas for Nicaragua are valid for 3 months at which point you either have to pay for each additional month that you stay in the country or you have to leave the country for at least 72 hours and then come back.  However, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala are not considered acceptable countries due to an agreement between all the countries called the CA4 - turns out that wasn't a big deal since I cannot currently travel to those countries as the UofR has placed those countries on its Black List ever since the Peace Corps decided they were no longer safe enough for them to send volunteers there.  Oh well.  Hopefully, Honduras gets it's act together in time for the Fam Med trip in October or that Guatemala gets marginally safer by this time next year - it seems a favorite past-time of post-Match med students is to jet off around the world and Guatemala sounds fantastic to me!

So I went to Costa Rica and had a great time.  Spent some time in the mountains and chilling out on the beach.  It truly is a beautiful country but at times I felt like it was almost a mini-US hanging out in tropical central america...Nicaragua is definitely quite a bit different.  Hopefully photos will be coming soon.

But other very interesting, fun and tasty adventures have been going on in the Sauce.  In fact, yesterday Michaela(a peace corps volunteer) and I engaged in a chocolate making adventure.  It was long and involved but well documented:

3 lbs of cacao beans will make any chocolate lover happy!

The workspace.  However, before getting to work home-made hummus and asian-style noodles (a delcious rarity in El Sauce) make for a delicious lunch.

So the chocolate making process involves about 7 steps.  The first is to roast your cacao beans for about 30 minutes until they pop - and pop they do - in fact they put popcorn to shame with the power of their popping.

That's Michaela and stirring roasting beans for 30 minutes could be considered boring - unless you're rocking out to good tunes.

Downside to making chocolate in El Sauce at the end of March?  It is really hot - over 100F hot.  But that's why there is ice-cold beer to compliment the scent of roasting cacao.

And that scent sure is delicious!  The beans taste quite good as well...

So after roasting the beans you have to remove the  shells - step 2.  I had a brilliant idea to make the process slightly quicker that actually made the process waaaaaay longer.  But what do you do when you have cacao nibs and little bits of cacao husks all mixed together?  Find a fan and blow the husks away.  Michael definitely enjoyed this part...

The next step involves making a mixture that turns out to be just like cajetas - a cooked milk and sugar treat that is sold all over the place down here.  You simply boil equal parts milk and sugar together for supposedly 30minutes to and hour (or in our case almost 2 hours) until it boils down into an almost solid.

 The next step is grind the cacao into whats called chocolate liquer.  While Michaela was making the cajetas I went to the local Molino and had the cacao ground.  It's pretty cool that the ground beans forms a liquidy but very bitter mash.

After that you simply take the cajeta-like stuff and mix it with varying amount of the chocolate liquer and whatever other ingredients you want.  At the end of the day we had:
1. Plain chocolate
2. Almond Chocolate
3. Vanilla-Almond Chocolate
4. Vanilla-Raspberry Chocolate
5. Rum Chocolate
6. Spicy Chocolate

We are guessing that is about 6 -7 lbs of chocolate!  and all for less than $10!  But it did take aaaalllllllllllll day.  We started at 1 and finished about 8pm, but it was totally worth the time.

The next step is to guard our chocolate from all the wide-eyed vultures that are circling the house!

The chocolate is not anywhere close to smooth, but it does taste delicious and is definitely on the darker side of the spectrum, which for a climate as hot as it is here in El Sauce is probably the best way to go anyways.

In other news, the end of trip is rapidly approaching.  Only 6 weeks left from this Sunday!  It's incredible that so much time has passed.  But the last 6 weeks will be a blast as I am picking Fiona up from the Managua airport on Sunday to start a combined Nica adventure for a bit.  And in another crazy turn of events there are 3 UofR medical students currently in León, one of whom is my good friend Mac.  Hopefully I can convince them to come on out to the Sauce and show them around my Saucey world.

6 weeks are gonna fly...

A bit of this and that.

Wow, that was a brutal morning...just got handed a very definitive 6-0 defeat in the weekend soccer league.  That being said it wasn't that surprising given that we were playing the perennial champions and my team is new and definitely not very organized.  It's rather interesting to listen to everyone talking about how we should play and whatnot - everyone here loves either Real Madrid or Barcelona and they like to think that by watching their teams they know how they should be playing.  Unfortunately, reality and mental desire are a bit disconnected.

I can't necessarily talk too much though - these days my knowledge of the game far exceeds my technical abilities.  What with all this cycling and running I now do my slow twitch muscles far outnumber my fast twitch - which were in need of help when I was playing regularly...oh well it's still a fun way to spend a few hours each day!

Next week will see me more in my current element with my road racing debut here in Nicaragua...a half marathon from Jinotega to San Rafael del Norte in the northern and 'fresco' part of Nica - should be an interesting time.  I am going to see more Peace Corps volunteers in one place than I ever have before, which me

Life in the hospital here in  El Sauce still goes well.  I have recently started to feel more confident attending to patients in the ED  and that has made the whole experience much more enjoyable.  My project is going well - in fact I have essentially finished with my surveys of the patients with asthma and boy was that interesting - I feel incredibly sorry for any child who has ever been nebulized here in El Sauce (and there are a lot - one of the 'normas' or edicts from MINSA the government health organization is that if a kid comes in with the suspicion of pneumonia and there are wheezes in the chest fields they get nebulized).  This generally makes mothers think their child has asthma and if a child has asthma they are forbidden from doing a TON of things - anything from bathing in the evening to playing in the river to eating ice cream or drinking a nice cold fresco.  Not a nice way to pass your childhood.  And this doesn't even touch on some of the traditional cures - anything from monkey, shark or fox oil to cures based on copious amounts of garlic or the blood of a cat.  One woman - who actually has her grandsons asthma well controlled was telling me that she would give him a little bit of a laxative so that he could get some of the phlegm in his chest out with his poop - an interesting concept.  

With this in mind my current project is making a little brochure about what asthma is and some myths and realities - including the best ways to treat the disease.  We'll see how it goes over - most people look at me like I am nuts and have no idea what I am talking about if I explain the actual physiological basis behind things - asthma and other things included.

Well, that's been a lot of words - let's see if there are any photos to share from the last several weeks...

This one is to make all you fruit lovers jealous...in a few weeks there is going to be a massive influx of ripe mangos and avocados!  Boy am I looking forward to that.  A ripe mango beats a green one with salt and chile any day...

I recently went to the port town of Corinto - the biggest port in Nica.  The goal was to eat a ton of delicious seafood and  I definitely accomplished that.  The views were quite good too...

The central park in Corinto.  There are a bunch of cruise ships that come in each day and deposit their charges to explore COrinto for the day.  Everyone was sure I was part of the cruise ship that arrived the day I arrived but it was gone by 6 and when I was walking around taking these photos the people were saying "Look at the gringo - he got left behind!"

A doctor here has a good friend there in Corinto who I called and he brought me out with the boys - or the gallera as they call themselves.  Really it's a group that can drink rum like water - incredible cantidads consumed! 

Variation on painted easter eggs?

Apparently this is how my beloved cashew grows...I had absolutely no idea!