¡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.