The official move to San Juan

The Move to San Juan

After catching the chicken bus back to Masaya (70 cords each, about $NZ3) - about a 3 and a half hour trip we met Ian, a young brother who is a taxi driver and arranged for him to pick us up the next day to drive us back to San Juan.  We decided that as it was a one off it would be worth taking a taxi back.  It was going to cost about $NZ100, still not bad for a three and a half hour trip.  And seeing as we were carting suitcases, backpacks, guitars and all sorts (ok just one guitar) we thought it'd be safer to take a taxi instead of having it all thrown around on the top of a bus.

Then Brother Hector Hernandez popped in, we had invited him over as we wanted to take him out for a meal, it was the least we could do as he had been so helpful before we arrived, chatting with us on Face Book, giving us a good idea of cost of living etc and arranging our pick up from the airport when we got to Nica.  We tried out a chinese restaurant across the road and shouted him dinner and gave him an NZ t-shirt and landscape calendar along with a couple of other little NZ souvenirs - he seemed sad to say goodbye and made us promise to keep in touch, and then we headed back to the hostel for our last night in Masaya.

After running around town in the morning, getting some cash and dropping another t-shirt off to our friend Wilfredo we met Ian at 11 and headed off back to San Juan.  Along the way we saw a few of Nicaragua's volcanoes, a couple of them are apparently on the island of Omatepe that we hope to visit some day.  That's where the floating kingdom hall is that was featured in the Awake! not so long ago.

As you can see the ground is very dry at this time of year.

Nicaragua only really has two seasons - the dry one, December to April and the wet one, mid-May until November.  The dry season also seems to be quite windy, in fact it was so windy the other day that a young man died when the sign he was holding caught the wind and he got blown into the power lines and electrocuted - I know!  I said it was windy!

Nicaraguans call the dry season 'summer' while the other countries in the northern hemisphere consider this time to be winter.

We also saw a close miss with a couple of horses wandering around on the highway.

....  a town filled with cute little motorbike taxi thingies.

...   some wind turbines

...  and some very crowded buses

When we got back from Masaya we got Ian to do a drive by to the Kingdom Hall as they were doing a working bee there, painting the whole hall inside and out.

Paul tried to get in on the action and look like he'd been working all along (not very convincing I'm afraid) 

and here's Kieran with one of our new friends, a lovely young brother called Blake from Michigan - they actually had been working all day.

Did you choose that colour Giovani?

There was still lots to do so we headed down to the hostel to drop our things off and came back to help.

The boys were all hoping for an afternoon surf but the hall got priority so there was no surfing today, we did manage to get the hall finished though so that was great!

The next day two witness families visiting from the UK (serving in Granada for a month or so) came to visit San Juan and they were booked into the same hostel as us.

We had just finished witnessing when we saw them arrive - they went in and then came back out again about 2 mins later.  i went up and introduced myself and asked them if they were witnesses and if they were staying at the hostel.  They were a couple of delightful families with a brood of little girls - 5 between them.  One of the sisters turned up her nose and said, hmmm well we're booked in but we're not really used to roughing it.  They were just learning Spanish so hadn't been able to communicate well with the staff and when they saw that they had a dorm room they were a bit worried.  I assured them that the staff had it all under control and they were to have that room to themselves so that the girls would be safe.   The decided to rough it and booked in.  One of the little girls was called Harriet, a little bright spark with curly blonde hair and pink rimmed glasses.  She gave us quite a few laughs over the next couple of days.

That night we went out to dinner with the families and had fish - whole fish - for dinner.  When Porl and I picked up our fish heads and sucked out the eyeballs the family didn't know whether to be impressed, shocked or disgusted, or maybe a bit of everything.  The oldest little girl asked what they tasted like and when we told her 'delicious' she decided she'd like to have a go.  She cautiously pushed an eyeball out of the head onto her finger.  The other little girls surrounded her and began to chant 'do it, do it' and after a bit of hesitation she bravely did.  I'm sure that'll be the topic of conversation for a while to come.