GRANADA
August saw me spending a couple of weeks in Granada the oldest city in Nicaragua.
It was founded in 1524 and also claims to be the first European city in mainland America. The Spanish influence can definitely be seen in the architecture and for me is the most beautiful city that I've seen here in Nicaragua.
Nearly every building has featured doors with lots of colour and cast iron railings. I took one or two pictures of doorways in Granada and will put them in a separate post so as not to bore those who don't find doorways particularly interesting.
Granada is right next to Lake Nicaragua and apparently vied for position as capital of Nicaragua against León for a number of years, a compromise finally being reached seeing Managua, situated between the two cities, becoming the countries capital. Given that they came into existence before the advent of motor vehicles the streets of Granada are rather narrow and many of them are just one way. There are still many horse-drawn carriages in the city and tourists love to take a tour of the city in one of these. I'm sure that if my mother was visiting she'd love to ride in one and in fact it was on my to-do list as well.
Chase, the young kiwi bro who lives with us, and I were in Granada for two weeks for our pioneer school. A history making event, being the first ever English pioneer school held in Nicaragua. It's a bit of a mission to get there from San Juan using the buses, as there are no direct buses and you usually end up taking about three buses over about 4-5 hours to get there, although in reality it takes less than two hours to drive there in a car.
Thankfully our pioneer school came straight after the Circuit Overseer's visit so Ruben and Cathy Garcia, our C.O. and his wife were kind enough to take me there in their car.
We got to share the school with our lovely friends Andrea and Giselle, those hard-core girls serving in Cardenas that I've mentioned before (in the Ometepe blog) - no running water for these girls!
I stayed with the lovely Guevara family and their menagerie of two kittens, a parrot, a puppy and two dogs.
Here Claudia and Francisco practice a typical Nicaraguan dance to present to the visitors.
We were very well looked after at the pioneer school with some lovely brothers and sisters from America using their vacation time to come down and prepare our meals.
This was lunch on our first day, delicious!
And our last day was a typical Nicaraguan meal with yucca, chicken, gallo pinto (rice and beans) and platano.
One of the highlights of the two weeks was the my darling came to visit for the middle weekend. We booked into a cute little hostel in town and pretended we were tourists. It was great!
I love the way that most of the buildings have a private garden in the centre.
We visited the Choco Museo.
Where I got to read all about how good chocolate is for you, as if we didn't know :)
We saw some interesting works of art.
Including this very groovy little chair.
In fact all around the city we found interesting art. We certainly weren't expecting to find a little museum with a Buddy Holly bust, a painting and a turtle shell, but there it was along the malecón, not looking particularly open to the public but it caught my eye and I wanted to investigate.
The young man cleaning the floor explained that it was his museum and we were welcome to enter, he didn't seem to know a lot about the pieces in his museum and seemed rather young to own one, but we went along with it. Not long after an elderly lad appeared and welcomed us into what turned out to be her home and museum - she certainly fit the bill a bit better than the 'curator' who had the decency to look rather sheepish as he returned to his sweeping.
Next stop was a ride around the city in one of the horse-driven carriages but that will have to be another post.
¡Adios!
