Skip to main content

Family Trip to Managua!

On Sunday, the whole family and I took a bus trip to Managua! 

The bus ride was probably the most fun part of the trip. I got to goof around with their cousins and had fun taking photos with everyone. 



Doña Chilo la Monga (nun) 


 We spend time in Puerto Salvador Allende, a port filled with random restaurants and eateries, overlooking a fairly well-polluted lake. It had the appearance of an amusement park at the entrance, but then you enter and realize there are no rollercoasters, just a lot of food. 

It's like an amusement park, but without rollercoasters and with a lake instead! 

All those tiny specks are pieces of garbage....


Yes, the park is named after the Chilean president who was assassinated during the revolution! Why is that exciting? Because I did my history term paper on the Chilean Revolution! 

(My family didn't quite understand why I was so excited about the name of the park. IB friends, you get what I mean.) 



I took some nice photos of my family while we were there. 




Karelia y su amor

Jhostyn y su hermanita Isis

Milena y Doña Venega 



Afterwards, we walked around Managua, which is extremely crowded and filled with traffic. My main focus was trying not to get separated from my family by the massive crowds! 

Tons of Christmas alters like this one decorated the side of the highway. 

Giant swirling lit-up tree things

Statue commemorating the revolution, with the red/black Sandinista flag next to it. I see a lot of red/black flags painted on poles and the sides of houses all over León. 










Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Sayonara Arigato

We went out to a restaurant for lunch today, a little eatery called.... something that's located.... somewhere (At this point, I have absolutely no idea where things are located in León or the names of the restaurants we've eaten at. Typically we just hop into Mateo's truck and go wherever he decides to take us.) The restaurant is pretty busy - lunch is the biggest meal of the day, so the place is filled with hungry customers. Inside, there is a wood fire stove in the center of the restaurant, filling the room with a thick, smokey scent.  Upon entering the restaurant, I passed by an older Nicaraguan man, whose face lit up when he saw me. "Ohhh!" he exclaimed. "Sayonara Arigato!!"  I laughed. It was something that caught me completely off guard, and the incongruity of it struck me humorous, since the man obviously thought I was Japanese.  If this same incident had happened back in the States, I would have felt insulted, but there was something about how t...

Meet my host family!

This morning, we met our host families and host agency representatives for the first time! After a few hours of introductions, autograph bingo, a presentation about our Community Based Initiative (or as Sam liked to call it, "mini proyecto"), and a game of Pictionary, we finally parted ways and left Mateo's house with our host families.  My host family is very kind! They are also about the same height as me (we're all cute and short!) so I think it's a perfect match.       Paulino, me, and Doña Chilo They have two daughters, a dog named Bebe, a rabbit named Joka (ho-ca), and they live with their grandmother.        Doña Venega and Joka el Conejo                            JOKA!!!  I also had a mini-adventure on my first day with Mpowering People. Ingrid, my jefe/mentor, and Gabriela, a post-graduate volunteer, arrived at my host family's home on a motorcycle to pick me...

I'm in León!

We made it!  After 12 hours of traveling, we've finally made it to Nicaragua...."we" being myself and the whopping THREE other volunteers - Maddy from Portland, Olivia from Denver, and Sam from Chapel Hill! I was surprised by the small group size, but apparently that's characteristic of the gap year program.  We actually flew into Nicaragua during a lightning storm! It was quite the experience to be in an aircraft, flying among the clouds, while bolts of lightning are shooting down all around you. Fun stuff!  Our in-country Amigos coordinator  met us at the airport, outside of customs, where a huge crowd of Nicaraguans were clustered about, families waiting to greet family coming off the airplane as well as various taxi drivers and vendors advertising their goods and services.  We chucked our backpacks onto the bed of the coordinator's pickup truck and drove to a restaurant, where we had our first meal in Nicaragua!  Enchiladas con mole y champiñones The en...