The Stinky Girl Travels

León is a beautiful city.  It's a pleasant balance of old and new, calm and chaos:  centuries-old cathedrals, homes painted in every bright shade of green, orange, blue, and yellow you could imagine, coffee shops, the neighborhood pulperias (where you can purchase small amounts of anything you need, such as a few eggs, veggies, some bread for dinner, makeup, toilet paper, etc.)  women walking down the street balancing baskets of groceries on their heads, people selling home-cooked food to the neighborhood, camionetas zipping around with passengers hanging on for dear life, merchants transporting their wares on horse-drawn carts, the daily wail of the city siren at 7:00am and 12:00pm (signifying the time to leave for work and to come home for lunch), and my personal favorite - the tortilla lady who walks down the street every day with a basket of tortillas on her head, yelling "TORTILLAAAAAAAS!" (I'll try to post a video in the near future)  Speaking of loud vendors, ...

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...