Hola from Esteli

Special deal for our readers, coke with free spaghetti!!!!

(as seen in our local supermarket)

We've settled in up in the highlands of Nicaragua, where the days are hot but the breeze is fresh and the evenings get refreshingly cool. I even needed my sweatshirt the other night!

The town we're staying in is called Esteli. It's a busy town of about 100,000 people, and it has a sort of rough-and-tumble wild west feel to it, partly because it is just a lively place and partly because of the caballeros (cowboys) roaming through. This is a big agricultural area, and there are lots of cattle ranches, tobacco and coffee farms, as well as lots of vegetable farms around here. This is also a region that produces a lot of leather goods, and there are more shoe stores here than I have ever seen in one place.

We spent the afternoon of our first day here, and the morning of our second day, looking for a place to stay. We'd spent the night in a decent little hotel, but wanted someplace a little homier and with a kitchen, and were willing to commit to a month if we could find a place we loved. We found a british ex-pat woman who had a room for rent in her place, and checked that out. We didn't fall in love with it, but she showed us a few other places she knew about and also helped us make an appointment with a real-estate agent who works with apartments for rent. We met Dona Violeta the next day and she took us all over the place, on foot and by taxi. We saw some humble little Nica style apartments and a huge empty home out in the country. Nothing seemed quite right, though, until she showed us the Hotel Cuallitlan. This place is two gorgeous garden courtyards surrounded by little casitas. Here is the front of ours:



The only little problem is that they don't have kitchens. Well, no problem after all, because the proprietress, Dona Marisela, has done this a time or two! She set me up lickety split with a kitchenette on our front porch. The fridge is inside the house. We negotiated a good price for our month stay, and are enjoying the peace and beauty of this place immensely so far.
A couple views of our house for the next month.

The courtyard and neighboring casitas. Mango and lemon trees included!

We've started language school, and both feel like complete idiots most of the time while in class, although we know we'll make progress. We speak spanish quite a bit with taxi drivers, the folks who work at our hotel, and pretty much everybody we can. Had quite a conversation with a guard outside the cultural museum today, of which I understood about 10 percent. We were asking directions to a church and some other things. His answer was quite lengthy, but he had a strong accent and was pretty much unintelligible. I feel like I can make myself understood, as long as I don't want to talk about anything else besides directions and how much something costs. Not quite true, but my vocabulary is limited enough that it's pretty frustrating.

Esteli doesn't feel as poor or as desperate as some of what we saw in and around Granada, but we still struggle with being rich Americans in a poor country. The per capita annual average income is about what we are spending on housing alone for the two months we're here.

We've been getting settled in, lots of grocery shopping at the markets and tiendas, and walking around town. We are about a 5 minute taxi ride from the center of town, and it costs just about a dollar for both of us. Interestingly, shared taxis are the norm here, so we never know where exactly we might be going en route to our destination, but it's never more than a minute or two out of our way. We both have some writing projects we are working on, and between those and the language school and figuring out life here, I think we'll definitely keep busy.

We miss you all, our friends and family, so would love to hear from you as you have time.

-Shannon