A few days in the historic colonial city of Granada! Luckily we had a local guide - Dutch Jenny from the Spanish school in Bocas! Jenny was doing her midwifery internship here (her last one was in Ecuador, you should see some of the photos) so she showed us around a bit and we got to visit the hospital too which was pretty interesting (I'm not sure I'd want any medical emergencies here).
One of the highlights was visiting the Dona Elba cigar factory. We heard about it fairly randomly from this America dude who started talking to us on the street and it turned out to be the source of the some of the best cigars in the world! We found the place and inside are photos of Arnie, Al Pacino, etc all visiting and smoking Dona Elba cigars. We did the tour, learned how to make cigars and bought a few for presents (and our own consumption).
Really cool to see a town/city in Nicaragua rather than just a tiny beachside village and the people were very friendly and loved chilling in their rocking chairs! Every house was crammed with rocking chairs (mesadoras) and as you walk the streets in the warm evening you can look into their pimped living rooms and see them rocking away. Awesome. Great food too, we ate lots of the street food and across the road from us was some sort of local institution where you get this marinated roast chicken, weird salad and some other stuff for about $3. Locals came from all over town to this place!
Easter weekend was approaching (obviously a huge deal in Catholic Latin America) and there were lots of floats, Jesus-on-the-cross and other Easter parade paraphernalia getting around. Again, I wish I could put about 50 photos up with each post to convey all the interesting little observations and stories. All on Facebook though if you have the time.
After a couple of days of checking out the lake, volcano, markets, etc we decided the surf forecast looked good enough to head back to Popoyo (only about 2 hours away in a taxi) for more of what we had last week. Fingers crossed....
