Church!

7-6-08

An addendum to my earlier comments about fruit: I think that Sara, the maid/cook/nanny, buys fruit at the beginning of the week, and then stretches it out until Sunday, so while my breakfasts until about Thursday were excellent, after that point the fruit situation started going down hill. I’m hoping that it’ll be fresh again tomorrow morning!

This was a good weekend. On Friday my friends from the school Steve and Roberta and I met our teacher Alejo at Café Nuit, for a night of dancing. I sampled the local beer, Victoria and Toña, as well as having some good Nicaraguan rum called Flor de Caña, which was smooth and excellent—I even liked it just having a sip on the rocks! Drinking is a big part of the culture here, for better or worse; the brother of my host, Jairo, tells me that he used to start drinking at 9:00 am, and continue throughout the day, spending upwards of $50 a day on rum alone, and his story seems to be pretty common here. As for dancing, we didn’t get a very good sampling of the local ability at Café Nuit because it was full of foreigners (including more than a few frat boys, one of whom took off his shirt, tried to climb one of the trees in the bar courtyard and got thrown out). There was a decent live band, and the setting of the bar itself was pretty cool—the bar and the dance floor were covered, as well as part of the seating area, but about half of the bar was roof-less, with vines and big tropical flowers around the tables.

After staying out much later than we said we would, Roberta, Steve and I got up at 8:00 to go on a canopy tour on the east face of the volcano Mombacho. We—along with a few other people—piled into the back of a land rover-esque van/truck and proceeded to bounce along for about an hour, up a small mountain “road” (essentially a little arroyo just wide enough for the car, with an uneven bed and big rocks in the way). Not what you might call a hangover cure…. Despite our upset stomachs, the ride was worth the view from the coffee plantation over which we zip-lined. It was funny for me—having facilitated ropes courses—to be a participant and not a guide, but I enjoyed myself thoroughly. I was hoping to see more birds, and also to have the guides give us some local history or talk about the plantation a little, but it was pretty much just the zip lines. Not that I’m complaining! The best part was the very end—rappelling down a HUGE tree, in free fall for a couple of seconds. After coming down, we took a short walk through the plantation back to the main house, where we had some delicious coffee before bouncing off back down the mountain.

Saturday evening I decided that I would eat dinner in town—as much as I like gallo pinto (beans and rice), I’d been having an acute craving for a big salad. Steve recommended a place called “El Tercer Ojo” (The Third Eye)—as the name implies, a very new-agey restaurant with Buddha statues and various vegetarian dishes. While I was waiting for my food, I browsed one of the bookshelves near my table, and found a bilingual collection of Walt Whitman’s poetry. I took it back to my table with the intention of trying to read one of the poems I know well in Spanish, but ended up reading “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” in English, stunned once more by Whitman’s genius—such a strong voice, speaking to me out of that poem (as indeed the speaker says that he will) from across the last hundred years. I don’t know when I last read that poem, but it was a joy to read it again.

After dinner I met up with Roberta and Steve again, for drinks. Saturday was Roberta’s last day, so we wanted to give her a send off. We didn’t have any particular location in mind, so we walked down La Calzada—the main touristy street that goes from the cathedral in the center of town down to the lake—because we could hear music coming from there, and there seemed to be a lot of locals walking that way. What we found was “Carnival”: it seems to be a yearly exhibition of music and dance sponsored by various local bars, radio stations and other companies. What luck! We saw a preliminary round of a beauty pageant, some mediocre rap, beautiful and lively folk dances—from both the Caribbean and Pacific cultures of Nicaragua—some amazing break dancing, and one group of three women who danced with a little girl who couldn’t have been more than 4, and could shake her hips better than I can! Music is so integral to the culture here that they must all learn a sense of rhythm in a much more deep way than we do—practicing dance moves in front of the TV while still in diapers and listening to music all day. It was a great send off for Roberta.

Today I went to church. I decided that since something like 90-95% of the population here is Roman Catholic, that this would be a good place to experience a Catholic mass. It was a great people watching opportunity, and though the echoes in the cathedral made it hard for me to understand what was being said, I liked watching all of the pomp and ritual that goes with the mass. From what little I could catch of the sermon it sounded like it was about science and the church. I wish I could have understood more of it—the only complete point that I understood was when the priest pointed out that the universities in Europe all started out in the church. I’m not sure whether he was then saying that for this reason the church ought to be more accepting of science and its goals, or whether he was preaching for a return of science to the values of its roots. All in all, it was a lot of stand-sit-stand-sit-pray-sit-stand-pray, and some pretty hymns. I like the way churches sound when they are full of people.

When I got back to the house I was exhausted! I laid down for a nap, set my watch to go off after about 15 minutes, and woke up an hour and a half later feeling very odd. I got up, and went out for a walk to wake myself up a bit, and started to feel much better. I walked up to the old train station, where there is a park called Parque Sandino, named for the man who inspired the Sandinista movement. Apart from its political content (a statue of Augusto Cesár Sandino with plaque), the park has a series of sculptures in the shape of heads with poems and poem fragments written on them. It was raining, but I had my umbrella and it felt oddly appropriate to be walking around this park reading poetry in the rain. I want to go back during the week—I think that there’s a museum of some kind in the old train station, and it looked like you might be able to get tea/coffee/snacks at the park as well.

Tomorrow, back to the grindstone for week two!