Where I went on my winter vacation, part II

Some random pix and random thoughts from last week’s trip.

This is the Granada waterfront. Beautiful, isn’t it? It was only a mile’s walk from my B&B and at the end of what my host called the “Champs Elysees” (Calle Calzada, the European-style street with bars and restaurants catering to the tourist trade). I went there only on a carriage ride because my host was emphatic that it wasn’t a safe place for a lone woman to walk. Probably one of those circumstances where he should have added “at night.” Wish I’d spent more time there now.

But of course I did see my share of Lake Nicaragua. The tours always include a stop at a famous monkey island. The monkeys aren’t native, but (as I understand it) abandoned pets placed on the island by a veterinarian, who cares for them. They’re a famous attraction, nonetheless, and are trained to come right up to (and sometimes onto) boats.

This particular guy once tried to get off the island by climbing along an electrical wire. He’s missing most of his tail because of that little adventure. He grudgingly took vanilla wafers from the tour guide’s hand, but was clearly disappointed they weren’t Oreos. Turns out monkeys are as fond as children of prying the halves apart and licking out the creme filling.

The cemetery was an odd place. Vast and old. Quite sumptuous. The rich-people’s section is New Orleans-style, with nothing but above-ground crypts and lots of “angels in the architecture.” The poor go underground, beneath crude crosses, at the end of a dirt road where the carriages don’t go. Our carriage driver, Carmen, pointed dismissively to that far-off slum of the dead, even though by her words we could tell she expected to end up in some similar neighborhood someday.

The exception to the dramatic division between rich and poor: Five or six crypts like the one below cluster around the monument to Granada’s most infamous famous politician, in the most upper-crusty part of the burial ground. Soldiers’ crypts, it seems. Even though I understand from online guides that the cemetery has been mostly unused since 1922, the majority in these special crypts were born in the 1960s and died in the 1980s. Sandinista fighters, I presume.

There were definitely a few small corners of town specifically for English-speaking tourists.

And of course, the little street sign planted outside the Imagine Restaurant and Bar says “Abbey Road” on one side and “Penny Lane” on the other. I never went there because the prices and items on the menu posted outside were strictly from touristville (steaks for $14 or $15, rather than the Nigaraguan quesillos I got for $1.60 around the corner from the B&B).

I’m guessing the staffers hablan inglés in a place like that. But surprisingly, they didn’t in this place:

The “Going to the Dogs” exhibit was in a cafe whose menu board and signage was entirely in English. But my waitress spoke about as much inglés as I did español. When I asked about buying one of the pictures, she had to call over another woman — with whom I managed to communicate in a mongrel mixture of Spanglish, accidental Italian (yeah, I get mixed up), and gestures.

The paintings and drawings are of Nicaraguan street dogs. They’re by a South-African-Chicagoan-Granadan woman who feeds some of the local pack.

Finally, you remember the infamous “suicide shower” in my room at the B&B? Pretty funny, eh?

Well, when I got back in the USSA, I spent that first “homeland” night at a Motel 6 and was reminded — ridiculously — of the difference in safety attitudes and regulations between Murrican parts and furrin ones.

Is that a bathtub? Or some sort of torture chamber, bristling with all those metal bars?

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I’ll probably post once more about Nicaragua before I return fully to reality. Please feel free to ask any questions; I’ll do my best to answer.