30th of july

our second day in a glorious city of leon, which is full of lion statues in the center, started with a visit to a bakery for some fresh pasteries and juice and continued to the market square where we took a bus to the village by the sea. life here starts really early and one hears cars and horses too driving and passing by the window at some 5am already. by some 8am streets are full of people selling things, going here and there and performing their daily activities. compared with honduras the street scenery here is poorer, people don`t tend to have as "just-out-of-laundry" clothes, but it is also understandable due to the difficulties the country has suffered during the past 30 years. where honduras is full of american franchise chains like popeyes, wendy´s and such, nicaragua is not even contaminated with mcdonald´s i think. not that anyone really misses that junkfood anyways. so, a big plus in this sense.

on the bus to the village of las peñitas there was this elderly gentleman who looked at us in this curious way. marianne and i were slightly puzzled by it but then the gentleman suddenly stated in swedish that we were talking swedish and asked where we came from. he spoke the language very fluently and had lived in sweden for many years in the 80´s. apart from that he knew that tarja halonen had lived in nicaragua and in general showed a very positive attitude towards finland :) it felt a bit odd to be speaking swedish to someone in las peñitas where the local people could not really tell that marianne and i were not speaking english and hence were not from US.

the next stop we had to make in las peñitas, pretty much straight away when we got off the bus, was at the nearest restaurant in order to get some lunch. the owner was this really nice german woman and so we decided to test our luck and order a soup with seafood and fish in it. once that soup arrived we were speachless. it was a huge bowl of the most delicious coconut milk based soup with bananas, veggies and most importanly an entire fish and and entire crab among other things like shrimps etc. that was the soup of the soups (the price being 5 dollars). the only problem was that we were not given any tools in order to crack that soft ball sized crab and so marianne and i had to use all (well almost all) our energy and direct all that brain activity into cracking the crab with only a spoon and a stick for the teeth. we succeeded in the end, even though the crab was fighting back even dead floating in the soup. i got a long cut on the finger and was bleeding for quite a while but managed to get that delicious crabmeat. way better by the way than any fish fingers you´d get back at home!that was a training for our journey to the corn islands where we might encounter difficulties finding food and might have to adopt a robinson cruso life style.

by the time we were done with the crabs and such the weather looked perfect for the beach. i was going to take my first dip in the pacific ocean. once walking down that beach, which has nothing to do with the carribean beaches by the way i sort of figured out how impossible it was to swim in that so called pacific ocean. the sand on the beach was black because of the volcanic dust and the waves were ferrocious!marianne concluded that it was exactly like in ecuador and that is why she hates the pacific. it drags you back in the water even though you are almost 10m away from the actual wave. poor marianne was knocked over a few times and gained yet another big bruise on the leg. the rest of the time on the beach was dedicated to bargaining with these smart little boys that would try to sell you all sort of necklaces from shells and such things. one of those little fellows bugged marianne for quite a while because his bullet-proof argument was that since marianne comes from such a country as finland which is very expensive everything must be really cheap for her here and hence she should definitely buy all of his stuff. not bad at all for a 10 year old chap!finally loaded with some 4 necklaces we hopped on the next bus that took us back to leon. on the way there marianne started suspecting that that shrimp allergy might actually be real and that last time (in la ceiba) she had exactly the same feeling prior to vomiting all night. not good!well, it was not all night this time, but a good chunk of our time was spent wondering whether her stomack would get better or worse and partly because of that (the heavy rain did affect our decision too though) we had to miss a concert of a nicaraguan band that was performing that night and which has actually very good music. pity, but well maybe next time.

before going to bed though i went out to that one bookshop to get the latest novel of the nicaraguan writer gioconda belli and got involved in like an hour long discussion with an owner of the shop. he was a typical supertalkative nicaraguan fellow who would tell you aaaalll about any subject you would touch upon and so i got a free lecture on the geography, history and a current political and economic situation of nicaragua. main point being "we have to fight the evil empire" and to be honest he had a lot of common sense in what he was saying. che with his gaze into eternity, hanging on the wall of the shop must have agreed entirely with the owner.