Matagalpa

Karina

and I went to Matagalpa this weekend, a town up north in the mountains. (he mountain picure is a view from our hotel. Because of my Sunday english class, it's hard for me to get away sometimes.

Matagalpa is an interesting city. The climate was extremely refreshing after being in the intense unrelenting heat of Managua all the time. (The heat has really been unbearable... I take the bus every day at 9:30AM across the city and then have to walk to catch the connecting bus that takes me to the centro. Although I don't have to walk far, I'm covered in sweat and completely worn out. Then I teach english in the afternoon in a furnace of a classroom with no air flow, where extremely loud buses pass every few minutes raising up a cloud of dust that could kill you.)

So back to Matagalpa, we went to a delicious Italian restaurant with a beautiful back patio full of plants and bright blue walls. We ate a huge salad and spaghetti with broccoli and olive oil, just like you make at home, mom! We wandered around the city, running into an AIDS prevention festival and a micro-producers fair where we bought black pottery and locally made chocolate bars. In the evening, we ate Mexican tacos (so much better than the fried Nica tacos) and went to the Grupo Venancia cultural center where a bohemian crowd was listening to a group play Silvio Rodriguez music and singing along. It is apparently the place to be on Saturdays.

On Sunday we woke up early and went to Selva Negra (I think they have a website if you google it), a coffee plantation owned by a German family that was the first immigrant family to start growing coffee in Nicaragua. We hiked in the forest on their land and just enjoyed being in fresh air...