Santo Domingo

Even though I´ve only been gone for two weeks, it´s funny being back. I´ve traveled many times, but never come back home in the middle of my stay. I so quickly fell back into my Chicago life, my comfort zone, that it was strange to jump back to the chaos of Managua.

I ended up coming back the day of the patron saint festival. There was a procession across the city with a big altar of Santo Domingo, and an hipico, which is a kind of parade of horses. People come from all over the country with their horses, dressed in traditional costume, and march through the streets, making horses dance to the strains of music blasting from competing speaker systems. The city closed off some of the main arteries, the roads I take in the mornings to Puntos on the bus. It was cool to see them lined on all sides by food vendors and beer vendors, shouting out their competing prices for cans of Toña and Victoria. Collapsable stages every 20 feet tried to drown out their neighbors with strains of ranchera, reggaeton, or live music. One stage had some MTV-esque dancers shaking it on platforms. Vendors walked through the crowds selling straw and leather cowboy hats that I was very tempted to buy. The whole festival had this cowboy feel to it.

I of course came back to find my house a complete disaster and have been working on cleaning it little by little, including the nasty broken fridge, which is cleaner now than I´ve ever seen it before, thank god! And today I battled with Managuan traffic and heat again walking from my house to the centro, where I arrived to find that there hasn´t been electricity there for a week! (more about that later). But I felt more ready to enter this battle now that i had 2 weeks of just having to deal with Chicago and New York traffic, nothing compared to here!