On Sunday, I hear church bells.
Citizens stay close to home and tourists are carried through empty streets in horse drawn carriages with flowers braided in the horse’s manes .A few retail stores are open around the plaza and taxi’s lollygag in front of hotels.Waiters stand in their dining rooms watching soccer on television. Moms and dads tend to children and older parents.
On Monday, the sounds change.
On Monday, there is a great flowing of people out of their homes and sidewalks become outdoor grocery stores with baskets, buckets, wheelbarrows filled with beans, berries, apples, citrus, lettuce, rice and staples. Workmen carry scaffolding, pick up paint brushes, swing machetes, keep streets swept clear of trash. Everywhere there are people in motion, bright colors, conversations, money changing hands for goods and services.
According to facts, Nicaragua is one the world’s poorest countries.Only a third of children finish primary school and much of the population stay poor. It is a country of great natural wonders and biodiversity and is visited by tourists from around the globe. Nicaraguan’s value family and are famous for their hospitality. Their culture is one of European, African, and Caribbean influences.On Monday, I start in line at a BAC bank changing two five hundred Cordoba notes just pulled from their ATM machine because local merchants are reticent to take them. There are seven people ahead of me doing bank business and next time I will use the money changer in the street outside who wears a ball cap and has a wad of money in his right hand.A funeral proceeds down the street outside with a long line of mourners following a black hearse with white curtains in the windows to the Cemetario.On Mondays, the living get back to the job of living.
I order an omelet, toast, and black coffee.
The Cafe de Arte is on a side street in the Historical District and traffic is thin this Sunday morning around seven.
There is a bookcase near a corner of the dining area where browsers find books to go with their eggs. Displayed art, done by local folks, portray agrarian scenes and stylized portraits of life in Nicaragua. A Trip Adviser sticker on a merchandising case tells me I am not the first to patronize this eatery.
A couple enter after I have been here about ten minutes, and then another older gentleman shuffles in and takes a chair with a view out the front door.
In this place where horse drawn carriages clatter on the streets outside, couples do what they normally like to do. The old gentleman looks at his phone and connects to wifi. He has seen changes in his lifetime and one of the worst is not being able to walk without fear of falling.
Home bases and food are two things I settle on first in a new place. If I have a good home base and have a good place to eat, I am most of the way to my nirvana.
My Denver omelet in Granada, it turns out,tastes the same in Nicaragua as it does in Denver.
The Vista Mombacho Apartments are in a residential neighborhood in Granada. From the outside, their appearance is unspectacular, but, inside, the architecture, furnishings and decorations are nicely done.
This pool courtyard is shaded and protected on one side by a tall blue wall covered by green ivy and, on the other side, massive walls of the apartment complex. There are no ” Swim at your own Risk ” signs and, as of yet, I have been the only guest using the pool. Sheets and towels drying on an old fashioned clothes line say that someone else is staying here and we are both lost in the 1950’s.
The water is warm with no need for a heater and the pool slopes from three feet in the shallow to seven feet in the deep. It needs a coat of baby blue paint.
In Granada, old is not ashamed.
There is much about ancient history that reminds me of our times as I float on my back in the water. stretch out my arms and legs, fill my lungs with air till I become a balloon, and become a target for passing birds.
Floating in the pool, under clouds, I am only different from ancient man in the things I have been forced to learn that he didn’t even know about.
Airport security is what it always is; intrusive, obnoxious, unproductive, insulting. From standing in front of the x ray scanner with your hands above your head, to a quick pat down by a uniformed government servant, it is hard to ever feel this is for my own good.
Once I clear scrutiny, I eventually end at my proper gate where i wait more, finally board my latest jet and fly for my sixth travel ring in the belly of a gussied up tin can.
Houston to Managua is a boring three hours in the air and standing in Managua, going through Customs, travelers who have been here before share their travel adventures in loud voices you can’t escape.
” Last time down we shot a hell of a lot of ducks, ” a middle aged man with a Hemingway beard and a protruding stomach tells me. ” I’m staying at the Hotel Alhambra. My friends and me come down here three or four times a year. ”
Customs goes quickly and paying a $10 entry fee to get into Nicaragua I smile for a camera mounted on the Custom officer’s booth window as he stamps my passport.
Martine, my pre-arranged shuttle driver, is waiting for me outside the terminal, holding a sign with my name on it. It is night and he is paid to get me to my lodgings.
” Welcome to Nicaragua, ” he says, in English, with a smile.
The United States is behind me, Nicaragua is in front of me.
Why so many people leave the U.S. looking for paradise is a Graduate student’s dissertation I would pay to read and actually read.
In the middle of the night, on our way to Granada, I can’t see anything of what I have gotten myself into, only know that another place on a world map is about to unfold for me.
I’m glad, as Martine navigates the dark narrow roads, that I’m not a duck.
We return our golf cart.
The cart jockey is a tiny man wearing shorts, tennis shoes with big socks, a blue faded ball cap. There are four carts ahead of ours that he has to clean, toss trash, wipe down seats, check gas, and inspect. We use golf carts because they speed up our play and that, in theory, helps us score better.
At my feet is a small key with a number 3 on it. Barely visible, I pick it up, bend it, watch it spring back to its original position. It isn’t a real golf cart key because they are metal and a different shape.
I ask the little Irishman with blond hair pushing out from under the sides of his ball cap what my found key goes to?
He looks a moment while he wipes down a cart seat.
” That’s the key to the box of Forgotten Dreams. ”
There are many keys in this world. Keys to lock boxes, keys to offices and homes, keys to cars, keys to your heart.
All the dreams in the world aren’t much good if you forget where you put them.
As we head back to the car, I hear him whistling ” Danny Boy. ”
I believe he has a box full of dreams under his bed that he opens frequently.
I-40 runs through Albuquerque’s midsection like a Mexican leather belt with a big rodeo buckle.
At I-40 and Carlisle in Albuquerque is a new ” Green Jeans” shopping center built using shipping containers, Albuquerque’s new building material craze. While the old woman who lives in a shoe is a theme of yesteryear, the Santa Fe Brewing Company, along with a local builder, Roy Solomon,have created a new urban retail center combining shipping containers and more traditional materials.
People are on the move in our 21st century and you can easily be asleep in Albuquerque tonight and wake up tomorrow in Singapore. Shipping containers are generic, sexless, and have no personality. They are big Lego’s; easy to move, stack, transform. They fit our generic drug, unisex bathrooms,one size fits all world.
Doing investigative research on shipping container building with Alex, the architect, we visit, see, and leave the new shopping and dining complex feeling the place is well done but not that exciting or cost effective.
Where I want is to live is in my own container mounted on the deck of a huge oil tanker sailing to the world’s ports, having scrambled eggs and bacon with green chili for breakfast, as we round the Cape of Good Hope.
Till that happens, Green Jeans, with its craft beer, home made tacos and stacked containers, will have to do.
Things get new names.
Route 66 becomes Interstate-40. Bruce Jenner becomes Caitlyn Jenner. British Honduras becomes Belize. Climate warming becomes a Religion. Kentucky Fried Chicken becomes KFC.
Before Truth or Consequences adopted its new name in the 1950’s, to promote a popular television show,this sleepy New Mexico burg was called Hot Springs.
For hundreds of years, Indians, cowboys and locals partook of mineral baths by the Rio Grande river. They put differences aside, slipped into above 100 degree waters, and looked out across the river towards the mountains where they hunted. In old times, before Elephant Butte Dam, the Rio Grande ran deeper and swifter. There are times of the year now when the river runs dry as southern New Mexico chili farmers scramble to pull allotted water and flood their fields.
While you soak you can watch ducks bob in the Rio Grande or follow the trend line of Turtle Back mountain from its tail to the tip of its nose. For fifteen dollars an hour you have your own personal retreat, cool the upper half of your body as your lower half cooks like a chicken in a crock pot.
Names change.
Conservative and liberal are not what their parents named them. Going to war to make peace is an old song. Spending your way to prosperity is preached from pulpit and podium. Voting for the least of two evils is how we participate in our Constitutional Republic.
When things get rough, soaking in hot mineral springs on a cool morning is a perfect tonic- no matter what they are named..
T or C is a place that sounds a whole lot more interesting than it will ever be and hot mineral baths take a little chill out of this winter that seems to drag on and on and on.
This sweet roll is pure Texas.
Tired of omelets, biscuits and gravy, toast, waffles, steaks with eggs over easy, diners can always opt for a non-politically correct sweet roll breakfast that Lyle Lovett would feature in his kind of songs.
This roll fills a plate instead of a saucer. It would go well on Caesar’s table at a fine Roman buffet where elites dine with the Emperor served by slaves and entertained by musicians and dancing girls.
This morning Dave and the Russian Vera join forces, one with a fork and the other a knife. The roll is carefully, surgically divided into smaller bites and by the end of breakfast they have finished half and put the other half in a takeout box.
I look for togas here but people in Pier 19 are wearing windbreakers and baseball caps and look middle class. We sometimes think we have a Caesar in the White House,but, so far, American Caesar’s don’t have a professional food taster, don’t get killed too often, and are kicked out of office after eight years if they can fool the voters two elections in a row.
Vera will have to walk miles to recover from this decadence.
Dave never gains weight but he will need a smoke before breakfast is done.
E-Harmony, from what I have learned about it, is doing as much for foreign relations as all our American Ambassadors put together.
At seven in the morning, you show yourself down several hallways into the restaurant.
Giovanni or one of the girls gets a pot of coffee and a full cup to me when they see me. When the wind blows I can feel the entire pier swing its hips like a drunk hula girl. It is five o’ clock somewhere and Jimmie Buffet Drive runs right through our dining area to the bar where Happy Hour begins when someone starts a fish story and the bar girl pours her first round.
At seven in the morning, this restaurant has an odd feel. Everything slants to the left and the guys who built the place must have had their heads in Margaritaville when they picked up their hammers and screw guns and measured their cuts.
By seven thirty, my order is on the wheel and cooks are scrambling eggs, frying bacon, making biscuits and gravy.
Sitting near the kitchen I listen to them talking about parties and during Spring Break plates will fly through their serving window as fast as they can fix them as they break their necks looking at girls in bikini’s, or less.
By eight, the sun is warming me through single pane windows and a pelican on top of a close by pier post in my line of sight is grooming.
Deckhands on the Osprey are out swabbing decks, loading poles and ice coolers filled with drinks, sandwiches and bait shrimp. In the gift shop, a clerk runs credit cards for men and women going out to fish this morning on the Osprey.
At seven, the world looks screwy. By nine, kinks are worked out.
South Padre Island, when you look at its aerial photograph on the wall, looks like a shark’s tooth.
I keep a sharp eye out for one legged sailors.
They are my canary in the mine shaft.
The sky is burning and, if it wasn’t, there would be no reason to snap this photo.
Joan, Neal’s wife, and the rest of us, all stare as we all walk towards the Shrimp Haus, a South Padre Island restaurant that features shrimp, shrimp, and more shrimp – boiled, breaded, fried, cooked or uncooked with salad bar and side orders of fries, potato salad or cole slaw.
The sky’s colors look like Matzatlan sunsets, sunrise in Ambergris Caye, the sun sinking in New Mexico, Arizona, Texas.
For a moment it seems the clouds are waves and the entire world has turned upside down with the top becoming the bottom and the bottom becoming the top. Palm trees, that the wind shakes, are cheerleader’s pom poms at this heavenly football game..
Mother Nature waves her flag and is impossible to ignore, diminish, or trump.
Tomorrow morning, we will be presented a different light show.
Sunrise and sunset are bookmarks in nature’s novel.
Being together is a good thing.
Recent Comments