bye, March!

The Month of March has almost completely come and gone already and I'm finally sitting down to write a blog entry. Oops.

My boyfriend was here from March 6-12th. This was his fourth visit...he'll be fluent in Spanish any day now! We decided to bare the 6 hour trip up to the northern part of Nicaragua to see the Somoto Canyon. The canyon was beautiful and the tour the guide/local gave us was really fun. We hiked parts of the canyon and swam the parts that couldn't be hiked. We took a pit stop in Esteli on the way back to my town to see what all the rage was about there. There wasn't much to do besides wander around, eat, spend 10 minutes in a Sandinista museum and about 3 hours looking for a non-existent Italian restaurant in my guidebook. Then we went to Granada where we spent another day wandering and eating.

Then I went back to work for less than a week before I went back to the airport, but this time to pick up my younger sister. We went to the Mombacho Volcano and did the longer of the two trails around the craters, which I'd never done before. After, we waited way too long for a bus to Granada to get lunch, at about 4pm. We proceeded to miss the last bus from Granada to my town and had to take a long, roundabout way back, exhausting our patience with the buses. The next day we went to the favorite Laguna de Apoyo where we stayed the night for free thanks to my grandparents. We relaxed and ate guacamole and other yummy food we brought to cook. Then we went to the Masaya Volcano and passed through the market on the way back to my town. We spent the next couple days just hanging around in my house/town, going to the nearby river, going to some of my classes and cooking. We got corn kernels in the market and had them ground at the town mill. My sister turned it into corn bread which, due to a probably gluten-contaminated mill, she couldn't even eat! So I had to bare down and eat it all by myself...what a drag. We also managed to lose my pet turtle by letting him out of his bowl to walk around in the yard. Whenever I did that before he would always bury himself in my compost pile. When we couldn't find him after about 20 minutes we completely undug all of the compost without any luck. Apparently he's an land turtle as opposed to a water turtle and is probably happier underground. We had a really fun time and it was nice to see her and show her around Nicaragua.

Now I'm finally back to work. People haven't forgotten about me which is good. I was a little worried about missing so much school, but I have until November to make up for those two weeks and it's not everyday that my boyfriend and sister can come visit, so I think they'll forgive me.