Random Things I Love in Nicaragua #8: Non-Consumer Culture

The man in the photo is pushing a cart on wheels down the main road into San Juan del Sur. Stacked on his cart are wooden chairs that have had the weaving redone. I’m guessing he’s walking the cart rather than riding the bicycle that’s attached to the cart for better control of the unwieldy load. Nicaragua is not a consumer-oriented culture. Here things are repaired, reused, recycled. Here things are used up and then likely still repaired, reused, recycled. I have 18” worth of clothes hangers with clothes hanging on them in my closet, and one drawer, versus the …

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Random Things I Love in Nicaragua #7: A Perpetual NOW

NOW is the last owl call in the grey dawn light. The morning bird song. The rooster. NOW is the dusty rutted dirt road below my rubber sandals. The chickens pecking amongst the garbage. The guard dog straining against his rope, teeth barred and snarling. NOW is the tide. Low. High. Waves breaking. Pelicans diving. Magnificent Frigatebirds soaring above us all. NOW is walking in town, eyes cast down. Looking for potholes. Looking for dog poop. Weaving out to the road, around the parked cars, back to the sidewalk, around the vendors, past the drivers yelling Taxi! Taxi! NOW is …

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Random Things I Love in Nicaragua: #6 Permanent Summer

I see Facebook postings by friends in Colorado and Washington State showing luscious white snow against barren dark trees. I do not miss it. Not at all. Oh, I remember the squeak of snow underfoot when the temperatures dropped below Zero degrees F. I remember the stomping of my boots as I’d enter the door. The feel of my ungloved hands held up to the fire. I remember watching the snow flying up and out sideways from the snowblower John was pushing down our walkway. I remember it fondly from the 25 years we lived in the white stuff but …

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Random Things I Love in Nicaragua: #5 Open-air Yoga

I have been practicing yoga for 25 years and have taken classes in carpeted gyms, in converted classrooms with hard concrete floors and in a lovely log building above a high-mountain Colorado river. But my most favorite place is where I take my yoga classes now, at Zen Yoga in the heart of San Juan del Sur. It’s open-air. So you feel the breezes. And the heat when there is no breeze. You hear the birds. The rooster. The children at recess in the school next door. The school bell calling them back to class. The motorcycles. The door-to-door vendor …

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Random Things I Love in Nicaragua: #4 The Practicality of Solar Energy

Last year we hired Nicamisol, a company out of Managua, to install our home’s solar system. What a game changer! It is hot living by the beach in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua. Yesterday was one of the few days I can remember in almost 6 years of being here that I hiked the beach mid day and didn’t sweat at all. In other words, most days it’s so hot that I start sweating as soon as I walk out the door. Our house, a modern concrete/rebar structure with lots of glass facing west, was designed more for the views …

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Random Things I Love in Nicaragua: #3 The ability to walk everywhere

Last year at the start of the pandemic John and I decided we would walk everywhere we needed to go. We don’t own a car here and mostly walk everywhere anyway, but as a way to keep ourselves safe from Covid-19 we decided to decline the occasional rides in vehicles with other people, including taxis. Weeks of solely walking everywhere turned into months of our doing so, and then it became a personal challenge…could we possibly go a year? We went a year and a week to be exact. Then it became time to go to the States to get …

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Confusion and Two Hospitals: Nica Nugget #110

This time last year I was very sick. It’s taken me a year to write about it, and even now it feels too hard. Do I start at the beginning, at the party at our neighbor’s house – they’d just returned to their vacation home here in San Juan del Sur, from their home in San Diego and thought they were over their bout with the flu (Steve came down with pneumonia the next week). Or did we pick up the bug the week before at the Military Hospital in Managua, where we have our Insurance plan and had gone …

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This is Me in 2020

This is me in 2020. It was a year of reading.72 books, or thereabouts, about half of which were nonfiction and most of which were read on my hammock.2 were Classics: War and Peace, and Moby Dick.About 1/3 were audiobooks.All were free (via our son’s USA online library or The Fussy Librarian).My favorite nonfiction book was Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.My favorite fiction book was The Overstory by Richard Powers.Both made me feel like my brain was gloriously tripping on marijuana out in the wilderness and I was in my twenties. While reading them, I …

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