June 9, 2014
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| Common Patio Area |
I had registered with a school called Spanish Dale! before I
got to Granada. When I signed up, I
asked them to arrange for me to stay with a family. I had done this a few times before in Mexico
and Italy and always found it to be both cheaper and more comfortable than
staying in a hotel or apartment.
Depending on the family, it sometimes offered me the chance to practice
my language skills. The house where I
stayed in Granada was quite large. It
had two beautifully landscaped patios.
On the street side of the house, there were a garage and a couple of
rooms used by the family. Then came a
large patio with a wall on the left side and shady arcades on the other three
sides. A large fountain dominated the
patio. The arcades served as the living
room. They were furnished with several
groupings of chairs. The walls were hung
with numerous pictures of buildings in Granada painted by Fatima's father. There were also many
elegant chests and tables of dark tropical hard woods, covered with a
collection of knickknacks that made the place feel like a cross between a
museum and the home of a grandmother, which, of course, it was. The owner’s name was Fatima and she spent her
days surrounded by her daughters, granddaughter and great grandchildren.
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| My Room in Granada |
On the far side of the patio was a dining room with a
kitchen behind that. To the right,
opposite the kitchen and lining the second patio behind that, were at least four bedrooms. As near as I could tell, three of them were rented to guests. A couple
of them were triples. When full, there
were seven of us staying there.
Unfortunately, this made it feel more like a bed and breakfast than a
family home and the table conversation was mostly in English. Bernarda, whom I took to be Fatima’s daughter,
cooked three meals a day for us and the food was excellent, if a little heavy on the rice and beans. Some
other women cleaned, but I think they were hired help, since they only appeared
in the morning and early afternoon.
Family members came and went. It
was tough to tell who actually lived there besides Fatima, Bernarda and
Bernarda’s husband. There was decent
Wi-Fi in the front patio, but it only reached as far as my room towards the
rear of the house when they remembered to turn on the repeater.
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| Hotel Housing Spanish Dale! |
The school was housed in a large hotel near the center of
town. Like most Spanish schools in
Central
America outside of Mexico, instruction was one on one. Students and their teachers met in the rear
passageways of the hotel. It was quiet
and shady back there. There seemed to be
two other students besides myself, both of whom were young women from England
in their early twenties. My teacher’s
name was Arleen. She was a woman in her
late thirties. She knew her grammar well
and was a good teacher. The first day,
we spent a lot of time conversing so that she could evaluate my Spanish
abilities and then we made a mad dash through the present and simple past
tenses, making sure I had a handle on the irregular verbs. As I suspected, I knew these pretty well and
could complete exercises accurately, but often made errors when speaking
without taking time to think. It was
good to have someone to point out these errors.
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| My "Classroom" |
Nicaraguan Spanish differed slightly from Spanish in other
parts of the world. While the word for
“car” in Spain and, at least formally, in Mexico is “coche,” in Nicaragua,
“coche” denotes an actual carriage drawn by horses. Carriages are not in common use in most countries,
these days, but in Nicaragua they are.
Nicaraguans refer to “cars” as “carros” or “autos.” Arleen completely failed to understand the
phrase “darse cuenta,” which is quite common in Spanish literature and means to
“become aware of.” I had to give up on
that one, relegating it to the category of strange things they say in
Spain. Reading a lot in Spanish has
increased my vocabulary, but not always in a useful way. Since Arleen had not had the opportunity to
prepare any homework for me, I got off easy on my first day. We worked from 8:00 to noon and then I went
home for lunch.
The food at the house where I stayed was quite tasty, if not
overly plentiful. For breakfast, I had a
banana and a bowl of fruit salad with a (somewhat stale) roll and coffee. Lunch was a chicken leg in a spinach cream
sauce with beans, rice, plantains and salad.
Dinner was a piece of sausage with more beans and rice, a piece of salty
Nicaraguan cheese and half a piece of what looked like pita bread. The guests ate in the formal dining room, at
a table set with a tablecloth and place mats.
There was a small water dispenser in the center of the table. After lunch, I sat in the living area and worked
on my blog for a couple of hours. I went
back to the school at 3:00 to go on an outing to Las Isletas.
I took a short walk to Calle Calzada, the tourist street, to
check out the action there. It was
pretty deserted, although I could see that it was lined with restaurants, bars,
shops, and tour companies. It was hot
and I was thirsty, so I stopped for a quick (and thankfully ice cold) beer on
the covered patio of one of the restaurants.
Then I walked back uptown to my house so as not to be late for
dinner. Dinner was served at 6:00 and,
although I tried to read after dinner, the beer caught up with me and I just
couldn’t stay awake. I napped until
9:00, when I managed to get up to write for at least a couple of hours before
returning to sleep.
June 10, 2014
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| Street View of My House in Granada |
I spent the morning reviewing the finer points of when to
use which past tense in Spanish. I did
pretty well with this, with the exception of certain idiomatic phrases that
require specific tenses outside of all apparent logic. Of course, there are many of those in
Spanish. My teacher had warned me that she
would be giving me some translation exercises to do. I had assumed that this would be my homework,
but she made me do it on the fly. I read
out loud from a book in English, translating to Spanish as I went. That actually went very well. I was surprised. I had much more practice in translating from
Spanish to English.
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| Fortaleza La Polvora |
I went home for lunch after class. I don’t norm-ally eat grains, pota-toes or
le-
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| Granada Street Scene |
gumes. My lunch consisted of a small
piece of pork with rice, beans, potatoes and plantains. No wonder I was hungry all the time. All that starch was messing with my
hormones. It was a good thing I wasn’t
staying longer, although the quality of the Spanish instruction was making me
consider extending my stay. After lunch,
I went for a walk up to the Fortaleza La Polvora (literally dusty fort), a
Spanish fort built in the 18
th century to protect the city from the ravages of pirates sailing across the lake from the Caribbean. There was a museum there, but it was
closed. I returned via a different
street, passing a couple of interesting churches on my way to the grocery
store. Granada changes rapidly once you
leave the tourist streets. A little girl
about 11 years old stopped me to warn me to put my camera away lest a thief on
a bicycle grab it. She then gave me a
tale of woe about how her father had died and they had nothing to eat. I didn’t know if she was telling the truth or
not, but she was so sweet that I gave here all the coins in my purse, which
elicited a huge smile and profusion of thanks.
I managed to reach the main shopping street (for locals, not
tourists) without being robbed and headed off towards the supermarket. My watch band had been on its last legs for
some time, so I stopped at a stall operated by a little old man to see if he
could provide me with a new one. Having
tried to buy a band for the watch before, I knew it was an odd size. The only one he had was an ugly plastic one,
but at less than $2, I figured it would keep me from losing my watch until I
found a better one and making a sale made him happy. The supermarket was hidden behind a big gate
and I walked right past it the first time.
When the pavement started to give out, I figured I had gone too far and
turned around. I found it on the second
pass. The Pali chain of supermarkets in
Nicaragua have all the charm of Costco with a selection little better than
7-11. I managed to buy some snacks and
something cold to drink, but couldn’t find any chocolate other than M&Ms,
which I was thankfully able to resist. I
left via the back gate, which led into a quieter street and took that back to
my neighborhood. I spent the rest of the
afternoon struggling with idiomatic phrases and the subtle changes in meaning
when used with different tenses. Mostly,
I just managed to confuse myself. I was
glad when dinnertime came. Dinner was a
small fried pupusa-like thing and another egg-foo-yung sort of patty covered
with spaghetti sauce, served with rice and beans. Everything tasted good, even if we couldn’t
identify what we were eating.
June 11, 2014
A group of high school girls from Wisconsin had arrived
during the night and I met them at breakfast.
The two groups of girls were staying three to a room and it made for a
very full house, as some of Fatima’s grandchildren were visiting also. I felt like a grandmother, too, even though
they were all nice girls. I was starting
to crave adult conversation, since I had hardly spoken with anyone my own age
for more than two weeks. I dropped my
dirty clothes off at the laundry and then spent the morning reviewing the
subjunctive tenses and translating an American history textbook into
Spanish. All of that went surprisingly
well. I must have absorbed more grammar
than I realized over the years. It was
just the idiomatic phrases that continued to confound me. Unfortunately, there was a big difference
between being able to complete exercises or translate written material and
being able to construct original sentences during a conversation. I may have known the grammar, but wasn’t
always able to access it on the fly.
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| The Front Patio |
After class, I came home for lunch. I had a nice conversation, after lunch, with
one of the male family members about my age.
He was tough to understand, but I gathered that he was from Jinotega,
near where I had been in Matagalpa, and had spent his youth traveling through
the mountains, selling goods to the people in remote communities. He said that he did this alone from the age
of 14, but that now it was very dangerous there as there were a lot of
bandits. He complained that young people
today had no respect. I hung around the
house for a couple of hours and did my homework. Then I took a short walk to the Convent of
San Francisco, the oldest church in Granada, built in 1529. On the way, I stopped into a travel agency
and reserved a shuttle to take me to San Jorge on Friday, where I could get a
ferry to the island of Ometepe. While
the shuttle was much more expensive than taking the bus, I could afford $15 to
avoid having to drag my luggage to the bus terminal and then change buses in
Rivas and get a cab to the ferry. It was
very warm, so I ducked into the Casa de Café for a coffee frappe and some air conditioned
Wi-Fi. I remained there, reviewing the
use of object pronouns, until it was time to meet my classmates for a carriage
tour of Granada.
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| Our Carriage |
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| Old Hospital |
The two English girls, my teacher and I took a carriage tour
at 5:00 when it had cooled down a bit. I
got a kick out of the cellular company advertisements painted on the horse
drawn carriage. Our driver was a very
good guide. He drove us all around
Granada and told us the history of the important buildings in easily understood Spanish. In city traffic, a horse and carriage can go
as fast as a car. He used hand signals
when turning. The tour was handy in that
we were able to visit a couple of interesting locations where I would not have
felt secure going on foot. Granada gets
sketchy quickly once you leave the main tourist arteries. One of these locations was the old hospital. It had only been abandoned for about 20
years, but looked haunted and creepy, especially on a cloudy late
afternoon. I also learned that a house
around the corner from mine was the oldest house in Granada and had been
occupied by William Walker, the American mercenary hired during the civil war
between Leon and Granada who declared himself president of Nicaragua after
killing the former president. He was
later ousted, but returned in 1857 to burn Granada to the ground. The whole tour took about 45 minutes.
The woman at the laundry was told me my clothes would be
ready at 5:30, but when I arrived at 5:45, she said it would be another 30
minutes. I went home and ate a dinner of
taquitos, rice, and beans and then returned to the laundry at 6:30. My clothes still weren’t ready and, although
they told me it would just be a few minutes I had to wait until after
7:00. The laundry was in the lobby of a
building that must have been some type of recreation center. There was a dance class going on and I was
surprised to see more boys than girls dancing.
I enjoyed listening to the music and watching them a bit. There seemed to be a martial arts class going
on upstairs and the kids were running down the stairs and then jumping back up,
two or three steps at a time. It
reminded me of box jumping in CrossFit.
I felt like I should have joined them.
Eventually, my clothes were ready and I beat a quick retreat up the
darkened street to my house.
June 12, 2014
I spent Thursday morning reviewing the conditional and subjunctive tenses and reading about the origin of the Spanish language. A turtle ambled around the garden in the hotel and a hummingbird visited the hibiscus blossoms near where we were sitting. Nicaraguan hummingbirds are drab brown creatures, nothing like the jewel green ones I am accustomed to seeing in California. It was hot. I went home for lunch and had all kinds of ambitions for the afternoon, but ended up taking a nap and staying in to work on my homework. The coffee I had in the afternoon the day before had kept me up half the night, so I didn't want to perpetuate the problem by having another iced latte. Granada lacked the numerous tiendas selling sodas, water and beer that I was accustomed to visit, so it was difficult to find a cold drink without going to a restaurant or bar. It was good to take a break from drinking, but I was starting to crave a cold beer in the evening. I hoped Ometepe would be more convenient.
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| Xalteva Park, the Site of the Original Indigenous Village |
Dinner was fried, smoked cheese with salsa over a bed of plantains and, of course, beans and rice. While I was napping, someone painted the columns around the front patio. I got the feeling that Fatima's hobby was decorating the house. She was constantly altering something or changing a flower arrangement. She must have inherited some of her father's artistic sense. She had added a water dispenser in my room while I was in class.
I was very tempted to stay and study for another week, but Ometepe and Costa Rica beckoned and I was starved for fish, adult company and a cold beer. It was time to move on.
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