In this blog entry I will describe my first impressions of Nicaragua in general and Granada and our house in particular.

Our house

Our house is about 2m off the street level. The footpath goes up some stairs to our door and the gate to get into the house. The front doors open straight onto the lounge room. To the right are some stairs that go up to a mezzanine level. before the stairs is the door to Dad and Bridget's room. Under the stairs is a door to the bathroom. Dad and Bridget's bedroom and the bathroom are under the mezzanine level. Straight across the lounge from the front doors is an opening to the dining room. There are three doors coming off the dining room: the one on the right, as soon as you go into the dining room from the lounge, is my room; the one on the far wall straight ahead past my bed room is one of the ways to get outside to the back porch; and the one on the far wall, but off to the left, goes into the kitchen. When you go into the kitchen from the dining room in the far right hand corner is another door to the back porch. The porch is undercover and looks onto the garden and around in front of the kitchen windows is an under cover laundry area too. There is also another bathroom out the back with a shower and toilet, but we never use them.

The garden

The garden has lots of plants and some trees that are all planted down the middle and it is very long. At the back of the garden there is a guanabana tree (custard apple tree), at the beginning of the garden the is an icaco tree (a coco plum tree) that has some very funny fruit. We have a guava tree that drops too many guavas and last but not least is our papaya that fell over very recently.

The lizards

We have lots of geckos in and around the house and they make little chirping noises when they talk to each other at night (that's why in Singapore they call them chit-chats). We have a bath gecko, a kitchen gecko, a morning gecko, a laptop gecko and a spider-man gecko that happens to be crawling up a wall every time I see him. We have a a little iguana that lives out the back too. We don't see it very often though.

Our furniture

When I first got here we only had two beds, a spare mattress, a few lamps some rocking chairs and coffee table and four fans. (Since I arrived we got a stereo and TV, two day beds, a chest of draws, bedside tables and two hammocks.

The streets and buildings of Granada

The streets in Granada are more bumpy and narrow than in Australia. And even though there are lots of cars and motorbikes and bicycles in Granada, you also see lots of people with horses pulling carts!

The buildings here are different too, it looks more like a village than a city here. Not many houses have front gardens and their front doors open straight onto the footpaths. All the houses are joined together too (at least in the center of town). They have a central park and all the buildings around it are big but as you get further away the buildings get smaller. A lot of the walls of the buildings are made of thick mud and straw bricks or big concrete breeze blocks and are plastered over and painted bright colours. All the doors and windows on the houses have wrought-iron gates and bars on them which are made into pretty patterns. They are painted black or white and sometimes other colours too.

The land around Granada

The most different thing from here to Australia are the volcanoes! Here in Granada there is a volcano called Mombacho. There are lots of lakes in Nicaragua too. Granada is on the edge of the the biggest lake in Nicaragua which is called Lago de Cocibolca.

The weather

Here in Nicaragua there are only two types of weather: hot and humid, and hot and rainy. The average temperature during the day is around 30 degrees all year around and never really gets much cooler. At night it stays quite warm too.

The people

When I first got to Nicaragua I saw people doing gardening with big machetes (they use machetes to cut grass and even to chop down trees). Outside the banks and lots of hotels and businesses there are security guards with big guns. There are street vendors, who sell all sorts of different things. Some move around and some that set up a table and chair and sit with their baskets of stuff. We see people on bikes just like in Australia but here you see whole families on one bike. One day Dad pointed out a a man on a bike with little baby girl on one of his legs and she was asleep leaning on his arm and was going up and down and up and down every time he pedalled. Lots of the time you see people with baskets of food or something balanced on their heads as they walk down the road. There are also old and sick people that don't have any family and don't have anybody to take care off them, and they will be sitting on the street and asking for money, but I don't think they like asking for money because they don't say it very loud.

The food

We went to lots of restaurants when I first got here because Nana was here and it was fun to go out. It's also really cheap. We went to Nica buffet for breakfast, Euro cafe for lunch, and Tele pizza and the Mediterranean for dinner. At home we eat lots of great stuff like pesto pasta, enchiladas, nachos, pesto and cheese on toast (home made bread), gallo pinto (rice and beans), etc. I get to eat cheese, sour cream and ice cream here because, unlike in Australia, it doesn't make me sick! Maybe because it never gets cold here.

Friends

When I first got here I went to the house of some friends which is also a shop called Mavericks. I play with Natasha, who is my age, and Jakob, who is two years younger than me. At their house we play games, watch movies and have fun all the time.

To sum up...

There are lots of differences between Nicaragua and Australia and lots of similarities too. My favourite thing about Nicaragua is that it has volcanoes. I really like Nicaragua it is great.