Nicaragua: Part 3; Granada

Granada is a super crazy busy colonial style city, I loved it! Reminded me of San Francisco or Prague where the buildings are all built beside each other and they don't waste space with anything green. Add to that a lot of people, cars and horse drawn carriages (as everyone attempts to share the narrow roads) and it is a little chaotic. It was also "Semana Santa" (Easter week) which is the major holiday in Central America. Interesting sights included palm houses being woven outside all the churches, a "mardi gras style parade" complete with band carrying Jesus on the cross (not sure party music really fits the occasion but...) and a human reinactment of the crucifixion. We did a ton of fun and interesting things in Granada and met up with more friends from Nosara. Highlights included: 1. Horse drawn carriage ride: doing the tourist thing and taking a horse drawn carriage around the central part of the city, visiting a 100 (not quite) different churches and heading down to the lake (the biggest lake in Central Americas(19th in the world) bordering the city. I gotta say riding by horse drawn carriage is the way to travel! We also switched hotels via carriage and made quite the spectacle ourselves with a surfboard and stroller piled on while the driver attempted to "parallel park" on the opposite side of the road (no easy feat let me tell you). 2. Making chocolate: Jorja, Carter and I went to a chocolate making class. We learned all about cacao beans and then we took the beans, roasted them on a fire, cracked off the shells, ground them and then added a variety of ingredients to make chocolate drinks popular with the aztecs, mayans, and finally the spanish. At this point we were all hopped up on cacoa and sugar and we moved on to making a chocolate bar. This step requires a bunch more masticating and tempering which was done for us by a few handy machines and then we got to add our own special ingredient. Mine was rum! 3. Open Air Market: We went on a wild goose chase looking for chia seeds and a cacao/nut grinder in the open air market. This was a market like you might see on the Amazing Race Tv show. A true labyrinth of impossibly tiny and very crowded streets, lanes and then I don't even know what to call them. Not easy to negotiate with a stroller and a real sweat fest I gotta tell you! I found my chia seeds but not my grinder, only a meat grinder, which unfortunately sent us in the direction of the meat stalls (I tried not to look as it was rather scary and may have turned me off meat for a lifetime!) 4. Tio Antonio: tucked into the heart of the city was this really cool little shop that is a social project (rare in these parts). They hire the hard to employ and teach them to make hammocks of all sizes. We finally bought one for our backyard, tried out the "World's Largest Hammock" and bought three "stuffy hammocks" (now hanging off the bunk beds at our house). There was also a cafe here completely staffed by the deaf and mute. You ordered by pointing to a picture in the menu and/or signing. Very cool, l-o-v-e-d everything about this visit and a definite highlight of the trip! Well as you can see I tried to "paint a few pictures with words" as we are waiting for friends to send us a few (as you may recall our camera ran out of power. We actually tried to replace/charge our battery by having our horse drawn carriage stop at the Radio Shack but sadly it was not yet open at 830am in the morning. Huh, go figure!) Anyways, stay posted.