I love this country - God knows I love this country. Currently I’m on my third time here. I have spent a substantial chunk of the last year here. I have given up jobs, cars, etc to come back here time and time again. So please don’t take what I am about to say as a condemnation of this country that I love.
This place is fucking ridiculous.
It is. It’s a ridiculous country. As an American I am used to certain things - efficiency, quiet, predictability. One of the things I love best about Nicaragua is that these are not priorities in this country - through the rabbit hole, Alice, straight through the bunny hole. Every now and again, though, I have my horrific-Gringa days, my Ugly American days where I would kill for a government agency with an actual computer system, a noise ordinance, a vague idea as to when it is the garbage might get picked up or when the power is going to cut out.
Case In Point, The Popularity of the Relojeria.
Time is a very loose thing here. Everything runs on Nica Time which means things happen when they happen and there’s really no sense in getting upset about it. Appointments are sort of suggestions - no one actually turns up on time.* Posted hours are approximate if they even exist on stores or cafes. The closest internet and call center to my house is painted with a big sign: 9 AM - 9 PM. Sometimes they open at 8 AM, sometimes they don’t open until about noon or so. Some days they don’t open or they close at 6 PM or 11 PM. The woman who runs the Pulperia closest to my house - a sweet, wonderful woman who is enormously patient with my crappy Spanish - doesn’t have posted hours. But she takes a nap every day and closes the store for a few hours. She takes her nap when she feels tired. On several occasions I have found myself fiending for a Coca Cola light, a piece of her pineapple pie or desperately needing a bottle of water and found myself standing in front of her locked door.
For a while I attempted to predict when she would take her nap. I finally gave up.
Herein lies the irony: around the Mercado are several relojerias. You see them all over Nicaragua. Reloj is watch. Relojerias are stores and stands that do nothing but fix and sell watches. Apparently they are popular and successful enough here that several can stay in business within blocks of each other.
Who is buying these watches? Why? What are they doing with them? Who in this country needs a watch? I see people wearing them but for the love of God, why?
Exhibit B: Mail/Everyone Loves A Receipt.
Before I say anything about this I would like to say how grateful I am to once again have American conditioner. Don’t get me wrong. I am swimming in gratitude. And aloe vera. Swimming in gratitude and aloe vera.
One week before I left I sent myself a package of stuff. Toiletries, primarily. At the US post office they told me it should take 6-10 days to get here. As I am currently up on week four sans moisturizer choices, I finally started inquiring about this. Nothing has shown up at Santa Lucia Social Club. I ask Rina, who is minding the place, about it. Have you gone to the post office? She asks me. I hadn’t. We hadn’t gotten a notice that there was a package. It’s probably there, she says, go ask.
Today I go to the post office and explain the situation. They are so nice - so very nice. They have a whole room full of packages and they basically have me go through them to see if I can find mine. I can’t. They open an ancient file cabinet and start handing me packages out of that. None are mine but I think I probably could have signed for any of them.
Eventually it is decided: my package is not there. Again, they are so nice, so polite and apologetic about it. They have me write down my name and phone number in case it turns up. I go up to the front office to buy stamps when they call me back. The woman is proudly clutching my package - unharmed, intact. I have to sign for it. When they look it up to have me sign for it I see the date it arrived at their post office: ten days ago.
Quick moral to this story, kids: if you mail me anything more than an envelope LET ME KNOW. My conditioner would have sat back there for all eternity had I not known it was coming.
It costs me 5 cords - about .27 - to retrieve my package. Again: twenty seven cents. I pay and go to leave and the woman flags me down - senora, una momenta. She is writing something. I assume I will have to sign something else. I wait. A minute later she hands me a handwritten receipt for my package fee. They don’t keep a copy of it or anything. Did she think I was going to return my package and want my .27 back? She doesn’t write me a receipt for the 40 cords worth of stamps I bought, only the 5 cord fee.
When I walk to the Malecon, the Lakeside area, I am always given a little receipt for my five cord entrance fee, a little pre-printed thing that probably costs more to print than it costs to get in.
They love receipts here. Love them. And they have weird little systems that are completely indecipherable to anyone else that they adore as well.
The Weird Little System Issue.
I am in a children’s store buying a ball for one of the clinic dogs. You cannot get dog toys here and I’m sick of throwing empty diet coke bottles for Quixote to fetch. By the third or fourth throw he‘s always eaten them.**
It’s a little store - the size of a large storage closet, maybe. There are two people working in it, two women. I point to the ball behind the counter - 30 cords. She takes it off the shelf, pulls out a receipt book and writes me a receipt for it. I go to pay her and she shakes her head vehemently and points to the other woman, who is literally two feet away from her. I lean over and hand the other woman my receipt and the 30 cords. She beams at me, stamps it with a ‘paid’ stamp and hands it back to me. I then hand it back to the first woman who hands me my ball and gives me the stamped receipt back with it.
I do not take a step to do this. I just pass the receipt between one woman and the next.
Quixote never even gets the ball. On the way home a dirty little street kid in Parque Central, maybe five years old is, following me. I have a can of juice and they follow you to get the can for a deposit. If you have leftovers, if you’re coming out of a restaurant, they’ll ask for those as well. I give the kid the can and the ball. He is delighted.
I’ll buy Quixote another one. In the meantime he’s never had anything but a bottle to fetch so he doesn’t know he’s missing out on anything.
But I’ve had the two party receipt thing happen to me in a bunch of stores. In pretty much every case the store is almost empty and the two people I have to hand things back and forth to are literally right next to each other.
Denouement: Do They Have Reggaeton in Heaven? And if they do, can it be counted as Heaven?
My room is painted bright yellow with a huge high ceiling. Bright yellow. The picture below was taken in my room with the light off and no flash. Just the yellow wall. Towards the ceiling is a big grated window. When the sun comes up every morning it bathes the room in an otherworldly yellow glow.
I am not a morning person. Not at all.
Most days if it wakes me up I’ll fumble around for a shirt, throw it over my eyes and go back to sleep looking like a hostage. If you throw another variable into the mix the shirt-over-my-eyes trick doesn’t work.
This morning, six am. The sun wakes me up. Sometimes I forget where I am and it’s a creepy thing to wake up to, this yellow glow. Am I dead? Should I be heading towards something right now? The grate, maybe, with all the light? It can be a little disorienting, particularly if I wake up thinking I’m still in Denver.
So I wake up thinking I might be dead, throw the shirt over my face and……it’s reggaeton time! My neighbors are doing some sort of home construction project that requires an early start and lots and lots of loud reggaeton. Reggaeton, as far as I can tell, is any pop song with a bad dance beat behind it. I heard a reggaeton version of ‘Every Time You Go Away’ - that 80’s song. It’s annoying enough in mid-afternoon. At 6 AM it can almost make you cry.
Again, let me reiterate: I love this country. Some of the things I love most about this country are the same things that drive me insane. But yeah, reggaeton, 6 AM. Brings out the Ugly American in me.
Though conditioner and a moisturizer selection do make it better.
As well as the fact that you can buy a machete in any hardware store for about $3. Not that I've ever bought one but surely that can be counted as a plus.
* I am just as guilty of this as anyone else is. It's not my fault, though. Granada is a city but it's also a small town and everyone walks or bikes everywhere. You cannot get from point A to point B without running into someone you know and winding up in a conversation. It does not matter if points A and B are five feet from each other and you just got here yesterday. This is a fact of life here.
** Whenever I do this all I can think of is telling my own spoiled dogs with their chicken wrap treats and tons of toys “You know there are dogs in third world countries that have nothing but empty bottles to play with”.
This place is fucking ridiculous.
It is. It’s a ridiculous country. As an American I am used to certain things - efficiency, quiet, predictability. One of the things I love best about Nicaragua is that these are not priorities in this country - through the rabbit hole, Alice, straight through the bunny hole. Every now and again, though, I have my horrific-Gringa days, my Ugly American days where I would kill for a government agency with an actual computer system, a noise ordinance, a vague idea as to when it is the garbage might get picked up or when the power is going to cut out.
Case In Point, The Popularity of the Relojeria.
Time is a very loose thing here. Everything runs on Nica Time which means things happen when they happen and there’s really no sense in getting upset about it. Appointments are sort of suggestions - no one actually turns up on time.* Posted hours are approximate if they even exist on stores or cafes. The closest internet and call center to my house is painted with a big sign: 9 AM - 9 PM. Sometimes they open at 8 AM, sometimes they don’t open until about noon or so. Some days they don’t open or they close at 6 PM or 11 PM. The woman who runs the Pulperia closest to my house - a sweet, wonderful woman who is enormously patient with my crappy Spanish - doesn’t have posted hours. But she takes a nap every day and closes the store for a few hours. She takes her nap when she feels tired. On several occasions I have found myself fiending for a Coca Cola light, a piece of her pineapple pie or desperately needing a bottle of water and found myself standing in front of her locked door.
For a while I attempted to predict when she would take her nap. I finally gave up.
Herein lies the irony: around the Mercado are several relojerias. You see them all over Nicaragua. Reloj is watch. Relojerias are stores and stands that do nothing but fix and sell watches. Apparently they are popular and successful enough here that several can stay in business within blocks of each other.
Who is buying these watches? Why? What are they doing with them? Who in this country needs a watch? I see people wearing them but for the love of God, why?
Exhibit B: Mail/Everyone Loves A Receipt.
Before I say anything about this I would like to say how grateful I am to once again have American conditioner. Don’t get me wrong. I am swimming in gratitude. And aloe vera. Swimming in gratitude and aloe vera.
One week before I left I sent myself a package of stuff. Toiletries, primarily. At the US post office they told me it should take 6-10 days to get here. As I am currently up on week four sans moisturizer choices, I finally started inquiring about this. Nothing has shown up at Santa Lucia Social Club. I ask Rina, who is minding the place, about it. Have you gone to the post office? She asks me. I hadn’t. We hadn’t gotten a notice that there was a package. It’s probably there, she says, go ask.
Today I go to the post office and explain the situation. They are so nice - so very nice. They have a whole room full of packages and they basically have me go through them to see if I can find mine. I can’t. They open an ancient file cabinet and start handing me packages out of that. None are mine but I think I probably could have signed for any of them.
Eventually it is decided: my package is not there. Again, they are so nice, so polite and apologetic about it. They have me write down my name and phone number in case it turns up. I go up to the front office to buy stamps when they call me back. The woman is proudly clutching my package - unharmed, intact. I have to sign for it. When they look it up to have me sign for it I see the date it arrived at their post office: ten days ago.
Quick moral to this story, kids: if you mail me anything more than an envelope LET ME KNOW. My conditioner would have sat back there for all eternity had I not known it was coming.
It costs me 5 cords - about .27 - to retrieve my package. Again: twenty seven cents. I pay and go to leave and the woman flags me down - senora, una momenta. She is writing something. I assume I will have to sign something else. I wait. A minute later she hands me a handwritten receipt for my package fee. They don’t keep a copy of it or anything. Did she think I was going to return my package and want my .27 back? She doesn’t write me a receipt for the 40 cords worth of stamps I bought, only the 5 cord fee.
When I walk to the Malecon, the Lakeside area, I am always given a little receipt for my five cord entrance fee, a little pre-printed thing that probably costs more to print than it costs to get in.
They love receipts here. Love them. And they have weird little systems that are completely indecipherable to anyone else that they adore as well.
The Weird Little System Issue.
I am in a children’s store buying a ball for one of the clinic dogs. You cannot get dog toys here and I’m sick of throwing empty diet coke bottles for Quixote to fetch. By the third or fourth throw he‘s always eaten them.**
It’s a little store - the size of a large storage closet, maybe. There are two people working in it, two women. I point to the ball behind the counter - 30 cords. She takes it off the shelf, pulls out a receipt book and writes me a receipt for it. I go to pay her and she shakes her head vehemently and points to the other woman, who is literally two feet away from her. I lean over and hand the other woman my receipt and the 30 cords. She beams at me, stamps it with a ‘paid’ stamp and hands it back to me. I then hand it back to the first woman who hands me my ball and gives me the stamped receipt back with it.
I do not take a step to do this. I just pass the receipt between one woman and the next.
Quixote never even gets the ball. On the way home a dirty little street kid in Parque Central, maybe five years old is, following me. I have a can of juice and they follow you to get the can for a deposit. If you have leftovers, if you’re coming out of a restaurant, they’ll ask for those as well. I give the kid the can and the ball. He is delighted.
I’ll buy Quixote another one. In the meantime he’s never had anything but a bottle to fetch so he doesn’t know he’s missing out on anything.
But I’ve had the two party receipt thing happen to me in a bunch of stores. In pretty much every case the store is almost empty and the two people I have to hand things back and forth to are literally right next to each other.
Denouement: Do They Have Reggaeton in Heaven? And if they do, can it be counted as Heaven?
My room is painted bright yellow with a huge high ceiling. Bright yellow. The picture below was taken in my room with the light off and no flash. Just the yellow wall. Towards the ceiling is a big grated window. When the sun comes up every morning it bathes the room in an otherworldly yellow glow.
I am not a morning person. Not at all.
Most days if it wakes me up I’ll fumble around for a shirt, throw it over my eyes and go back to sleep looking like a hostage. If you throw another variable into the mix the shirt-over-my-eyes trick doesn’t work.
This morning, six am. The sun wakes me up. Sometimes I forget where I am and it’s a creepy thing to wake up to, this yellow glow. Am I dead? Should I be heading towards something right now? The grate, maybe, with all the light? It can be a little disorienting, particularly if I wake up thinking I’m still in Denver.
So I wake up thinking I might be dead, throw the shirt over my face and……it’s reggaeton time! My neighbors are doing some sort of home construction project that requires an early start and lots and lots of loud reggaeton. Reggaeton, as far as I can tell, is any pop song with a bad dance beat behind it. I heard a reggaeton version of ‘Every Time You Go Away’ - that 80’s song. It’s annoying enough in mid-afternoon. At 6 AM it can almost make you cry.
Again, let me reiterate: I love this country. Some of the things I love most about this country are the same things that drive me insane. But yeah, reggaeton, 6 AM. Brings out the Ugly American in me.
Though conditioner and a moisturizer selection do make it better.
As well as the fact that you can buy a machete in any hardware store for about $3. Not that I've ever bought one but surely that can be counted as a plus.
* I am just as guilty of this as anyone else is. It's not my fault, though. Granada is a city but it's also a small town and everyone walks or bikes everywhere. You cannot get from point A to point B without running into someone you know and winding up in a conversation. It does not matter if points A and B are five feet from each other and you just got here yesterday. This is a fact of life here.
** Whenever I do this all I can think of is telling my own spoiled dogs with their chicken wrap treats and tons of toys “You know there are dogs in third world countries that have nothing but empty bottles to play with”.
Top picture is one of the flowers in my courtyard with fallen mangoes under it.
1 comment:
Oh my god, I am telling mercy that you said she can longer have chicken wrapped things that only dogs eat - she will not be happy. Atty will be told no more lettuce, no more toys for thibbs or seamus - the dogs are not happy about this at all
Post a Comment