Granada cemetery (that’s a real bird!)
On Saturdays La Mariposa offers up full-day excursions for those with enough energy to take them on. Accordingly, yesterday at 8 am we were piling into the butterfly-festooned van for a trip to the city of Granada.
The trip took about an hour in the van, but the girls kept themselves entertained by playing “Stop the Bus” through the whole alphabet. (This game involves thinking up three categories, then picking a letter and seeing who can first think of something in each category that starts with that letter.) Before long the whole back half of the van (none of whom were under 50) were playing along. The nice elderly British gentleman sitting next to Zoe got quite enthusiastic and won several rounds before his wife told him to cut it out. (His entries for “book character” were things like “Agamemnon” and “Beowulf,” while the rest of us were basically coming up with Harry Potter characters.)
Granada is a lovely Colonial-era city, with palm-lined boulevards and brightly-colored houses. One side is bordered by the enormous Lake Nicaragua, so big that it looks like an ocean. Another has the Mombacho volcano looming up over it. Almost every building seems to have a beautiful open-air courtyard at its center, filed with greenery and sunshine and blue sky.
Bell tower at La Merced
It’s probably the most touristy spot in Nicaragua, and accordingly has a lot of tourist activities. For the first part of the day, Richard from La Mariposa showed us some highlights — a gorgeous cemetery where the rich are buried (“mucho dinero”), an old fortress, the Colonial Merced church, where we could climb up in the bell tower and see sweeping views of the city. Our family almost decided to skip out on the cigar factory tour, but in the end it was lucky we didn’t. The “tour” consisted of a quick stop to watch two people rolling and wrapping cigars, but Lanie managed to charm the workers enough that when she noticed a huge parrot in a cage in the courtyard, they took him out and let him sit on our shoulders (adults only, sadly).
We did break off before the next museum, choosing a horse-drawn carriage ride around the city instead. Our driver initially stopped at most of the places we’d already visited with Richard, but the girls just took the opportunity to get out and pet the horses (who incidentally were named “Mercedes” and “Benz”). He also brought us down to the shore of the lake, where powerful winds swept into the city and whipped the water into whitecaps (making me glad we’d decided to skip the rather expensive boat tour later that afternoon).
We met up with the group again for lunch, and the restaurant did not seem well-equipped to deal with a group of our size. Our food came at wildly varying times, and poor Lanie (who’d ordered the simplest of meals, pancakes) didn’t get her food for an hour and a half, after everyone else had finished (and I had reminded the waitstaff three separate times). However, it was popular with Zoe, who’s grown a bit tired of rice and beans and greatly enjoyed her bacon cheeseburger.
Batta batta chocolatta!
Friday I googled, “what to do in Granada with kids” and one thing that kept popping up was the Choco Museo. We mentioned this on the van ride in and many in the group seemed very interested in the idea. In the end, Jane from Colorado decided to skip the boat ride and join us. We arrived just in time to join in the 1.5-hour chocolate-making class, and soon we were wearing aprons and dancing around a fire chanting, “Batta batta chocolatta” (or something along those lines) while we stirred the roasting beans, After we shelled them and ground them to paste with our mortars and pestles, the teacher used the paste to make two drinks — one like the Aztecs used to prepare (with honey, hot water, cinnamon, and chili pepper), and the other in the Spanish tradition (with sugar, hot milk, cinnamon, and vanilla). And the crowning glory was when we were each given a bowl of chocolate and allowed to pour our own bar, mixing in our choice of a wide range of ingredients. (Lanie went with peanut butter/marshmallow/sea salt, and Zoe and Nadia had some sort of concoctions involving coffee and cinnamon.) The variety of chocolate down here is different than what we’re used to, but very good. Even the roasted beans plain were pretty tasty.
Disaster threatened when he told us to return for the bars in an hour and a half, and we needed to meet our bus in 20 minutes. Luckily, a quick trip into the freezer allowed them to expedite the process for us. We made it back to the van only a few minutes late (and considerably stickier). The boat trip people all regarded us enviously.
