rain!

c





it poured rain every few hours today, which was lovely for the slight drop in temperature, but my clothes are still damp. hopefully we'll still be able to have some breeze tonight, because it can get ridiculously hot up in our little loft/crawl space. anyway - uploaded some pictures! i wasn't able to get as many as i wanted, but tomorrow or the next day i'll try to put up some more. featured here are elvin and i on the boat to isla ometepe (check out my i'm-feeling-nauseous-no-more-pictures smile), the view of volcan concepcion from a little spit that goes out into the lake, which we discovered is a popular swimming beach on sundays. the other picture is some typical nicaraguan food - fried plantains with fried cheese. i also have a picture of elvin's lunch that day, which was a big taco, fried. fried, fried, fried. it's been a funny experience to go from that food to what we've been eating here, which has (true to the eco-hotel/sustainable-everything commitment) vegetarian, fresh, full of garbanzo beans and eggplant (oberlin!) and rice pilafs and so on. elvin is very excited that he's been a vegetarian for four days now.

we were given the full tour of the totoco 'farm' area today (in the pouring rain), and it was quite impressive. so many efficient systems for filtration/irrigation/re-forestation/composting and many other things that i am beginning to understand ... it was very exciting. they have a large vegetable garden and we had tomatoes with fresh basil from the garden today with our dinner, nice! we've also arranged a deal with luis, who works at the farm, to bring us tortillas every afternoon for the next day. he offered to take us to a beach near here - i'm not sure if its on the lake or if its more of a swimming hole - on saturday, so we will definitely take him up on that offer.

thank goodness there is a lot to keep us occupied here - it is a pretty silly series of events to get around this island. one of the women who works at the farm left for costa rica this morning, and was trying to figure out how to get the early bus - early ferry - other bus on the mainland - other bus to costa rica !?!?! and we were discussing when we tried to take a bus just from moyogalpa to balgue (both cities on this island), which only goes once a day, and we asked a variety of people on the street to try to get a good idea of what time it came. we were told 2:30, 3:00, 3:35, 3:45, 4:00 and 4:15pm! and various different street corners. it was pretty hilarious ... and led to us taking that $35 taxi. oh well.

more pictures of where we are now to come soon, but good night for now!!