Granada, NICARAGUA: What an interesting place! I will start off by saying being in Nicaragua sure makes me thankful for Costa Rica. I traveled with a family of four (the Amiots, they have 2 children Emma-5 and Taylor-10) and a single missionary from Cincel (Laura). We arrived by bus in Nicaragua about 9:00 p.m. on Saturday. The bus ride was fairly smooth and seemed to go pretty quickly. We found a taxi and all 6 of us, including our luggage, was crammed into the taxi. We were a little confused on the money situation there and paid a little bit more than we should have, but we are learning.

We get to Hotel Colonial, our home for the next 3 days, and go straight to bed. The next day Laura and I go out and explore. The hotel is right around the town square. The strange thing about this town is that it is a colonial town with very large colonial buildings but the people are far from colonial. Imagine, if you can, a third world country with colonial structures. It is strange. Laura and I find out on Sunday, that there will be a running of the bulls in the street right near our hotel. We were all pretty excited about that, because we have never seen one of these before. Well, after all that build up, there are a lot of people around waiting for this bull run and we see one bull that is not really running and so there are men on horses beating this bull to get him to run. By this time, we left, and went back to our hotel room. With all those people things can get a little crazy. It was a great cultural experience, though!

On Monday, the Amiot family and I go to Mesaya, it was a town about 20 minutes from Granada with a huge artisans mall. There were a lot of shops with neat stuff from Nicaragua. Later in the afternoon, we went on a boat tour. Granada has a very large lake and two volcanoes. The lake is 358 miles around and there are 200 some islands. The lake is fed by salt water so there are sharks and other ocean creatures in this lake. It is also has quite a few waves, but is very muddy and murky. So on the boat tour, we saw just a few of the many islands in this lake. The picture above is from the tour and you can see one of the volcanoes in the back. We also went by an island that had Spider monkeys, we couldn't get to close with the boat, otherwise we would have some special visitors.

Tuesday was our departure day and we pulled out of Granada at 1:00 p.m. Our bus ride home was not as smooth. Our bus broke down just about 2 hours outside of San Jose. We were able to get a ride home, through God's great provision, and made it back to San Jose around 9:30 p.m.

Needless to say this was an adventerous trip for me. I had a good time with my friends, but I don't think I will be taking a bus trip to Nicaragua anytime soon!