Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

People here have been very friendly. The hotel where we've been staying seems like the center for backpackers in this town (lots of Australians, some Canadians, and a few sets of people from non-English-speaking countries). We've met some cool people, including Tricia, who went on the waterfall tour with us yesterday.

We stayed out late last night at a local bar with a bunch of the fellow hotel guests, trying out Nicaraguan rums and local aguardientes. After the backpackers went to sleep, Mona attached us to a group of Salvadoreans who had a guitar and were doing singalongs. "Sweet Child of Mine" seems to be a favorite around here. We got to talking a bit about music and politics.

We've been eating well the past few days. Juayúa hosts a fería gastronómica (food fair) every weekend. We've been grazing on things like corn pancakes, fried corn dough, grilled steak with onions, fish stew, fried yucca, roasted rabbit, beans and rice (with lots of lard), BBQ chicken, frozen strawberries dipped in chocolate, dulce de leche, and milk pudding with cinnamon.

Strangely, the festival closes before dinnertime, so this evening we took a drive to Apaneca, another nearby town, in search of a recommended restaurant. There was a parade or something going on in town, so we were stopped in traffic for a few minutes. Suddenly, the bus in front of us got tired of waiting and started to back up rapidly. Luckily, they slammed on the brakes when Mona honked, and we were able to back up and let them past.

The restaurant we were looking for looks like it's been closed for good. We tried following signs for another restaurant, which turned out to also be closed, but less permanently. Tricia picked a restaurant we'd seen as we entered the town, and we had a nice quiet dinner on an outdoor terrace with fireflies in the background.

Side note: we were woken up by an earthquake this morning. It turned out to be a 5.6 in Guatemala. Apparently our San Francisco senses are particularly attuned, because nobody else seemed to have noticed.