day 11-12: matagalpa
we left early saturday morning for matagapa, a quaint little mountain town about 100 km north by northwest of managua.
after a few hours of fun car games and naps, we arrived at an incredible mountaintop bistro with an extremely frazzled waitress. we overlooked the valley and the monkey cage (complete with monkey) while we chowed down on our foodzu. i think i had steak fajitas. it took about an hour for everyone to get food, but it was worth it just for the view.
post-lunch, we went to one of matagalpa’s awesome features: a chocolate factory/farm/”castle”: El Castillo de Chocolate is a hilltop chocolate company that makes some of the best Nica chocolate known to man. They don’t export to America (officially) but they do sell it all over this country, so we stocked up on it. Ingredients: organic cocoa beans and sugar. that’s it. so good. we got lots of free samples and met up with two incredible volunteers from the peace corps. because so many of us on the trip are interested doing on-site service post-graduation, we had a TON of stuff to talk about.
dinner was incredible. the restaurant we went to sold meat…. BY THE METER. the 16 of us (11 volunteers, 2 PD’s, 2 peace corps, 1 tour guide/friend of PD) ordered two meters of steak and chicken with lots of onions, fried plantains, rice, beans, and salsa. great awesome food. we went to a bar afterword where basically we all realized how tired we were. i fell asleep after a long but awesomely fun day around 11:30pm. haha
this morning we woke up and went on a ~4 km hike in the mountains. it rained on and off but was gorgegous and made me think of hiking in a mix of the rockies and vancouver.
we had lunch at the bar we went to last night- where we ordered THE BEST chicken fingers (“deditos de pollo”) i’ve had down here. aaaaaand we had french fries!!! haha i was super-happy on the way home.
our little microbus was baller as always. i’m surpised we didn’t have any trouble, considering that 13 of us and all of our bags fit comfortably on the 2.5 hour trek back to managua.
back at the house, we made community dinner (noodles and guac and chips) and had a team meeting-where we finalized plans for going to san juan del sur next weekend- and then watched baby mama. great ending to an epic weekend.
MVP of the trip:the PD’s. and the chocolate factory
Best Effort: our micro
Best Dressed: nikki (raincoat habit), lauren (tshirt hat), and all the girls (waterbottle holster = bra)
Funnest, Non-Kicking Bed Sharer: Robert
Funnest, Non-Kicking Hall Mates: Cassandra and Emily
but all in all, it’s good to be home!!!!
