First Weekend in the New House

Ah yes, it definitely feels good to have my own place (well sharing a house with someone). As soon as I got settled in I felt more at home here in Esteli than ever. It was definitely time to take the next step. The family I was with was awesome and everything and I really liked them and they fed me well but a month was enough. I now have some privacy, my personal space and I can do everything on my schedule, not someone else’s, plus I can sleep better too.
So Friday night after work my housemate and I bought a bit of food so we could make dinner because she had not much in the house. She is all excited because I like to cook. So I decided to change it up and eat something that was not rice and beans, I love rice and beans and I will definitely cook them but this weekend I took a break from them. So Friday night I made pasta with a vegetable and sausage sauce and it was delicious and nutritious. After dinner I unpacked just what I needed to sleep, sheets and stuff like that and then went for some beer with people. Oh yeah, I forgot. When I came home from work it was awesome because I just kicked off my shoes laid on the couch and relaxed and then decided to eat when I wanted to! Oh the little things. Plus, I had a beer with dinner which was awesome because the only thing I have had with dinner for the past month was coffee or water. Where I went on Friday night is awesome. It is seriously a true hole in the wall. It is called Bar Titanic and it is literally 4 concrete walls with a tin roof, concrete floor and plastic outdoor furniture. What more could you ask for! The only thing this place sells is 1 litre bottles of beer and even though it is such a complete dive it is full most of the time. What makes this place so awesome apart from its obviously amazing appearance and hole in the wall atmosphere is that it is the closest thing I will find to the Phoenix (rock club in Toronto on Saturday nights) because this place plays metal and classic rock and you can just ask the guy owns the place and happens to be the waitstaff also to play any song and he will put it on. I ended my night with Chop Suey, Toxicity and Science by System of a Down, Dazed and Confused by Zeppelin and then Roxanne by the Police and this was all in a dirty bar in a small Nicaraguan town, how cool is that.

Saturday I did not get to sleep in as planned, in fact I was woken up at 6am by roosters and this is apparently an everyday occurrence. But that is ok because at least I was in my own bed and could just roll over, throw my ipod on and go in and out of sleep until 9 when finally I let the roosters win. When I was getting my furniture I also got some pillows and I just grabbed some random ones from my bosses house. Well it turns out that one of these pillows is a real feather filled pillow! It is amazing, I have never had a pillow like that before. OH MAN! As I was moving my furniture around I decided to wipe my mattress cover off a bit and give it a few whacks because it has been a while since anyone has slept in it. As I wipe the cover a friggin scorpion comes out from underneath it! I was a little shocked to say the least. It was not big, because it was a baby, maybe the size of my big toenail but it was a scorpion nonetheless. I should have taken a picture as proof but by the time I was done kicking its ass it did not resemble much of a scorpion. Kind of freaky, I definitely through the mattress cover out.

Anyways, back to Saturday. So yes roosters and then I wake up and relax a bit before eating which is something I have missed in the last month. Saturday I did not do too much. I just felt like relaxing and taking it easy and enjoying my own space. My plan was to go to subway and get a sub as I mentioned last post, but I never made it there. Subway is the only North American store/restaurant in Esteli, kind of random but it works for me. I felt like cooking instead since it has been a while since I have been able to cook for myself. So I went shopping for some foodstuffs came home, ate some left over spaghetti, later on made some toast and eggs. I don’t have a toaster but there is a flat pan/grill thing that rests over two burners used to cook tortillas that I can toast bread on. After that I made a stir-fry with chicken and vegetables mmm mmm good. On Saturday night, I just felt like staying in and relaxing, hung out with my housemate for abit and then watched Forrest Gump on my laptop, there is no t.v. in the house. What a sweet movie. The grocery store lineup was ridiculous. There was only about 6 people in line but it took almost 30 minutes. It was ok though because since I am white and stand out like a sore thumb people are interested in talking to me and are excited when I respond in Spanish. So I managed to meet some people in. All those IDS stories about nightmare waits at banks are all true. I opened up a bank account the other day and I was in there for over an hour (not including waiting in line).

Sunday was a relax and do nothing day. I walked around and got familiar with the new area that I am in which took about 2 minutes. Made some delicious food. Other than that I just relaxed around the house, rented a movie from Brazil, it was in Portuguese but had subtitles, called Ciramindu or something like that, it was about life in this big prison and then there was a riot. It was a really good movie. Anyways, so after dinner my housemate and I are sitting with 2 other people just talking and eating some mangoes when guess what crawls out from under the couch…..another baby scorpion! Of course, it got killed, 2 minutes later another crawls out (and also gets killed). My housemate and I are like what the hell is going on here, this is not normal. Just last week, before I moved in she had to set poison traps because there were mice in the house. Of course our Nicaraguan friends are laughing thinking this is all so funny and then they go on to say you know, if there are baby scorpions then that means the mama scorpion has to be around somewhere because they do not stray far from the babies. NOT COOL!! We kept asking them if they were joking and finally they were like no, seriously, stop asking there is probably a mama scorpion in your house somewhere, it will probably fall from the ceiling they say, because apparently they like to stay in between the drop ceiling and the tin roof. Don’t worry they say, you won’t die if you get stung, it just hurts like no pain you could ever imagine and at night they are easy to see because some of them glow in the dark (apparently they are big yellow suckers, the babies were small yellow suckers). So my housemate and I were not going to bed with this on our mind so our friends left and we tore the house apart going through all the cupboards, our pillows and blankets, clothes to try and find this scorpion. Well, we did not find it, so we convinced ourselves that maybe the babies were just brought in with my furniture because we had left the furniture at the front of the house, where the last two were found, and then brought it to my room at the back of the house where the first won was found. Good reasoning or not, it helped me sleep, but I was still on the lookout this morning, making sure to shake my shoes out and stuff.
So of course this morning at work we are telling some people about this and they were like yeah his house (my bosses) has a problem with scorpions right now so its possible that the babies were just in the furniture and you brought them in the house. I hope this is true and this is the end of any scorpion problems. I also hope that there were only 3 babies that made it in the house and subsequently died and there was not a 4th that is still hidden somewhere and in a couple of months it has grown and attacks me for killing its siblings.

Hasta Luego!
P.S. I broke down and ate rice and beans and tortilla for lunch today.