Laguna de Olomega

This weekend we took a couple hours and went to see Laguna de Olomega, which is on the border between the departments of San Miguel and La Union. For $15, we got a tour around five of the islands and stopped at one of them to see some petroglyphs. To me, Olomega is much more worth seeing than Coatepeque and some of the other volcanic lakes, mostly because of the floating water plants and the birds. It also has pockets of boiling water, which is nifty as long as you don't have to get close to it. There was tasty lake tilapia for lunch, swimming pigs, friendly locals, and really adorable little kids, which makes all the difference!

NicaTESOL Trip

I just got back from yet another conference trip, this time to Managua, Nicaragua to NicaTESOL. It was a fun 8 or 9 hours in the car. Going down, there was supposed to be a lot of bad weather from hurricane Felix, none of which I ever saw. I also saw the actual end of a rainbow for the first time in my life. On an amusing note, we were stopped a good 7 times by the police in Honduras, and maybe another 3 times in Nicaragua, just on the way there. My personal favorite was when they threatened to take the driver's license away because he had no car insurance, which apparently really is a law in Nicaragua. I want to know how many Nicaraguans have car insurance, though, or if it's just for foreigners. I also saw lots of fun animal crossing signs: snake, cow, armadillo, iguana, small child, and best of all, a large unidentified rodent that kind of looked like a sloth.

I stayed in the Los Robles area with another friend from work, had some good Korean food, watched other people's faces as they tried sushi for the first time, and yes, went grocery shopping (every other Central American country has a better selection of international import food items than El Salvador, like Craisans). I also spent the whole time limping around UCA with my jellyfish wound, which was/is amusing and painful at the same time. People were soooooo nice there, though, and really helped a lot! Managua was hot, but not that bad, and once you get used to the fact that the streets don't have names (or if they do, they're not written on the streets), it's not so bad. On Saturday we went to Masaya, about 30 km south of the city, and with a much more pleasant climate, where I bought some nice painting and eyed the hamacas that I have no where to put at this point. Next time...

Bolas de fuego in Nejapa

This would have been fun to go to, had I known about it beforehand. Where else do people throw flames at each other and end up on fire?!

Read a more about it on this guy's blog.