Well, this morning I discovered the difference between my clothes washing skills and those of Doña Adilia. The clothes that she washed for me (to demonstrate correct technique) were almost as soft as if they had come out of the dryer. The clothes that I had washed, on the other hand, were stiff with soap. So there´s another thing to look forward to when I return to the U.S..
I have some time to kill today. At 5.30 I´m going to meet Lesbia at la UCA and we´ll take a bus back to Granada. I´ll spend the night at her house and come back to Managua on Sunday. At 2.00 this afternoon, there´s supposed to be some kind of music festival a couple of blocks from here. The flyer notes that there will be no ¨caca cola.¨ Could be interesting. The entrance fee is 20 cordobas, which is a little more than a dollar, so I think it´s worth checking out.
In other news, my cell phone works! Grupo Fenix is loaning me a cell phone to use while I´m here. It doesn´t have any minutes on it, but I can buy phone cards to use with it. Apparently this is the normal way to use cell phones in Nicaragua. I had a lot of trouble with it at first...I bought the wrong brand of phone card, and then when I finally found the right brand, I entered the code and a voice told me that it was ¨invalido.¨ I went back to the store where I bought the card, twice, to ask the lady what was going on with my card. Each time she tried to explain it to me, and finally I understood that once I´d entered the code once, I didn´t need the card anymore. I could just dial a number, and the call would go through. This was, in fact, true of phone numbers in Nicaragua, but I still had trouble calling the U.S.. It turns out the country code is ¨001¨ not ¨1¨. According to my phone card, I can receive free incoming calls, except I don´t know what my phone number is. There´s a six digit number on my phone´s screen, but I think there´s some prefix that I´m supposed to know. Phones are strange in Nicaragua. A landline can´t call a cell phone, and a cell phone can´t call a landline. Anyway, the end of the story is that I did get to call home and talk to my mom and dad, which was really nice.
An update on the mouse situation. I am now able to sleep, more or less. The real problem with the mice was that I could HEAR them scrabbling around on my books, and that kept me awake. If I have the fan on, I can´t hear them as much, but around 2 am, when it starts to cool down, I usually get up to turn off the fan because I´m cold. And then I can hear the mice. BUT I figured out that if I double up my topsheet, that keeps me warm enough that I can leave the fan on all night. I also have to sleep with one ear pressed to the pillow and a hand over the other in order to not hear the mice, but it´s doable. And judging by the amount of mouse poison disappearing from my room, I´m making a significant dent in the population.
Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday next week are ¨dias de la patria,¨or basically days to celebrate Nicaragua and being Nicaraguan. Anyway, no one has to work, apparently. I´m not sure if this really means no one will be working, or whether there will still be taxis and buses and everything. There´s supposed to be a big parade, and lots of festivities. I´m pretty happy with my location near la UNI and la UCA, because it seems like a lot of things happen around here. The only problem is that most fun stuff is at night, and the walk home, while not very long, is a little sketchy in the dark.
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