Granada was weird.  I don’t know how else to say it.  We got dropped off in the Central Park, which is a common occurrence we’ve found, and we didn’t have a place reserved to stay, so we started walking with our backpacks towards the main street.  A guy approached us and asked if we were looking for a place to stay.  Unfortunately, the bags on our backs are huge signs that say, ‘HI WE’RE NEW AND NEED A ROOM!’.

After the Coyote situation in San Pedro, I try to ignore these guys, but something about this kid said to stop, and so we did.  He had a place that was just off the main strip and was only $20 a night.  “PER PERSON?!” I asked, expectantly, perhaps rudely….”No, for you both”, he said.

I calmed down decided we should check it out and it turned out to be a great deal. We had our own private room with bathroom and shower, and it was right off the main strip in town.  We walked around the next day to try and find cheaper digs and they were either full, more expensive, or dirty.  So we stayed for five days. The only thing that bothered us was the noise at night.  We arrived at the beginning of a festival weekend, and the first night we went to bed and turned out the lights..not thirty minutes later, the restaurant/club across the street came to life blaring Salsa music.  We tried dancing to it, but we soon found out we’d need lessons (which we eventually found in San Juan, for free (but that’s another blog entry).

We sat down at an Irish Pub for dinner on the main street that night.  As we were examining the menu, the back page caught my eye.  I should have taken a picture of it.  There was a large amount of child orphans running around this town, it said.  They are given food from a local pantry, but they will still beg for food from the foreigners who come and feast on cheeseburgers and fries.

This was about the time I noticed the anti-child prostitution signs.

Thankfully the worse we saw was a young girl that came up to us as we ate some chili-cheese fries (shut up, I know), and was begging for a bite and I might have obliged her except for the fact that she was…..chubby.  Girl didn’t need no chili cheese fries just like we didn’t need them either.

The highlight of our trip to Granada was a spur of the moment trip on a house boat that went through the tiny islands in Lake Nicaragua.  So spur-of-the-moment was this trip that we didn’t have our camera to take pictures, so I’ll do my best to describe it.

We payed $5 each for this entire adventure, except for beers and a couple of hot dogs we bought.

It was a two story boat with a grill, two bathrooms, a water slide, plenty of tables, and a dj playing music. We took a small boat out to where it was docked and then spent about three hours floating around these small islands, where the very rich of Granada had really nice houses.  The boat anchored for about an hour while everyone (except for me because I was still recovering from my volcano boarding injuries) jumped into the lake.

Normally, when you tour these tiny island, you’re on a very small boat with about 10-15 people, so when our huge barge came through with 30+ people on board, people in the smaller boats ended up taking pictures of us instead of the islands.

We stopped at ‘monkey island’, a tiny island with a few monkeys on it that lived off of the food people brought on these trips.

Always have your camera on you.

We also paid $6 each to get into a hotel pool in the city.  It was great..the water was freezing cold. I wish I could describe the heat in Central America.  It’s hot!  So when we jumped into a cold pool, it was very refreshing.  It was nice and quiet and we got to relax and get away from the busy city streets for a few hours.

We had one more stop in Nicaragua…San Juan del Sur…a place we would end up staying for three weeks because we loved it and because….well….one of us got injured (again).

Post script from Mandy:

Granada was very touristy and with this came someone trying to sell you whistles, hammocks, bowls, or food every 5 feet. That got old very fast. On the bright side we met up with fellow volcano boarders Katie and Paul from North Carolina! We sat down with some beers and dinner and laughed the evening away telling stories…Hi guys!