We headed along and sure enough, just around the bend I could see Juan's distinct figure, his small, muscular body, and heavily hunched back from years of working in the fields. He saw me coming and gave a shout, "Markitos!". "Juancito!", I replied and we ran towards each other and hugged happily. We learned he would be working for a few more hours so we decided to go ahead with the final stretch of the journey, to visit my host mom, Bernarda, at the top of the hill.
This post time line wise should come before Mangagua. We arrived in Northern Nicaragua from El Salvador via Honduras. We thought that we were going to have to stay on the Honduran side of the border because our guide book told us that the border closed at 5 PM and our buses had taken a little longer than expected. But after talking to some locals that were also headed for the border who said that it would be open we decided to go for it. The border was in fact open and we took a luxury bus the 25 kilometers from the border to Somoto. Check out the link to the right for a map of Nicaragua. Somoto is a small town outside the even small community of Uniles where Mark stayed for 6 months about a year and a half ago. You can read about our adventures there in his post. 
Since there is not a lot of things to do in Unile other than look at the beautiful scenery, I headed to Savana Grande a small community on the road from Somoto to Ocotal. Grupo Fenix the organization that we both volunteered with in Nicaragua is building a Solar Center(Again see right for more info). We were able to get down and dirty and throw some roof tiles and dirt around. In the foreground of the picture to the left is Rod a volunteer from Canada is smoking out some hornets that had made their nest in the place that we needed to work. The center is made out of adobe bricks which will then be covered with a plaster like substance. We were taking off the roof tiles which were temporarily put up there to protect the adobe so that the real roof could be put on. Hopefully it will happen before the rainy season. After a few days working it was on to Managua.
We had looked up his program online and knew that he lived only 1.5 kilometers from the University and we knew how to get to the University and we had two phone numbers and were pretty sure he was living at one of them. And it all worked well. We took the bus to the University called Patrick and he met us there. His house mates were very welcoming and fed us and let us play games and guitars in their yard. We also got to got Spanish class with him which was fun.
The next day we met my friend from CISV El Salvador Andy and he took us to a place where we went horse back riding up to a look out point on top of a big hill. Again we have some pictures but the computer is not letting me upload them for some reason so hopefully later. We also went and played soccer under the lights it was nice because it is pretty hot in San Salvador so playing later in the day made it a lot cooler.
A little bit sad but we got over it quickly. The next day I went to the beach with Andy while mark stayed in San Salvador and went to Patrick´s praxis site where he teaches English. After almost 24 hours without seeing each other we were reunited in a quest to watch the US play Mexico. To no avail the game wasn´t broadcast in Central America oh well we got to watch the highlights on ESPN sportscenter of the USA beating Mexico 2-0.
That night Andy got us box seats to go to the National Stadium. We watched Nicaragua get beat by Guatemala and El Salvador beat Belize. It was pretty exciting and the beers and burgers were good to. Although drinking the night before riding a bus all day that doesn´t have a bathroom is not really the best idea. Oh well a little dehydration is not that bad.
Little did we know that we had arrived to one of the more festive hostels in town. No sooner had we returned from an early dinner were we invited for some drinks and conversation with the hostel owners and their friends. One thing led to another and before we knew it we were all drunk singing "welcome to the Hotel San Andres," I with my trusty guitar and Jacob piping along with his Harmonica. Jacob passed out a little early that evening and I spent the night jamming with an El Salvadoran guy who also played guitar.
He kindly offered us some of the best whitebread/American cheese sandwiches we had ever tasted. That evening we went to Antigua Guatemala, a small town about 30 minutes from the capital. Antigua is a beautiful town full of buildings preserved from the colonial Spanish era. It is so beautiful that it is now overrun by tourists, travellers, and language school dropouts. Mas gringos que gente, se dice. We stayed the night at a place called "Jungle Party" and then headed to Fers house on the big lake outside of Guatemala the next day. We ate more in those 2 days then we had in the last month. They just kept feeding and feeding us- spaghetti, tamales, chichuron, frijoles, tortilla. We were stuffed. 
The last night in Guatemala we stayed at hotel near the bus station in order to make an early exit to El Salvador. At five in the morning we were awakened by the sound of a massive traffic jam outside of our room. Our hotel was in the middle of the biggest market in Guatemala City and things get started early there!
The Plaza in Oaxaca is one of the best that we had seen. No traffic was allowed and there were a lot of restaurants around the edges to sit and have a beer or coffee. And since neither of us drink coffee we had a beer and some peanuts.
When we were looking for hotels, we found lots of signs here that advertised the Matrimonial bed for cheaper than the other rooms. We weren’t really sure what that meant but we found a cheap hotel with out one so we never found out.
There were a lot of craft markets and people trying to sell blankets and bracelets on the street. We went to a museum of Mayan traditional medicine that was really interesting. It had the poster on the right that we liked a lot. We went to the museum of some Dutch explorers who had studied the indigenous peoples of the area that was a little strange because only in half the rooms was anything labeled but in the half that was labeled there were really intricate descriptions.
