Granada, Nicaragua

Granada is the oldest colonial town in Nicaragua, with itself and Leon vying for power for much of their history. Its a sleepy little town on the banks of the enormous Lago de Nicaragua. We spent much of the first afternoon walking around, admiring the old churches and terracotta tiled houses. We were taking photos of an old car where some women invited us in to take a photo of a 105 old lady (born in the infamous year of 1903!) so we joined them in their lanai and discussed Granada's past before continuing on our way.

We had a very Italian pizza con jamon in candle-light as they have daily power outages for 5 hours because they are upgrading the country's power grid. We then walked around a bit in the dark and resigned ourselves to our beds.

The next day we got up late, had a great breakfast of banana pancackes at the churchside cafe and instead of making our way to the Isla the Ometepe, as planned, we decided to stay an extra day to see the running of the bulls and some concerts for their town festival.

Well, the running of the bulls was straight out of a dingy movie scene. We arrived in the almost deserted waterfront at about 5pm and we see this small encolsed arena made of corrugated tin and wire mesh, with some wooden planks holding it up. As we get closer the area becomes packed with sweaty men covered in mud, standing around. We then entered the compound at the lower level, and stood under pilotiers supporting the upper spectator section, on eye level with the arena, with the only thing separating us from the bulls was a wire fence and waste-high wooden planks.

Its actually a rodeo mixed with the running of the bulls. It begins with them letting loose a bull with a rider on it, and as soon as the bull knocks him off its a free for all, with the audience members in our section (mostly drunk young men) slipping under the planks and into the muddy arena, antagonizing the bull with rags or red shirts and then running from it at full speed when the adrenaline kicks in. We watched 3 of these cycles, of the bull being released, the rider getting knocked off, and the following 10 or 15 min of free-for-all (where one drunk guy got gored pretty bad). Charles has a good video of one, I'll try to put it up later if I've got time.



Walking back to town we saw one of the most coloful sunsets I've ever seen, filling the whole sky with a bright orange-pink color. The same night they held the 2nd annual young musician's festival in Grananda, so we went to see that a bit, though it was dissapointing cuz it was just an old folk singer with 3 million songs about his love of Nica. We decided to return later for better music, but when we returned at 11:30 pm they were already taking apart the stage and folding up the lighting, and the cultural center of nicaragua was dead silent.