Old Piles of Words

Getting settled in Brussels

matt — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 13:34:17 +0000

First of all, we would like to wish everybody a Merry Winter Solstice and a Happy New Year! Yes, we're late. But then, so were you!

Anyway, back to the narrative of our suddenly less exciting lives. After a fun time with my family in the US, we have finally returned to Brussels to settle in for a while. Our trip to get here was prolonged by some of the biggest snow storms in Europe in 20 or 30 years, and we ended up spending a couple of nights in Dublin. Upon arriving in Brussels, we were pretty shocked by the unprecedented (in our lifetimes) sight of a foot and half of snow!

We have been here for about two weeks now, during which time we enjoyed the holidays with Venla's family and our friends, which was quite relaxing. It is now on to the the double imperative of settling into a new city: finding work and finding a place to live.

I can report quite a bit of success on the quest for a place to live. After visiting a half dozen apartments, we have finally found one that really makes us go "wow". It is in a wonderful location near the Atomium, just a hundred meters from the subway but up and away from the busy through-fare on a quiet side street. The place itself is beautiful: a newly renovated duplex with big windows and a friendly The shook hands on the deal, but it is not signed yet, so keep your fingers crossed!

The job search is going a bit slower. It seems, somewhat unexpectedly, that it is easier to convince somebody to take your money than it is to convince someone to give you theirs. We have each sent out a score of applications for what we would call "dream jobs," and are waiting to see if anybody bites. Venla has already gotten an interview, while I have just had a series of semi-automated "thank you for applying" emails. If nothing works out soon, we'll put the rubber on the road and start walking into places to see if they are hiring.

That is it for now, we hope everything is going well for you, our fair readers!

Chicago Again

matt — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 21:13:58 +0000

And so trip has come full circle. We arrived back in Chicago 14 months after using the city as our departure point for our Latin American adventure, this time to see my sister, her husband, one niece who I knew and another who I was meeting for the first time. It was a very cold visit; Chicago in December is no joke. But it was also a fruitful one. We spent a lot of fun time with the family, and also some fun time exploring the city.

The city's zoo put on a wonderful light show, which unfortunately (and logically) can only be visited after dark when Chicago passes from cold to freakin' cold. We also took advantage of Chicago's kicking museum scene a couple of times, once to visit the venerable Chicago Institute of Art, which has a wonderful collection of European art in general and impressionists in particular. It also had a nice display of American art and a traveling exhibit of pre-colombian sculpture from the Mexican Museum of Anthropology, which was a nice trip to the past since we had seen all of the pieces in Mexico City. Another worthwhile visit was the city's aquarium with my family; the nieces really love the fishes!

We had a great time in this world-class city, reunited with my whole family for the first time since... well, I am not sure. Enjoy the pictures, we sure liked taking them!

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A little Catching Up…

matt — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 21:00:12 +0000

It has been a while since we last posted an update here... I suppose that the gradual transition to a normal life on our way through the US has made us a bit, shall we say, soft. Well, that is done now, and we will soon be transitioning this blog from our travels and adventures to the more pedestrian issues of job hunting, apartment moving and getting fat again. But in the mean time, we have nevertheless amassed a couple of experiences to write about, so here is the first of our catch-up posts: Denver!

Actually, there is not a lot to say about our sojourn in Denver. We spend most of our time rebuilding our wardrobe at the stores, eating my parents out of house and home and just wasting time on the living room floor. We did get out a couple of times for some good fun, though, and celebrated Thanksgiving with my aunt, seeing Denver's Lighting of the Lights with my other aunt, and even getting a day of bowling in with my grandmother.

And, of course, even in Denver we managed to see old stuff: the Denver Art Museum holds one of the country's best exhibits on pre-hispanic art, and indeed one of the best such exhibits that we have seen since the Mexican Museum of Anthropology. We got some good shots of some really good art, so if you have not yet seen enough pictures of pre-colombian pottery (and who could?) check it out!

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Paradise Lost…

venla — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 04:06:59 +0000

As we are slowly getting to the closing chapters of our southern adventure, we though it wouldn´t be quite fair to our readers to finish the story off on the beach in the sun, with us living happily ever after. So here is the true, unabridged and inglorious story of Matt and Venla's last couple of days in Latin America, as they travel from their paradise island to the harsh realities of Masaya and Managua.

The boat that was supposed to take us from Ometepe to shore was cancelled because of the island's fiesta (everybody went to the party), so we sat down by the side of the road to wait for possible transportation to the other harbour. A yellow chicken bus, fairly surprisingly, turned up less than an hour later as announced by the chips selling lady, and we even had time to get a last lunch of rice and beans before catching the 3 o'clock ferry to the mainland.

In the port, we haggled for a collective taxi ride to the nearby transportation hub of Rivas (with 4 of us on the back seat once more), and spent the whole ride arguing with the driver who kept trying to convince us that we had missed the last bus and we were never going to make it to our destination, whereas he could take us for only $15 a person. 15 minutes of telling him we were not interested got the price down to $6 per person, but we still decided to try our luck on the buses, a fairly daring move since it is true that buses do not usually run after nightfall, which was threatening to happen any minute.

We were lucky enough to hop onto a bus, which, we found out after a while, happened to stop exactly where we wanted to go. So we laid back and enjoyed being crushed between hundreds of elbows and knees and bellies and food baskets one more time. For a complete experience, the bus even did us the favor of breaking down by the side of the road for about half an hour, the driver and helper pouring gallons of water on the smoking motor. We finally got dropped just outside of Masaya, and hopped
into one last taxi to the center.

The town of Masaya, just one hour away from the capital, is an obligatory stop for every tourist to Nicaragua: its famed market supposed to be an extraordinary treasure trove, replete with a stunning variety of original crafts from all over Nicaragua. So we showed up at the market the next day, our pockets filled to the brim with shiny Cordoba and dollar bills, ready to pillage the magic market for Christmas presents and souvenirs. Unfortunately, we are, by all accounts, spoiled travelers, and, compared with the markets of, say, Bolivia or Mexico, this one seemed like a small tourist trap full of poorly made junk. We left the market about as rich as we had entered it, and beelined for Managua, our bags lighter than we had expected.

Managua, it turned out, was just as anticlimactic. The Nicaraguan capital will remain branded in our memories as the only place in Latin America that actually scared us off the streets. We spent the day before our flight surfing the inter-webs and only ventured as far as the nearby shopping mall and the eatery on the corner, where we downed one last portion of greasy rice and beans while watching cockroaches run on the walls around us.

Then we flew north, to what Matt likes to call "the real America". We celebrated our arrival during our six-hour layover in LAX by eating not one, but TWO meals at the Tex-Mex fast-food joint Baja Fresh! Ah, Latin food you can love!

So, yes, this is our last Latin American post- to say that we are not too sad to be slowly going home...

San Jose del Sur

matt — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 04:21:11 +0000

For our final night on Ometepe (and, for all intents and purposes, our last night of vacation), we decided to opt for a little more luxury, moving out of the $10 a night places to pay a whopping $20! We headed over to the island's south end to stay in a nice, lakeside place in San Jose del Sur to spend an evening and a day swimming, sunning and relaxing in the hammocks. We ate some great (albeit distressingly typical) food in the village, and just relaxed. It would have been perfect, f it were not for all of the tarantulas that came out after dark!

Enjoy the pictures, these are the ones that usually make the covers of travel brochures... I bet ya'll are jealous!

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Cascada de San Ramon

matt — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 04:17:53 +0000

While we decided not to climb Ometepe's other volcano, Maderas, we did head about halfway up its slopes to the beautiful waterfalls called the Cascada de San Ramon. These waterfalls are fed by the abundant flows that saturate Maderas, filling its crater with water and creating springs around its slopes. The waterfall in question is a thin, sinewy stream that plunges some 40 meters over the edge of cliff and creates a small, pleasant pool at the bottom. The walk to get there is quite nice, with lots of birds, butterflies and other wildlife. Once arriving, we of course plunged in to the refreshing pool, although Venla naturally spent more time in the water than I.

To be honest, there is not a whole lot more to say about the falls, other than enjoy the pictures!

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Biking Around Concepcion

matt — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 22:51:35 +0000

We have a strange way of resting, some have said. Sometimes the way we rest even resembles a triathlon. So we spent one of our last days on the island biking around the big volcano. The ride provided another interesting glimpse on local rural life, and it even included a stop in the precolombian art museum, which, apart from the usual pottery we are all big fans of by now, also included a lot of grinding stones (a status symbol, they say, much like cars for us). We barely made it back to our hostel by sunset, just on time for the power outage caused by the fiesta in town. We had no regrets about going straight to bed, our legs a little store once again.

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The Petroglyphs (and flowers) of El Porvenir

matt — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 03:45:02 +0000

I'm sorry, but I am an addict. I just can't stay away from the Old Piles of Stone. Unfortunately, Nicaragua is not exactly an archeology junkie's dream world, despite what the national tourist office's promotional literature claims. But we did our best, and went to see the petroglyphs of El Porvenir, on the Maderas half of Ometepe. Archaeologists estimate that these scribbles etched in stone are between 1200 and 1400 years old, but I am pretty sure that they pulled that number out of somewhere other than good science. Luckily, though, the glyphs are surrounded by some really lush forest, making for some great flower sightings.

Geniuses as we are, we decided to go see this far-flung place on a Sunday, a day when transportation in the cities is sketchy, much less on a rural island. We ended up hitching a ride out to El Porvenir in a pickup, and to move on to our accommodation for the night, we waited by the road for a couple of hours watching some kids play the country's favorite sport, baseball. We finally found an old school bus to take us to our "home", over a road so rough that they call it "El Toro" in reference to the island's second favorite sport of bull-riding. Even after a year, we haven't learned: you just don't try to do things on Sunday in Latin America.

Enjoy the shots. We promise that we didn't photoshop the flowers, that is the real color!

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Ojo de Agua; or, the Eye of Water

matt — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 03:23:33 +0000

After a day of celebrating with the locals in Altagracia, we decided to spend a day relaxing a bit. So, we headed over to a bubbling volcanic spring on the isthmus between the two volcanoes known as the Ojo de Agua, or the Eye of Water. It is a beautiful place, where visitors can swim in the warmish water or just sit on the edge of pools shaded by ancient ceiba trees and ordering drinks or meals from the small, thatched roof restaurant up the hill.

It was relaxing, fun, and very beautiful. Enjoy the pictures!

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Altagracia and the Zompopo Dance

matt — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 03:10:23 +0000

After a couple of days staying in the town of Altagracia, we were lucky enough to find that our visit coincided with the island's biggest festival of the year, the Fiestas Patronales, dedicated to Altagracia's patron saint, Saint Diego. It may seem odd that the most important festival of the year should occur at this time and not during the week preceding Easter as in most of Latin America, but there is very good reason for the difference. Before the arrival of the Europeans, Altagracia was the most important indigenous settlement on the island, which in turn gave it a lot of spiritual prestige. Indeed, the town is host to Nicaragua's most important pre-Colombian finds, including a number of statues that remain in the church yard (one of which features on the 500 Cordoba bill). The most important festival for this community was the fertility celebration dedicated to the Zompopo, or the leaf-cutter ant. It happened to fall on the Catholic feast of Saint Diego, and so the natives simply renamed the festival and continued celebrating it.

Today, the Fiestas Patronales have an undoubtedly Catholic tone to them, with an image of the old holy dude figuring prominently in the festivities. However, other elements of the celebration are clearly pre-Colombian. During the procession, the participants dance with a sprig of a tree above their heads, a reference to the leaf-cutter ant. The image of the saint spends a week traveling around town, being hosted by different members of the community, an early native tradition. Finally, the event lasts a full week, as the earlier fertility festival did. Other elements of religious syncretism abound in Altigracia, such as the statue of the island's twin volcanoes that graces the central park: the old deity (volcan La Concepcion) holds a statue to the Virgin Mary within.

After the procession, the festival turned into a much more modern event that seemed more like a Mexican cowboy movie than reality, complete with displays of horsemanship, bull riding, drinking, and really loud music (including mariachi bands!). We heard one local hotel owner say that he would not go because he had heard that Catholicism (as opposed to Evangelicalism) was bad for business, but it seems to us that the business-negative parts of the party had very little to do with the stuffy, old and empty church in town!

Altagracia was another fun, interesting example of the melding of cultures that today comprises Latin America. We hope you enjoy the pictures, but rest assured we had a lot more fun taking them than you have looking at them!

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