Today we woke up and grabbed breakfast at this place called "El Desayuno" which as the name suggests, only serves breakfast. The resturant was very cute, had good food and free wifi (which is almost as important to us as the food, lol). The power did go out while we were there, which is unfortunately a very common occurrence in Leon (also often times the water will stop working for a day or so in the town).
After breakfast we headed to the main cathedral to try a third and final time to climb to the top. It was still closed!! It's like they are trying not to make money. We gave up and headed to Bigfoot Hostel to grab our bus to Granada. It is a 3 hour bus ride that passes through Managua on the way, so we passed the time by chatting with the other passengers: an Australian couple headed to Lago de Apoyo and three guys from the UK headed to San Juan del Sur. We are planning to go to both places so it was interesting to hear what they were going to do there.
Once we arrived in Granada, we checked in at "Hostel Mochilla". It was the only hostel I had been able to book because there is a festival in Granada this weekend for the Hipica and Carnival and the city was booked (Hipica is a yearly event which is part of the local festivities in honor of the Assumption Virgen at the Xalteva church. The Hipica is essentially a horse parade; there is normally about 2500 horses that go on a parade which starts at the baseball stadium and finishes at the lake). The hostel wasn't bad;, it had a nice central courtyard but kind of smelled like urine. I came to realize that was because they had so many cats living at the hostel, so it was sort of a cat liter box scent.
We took a walk around the town in search of a cafe where we could work on some trip stuff. We found a cafe/restaurant that we could sit outside and drink a beer with wifi. While we were sitting there, a very strange parade came down the street asking for money. We weren't sure what it was for, but it was pretty funny.
We went to Hostel Oasis and booked our transportation and stay at Laguna del Aroyo for the following day ($13 USD for a round trip ticket). Then we headed out to see the local sights. Like many of the towns we've been to, there are many beautiful cathedrals to tour. We were able to climb to the bell tour of the main cathedral for $1USD and it was a beautiful view of the whole town and the lake behind it.
We decided to head to the local supermarket to grab some provisions. Unfortunately, the market was in a very sketchy area of town and I definitely felt unsafe being down there with my ipad (my most prized possession these days, second only to my passport). We got what we needed and headed back ASAP before it got dark. Luckily, there were tons of people out so if we did get jumped, hopefully someone in the audience would intervene. At one point, a group of 8 men approached us, but we pushed around a horse buggy which put them on the other side of the street. We hung out for a bit at the hostel and then decided to get a drink and check out the festival before heading to dinner. The main square had a stage erected in it where a priest was giving a sermon to the whole town. There were tons of street vendors and it looked like the whole town had come out for the event.
Since we couldn't really understand what the priest was saying in Spanish, we decided to head to Reilly's Pub and get a drink. We tried their specialty rum "Flor de Cana" on the rocks which wasn't bad; definitely not sweet like a lot of rums are.
The bar had an open courtyard and we were able to watch the full fireworks show from within the bar. All I could think was how expensive it must have been for them to put on a show like that; it was like 4th of July! But Central Americans love their fireworks! We got a recommendation from the bartender for a Mediterranean restaurant in town called "El Camelito" or "the camel". We headed down the main street with all of to little restaurants and marveled at the stark difference between that area of town and the ghetto we had seen earlier.
El Camelito had great food and we sat out the outside patio drinking wine and talking to the American couple next to us. The couple had ironically had dinner next to us at "El Carbon" in Leon. They were an older couple from Texas so we talked about our families and our trip so far. After dinner, we grabbed some gelato and headed home.
Side note on men in Central America: I know this is a generalization because not all men are like this, but the Central/South American/Mexican cultures all seem to allow men to be absolutely disgusting to women. It really ruins your experience sometimes when you are seeing a beautiful cathedral and a man keeps talking dirty to you or when every 10 seconds as you walk down a street men make wet, kissing sounds at you (literally makes me gag). Last night, I had a 7 year old child pinch my ass and tonight a child who might have been even younger slapped it!! When I turned around to look at him as he walked by, he was staring right at me like "what are you going to do?". I was flabbergasted. It is definitely the aspect of this culture that I dislike the most (not to say that things like this don't happen everywhere, including the states, it just seems to be constant here). One old man did yell at a guy for taunting us which shut the guy right up and I was very thankful for that.
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