Nicaragua

Hello friends
Sorry for leaving you all, but this was necessary for me and I suppose it's good for you to be relieved of me for a while. I'm going to learn Spanish fluently down here and also going to learn alot about politics and history of central and latin america, with focuspoint on Nicaragua.

Alot has happened the last few days. This thursday I left everybody behind and went for Nicaragua, in a way alone, as I knew none of the companions I am here with at the time. I went from my hometown to Oslo, where I met 16 girls, and once we arrived in London I met two other students (one who is 40 years old, there are two 40 year olds studying here), other than that we are 14 men and 62 women studying here.

In London I found out that one of my bags got lost somewhere between the plane and the terminal, so I had no other choice than go to the hotel and wait and see the next morning wether or not they found it, which they didn't. So I went of to miami with one bag and my backpack, only knowing that my luggage had been "seen at Terminal 4", as they put it.

Anyways, I saw four movies on the plane to Miami, and in Miami they stopped me because they thought I was this hashish guy. They sort of insulted me, they thought my t-shirt was this marijuana t-shirt, but it was really che guevara. The guy behind the counter laughed when he found out. Anyways, I was lost for a while, looking for the others, I was almost too late to check in, but they let me pass the queue. Then it was through another of those annoying security check points.

Finally around 16:30(Local time) we arrived in Nicaragua, but seven other people lost their bags in transit. Six of my friends from Managua met me at the airport! So I had a long while where I could chat with them. We went on at about 17:45 when everyone was ready, at about 19:50 we arrived at our house in Leon, where we went directly to sleep after a little chat.

The morning after we went out, discovered the local shops and markets, walked around for a while, ate some dinner at a place the hostess at the hostel had recommended. Later we went out with alot of other people to a place called El Mediterraneo, a very classy place where we ate and drank and had a good time.

Late at night the new arrivals came in, they had stayed in Miami for three days so they had gone out on the city once they came here, we met them and had a long talk before we went late to bed.

On the sunday I met my friends from Managua. They had come at saturday, but we were out. So we went to the beach together with some of the norwegian girls. Ate at the beach, and I got a tan really without working for it. In the afternoon, at 15:00 there was a meeting at Casa Iguana where everybody met, got some information and that was about it. Later we had another information meeting here, after having been to a fort where we could see over Leon. We then went out to another place called the Via Via, a very good place where we ate and had a few drinks.

This morning we woke up at 6 o clock, I took a shower and had a piece of bread with marmelade. We then went to school at 7:30 and arrived at 8:15. There was an information meeting and after that we had a diagnostic test on our spanish, on which I scored 64%. If you have over 50% you are qualified to have Spanish II, but they recommend 70%. However I do not think I will have any problems with Spanish after three months. We're being divided into 16 groups of spanish whereas each group has between 4 and 6 people.

What's fascinating is that the school lies directly by the beach, and it's rather big. There's grass and trees and hammocs, it's beautiful.

We ate lunch at school, and we bought two large books of articles and different scraps from other books which were essential for the latin american studies. After all that, and after reading for a while, we went back to the city to visit som libraries where they recommended us to go to do our studies.

After all that I'm sitting here, waiting to get my group numbers and to see who my class mates will be. I hope everyone back home or wherever you are are all right.