Nicaragua October 2009

Not exactly what springs to mind when one thinks of a vacation paradise, but apparently even Nicaragua has a tourist industry. But don’t go to the capitol city Managua!


For some reason Managua is the only place in the world that doesn’t use miles, kilometers or even North, South, East or West. Everything is relative. The use their own form of measurement (which I have forgotten) and directions sound like this, “Go three mm’s (mystery measurement) to the church and turn left, then 9 mm’s to Carlo’s house and veer right again…. This goes on for pages. The problem is that the city was wiped out by an earthquake in the 70’s and mostly never rebuilt. So the church is now a Laundromat, and Carlo’s house is gone. And if you think you’ll just simplify things by walking and asking directions at every intersection forget it. The sun is boiling hot, everything is miles and miles apart, and all the missing manhole covers make any walk treacherous.

You know how tourist guide books put a positive spin on everything? Well Fodor’s couldn’t manage to find anything much to say about Managua. Fly in and get out is their advice.

My readings on this country were a bit schizophrenic. I tried to nail down once and for all who the Sandinistas were and why the US was involved in that mess. Wish I could tell you, but I only managed to move from a thick mental fog to a slightly thinner one. On the other hand, since the only thing I associated with Nicaragua was war, I went out of my way to look at pictures of anything else. It is a beautiful country.

To celebrate Nicaragua we invited my sister and nephew up for a dinner of carne asada with two kinds of pico de gallo. I made one version with a habenero pepper and one without, but I was too timid with the habenero and both versions turned out pretty mild. For dessert we had “pastille de los tres leches” or cake of the three milks. This dessert originated in Nicaragua and has become so popular that versions of it can be found all over Latin America. It’s basically a white cake made with a whole lot of eggs. When the cake is cooked, you take it out and make hundreds of little holes in it with a skewer. Then you pour a mix of whole milk, sweetened condensed milk and evaporated milk over the whole thing and let it sit. The cake is extremely moist, very dense and just very plain. I took most of it to work and fed it to the office.