This morning, helping Doña Ana stir the pot of Indio Viejo ( a fragrant local stew which we helped prepare in her outdoor kitchen), I felt a tiny bit closer to normal life here. After visiting the intense fresh market behind the cathedral with three fellow travellers, and locating all the ingredients on our shopping list, we were herded by our local guide onto one of the trucks which serve as in-city buses. For 15 cents, you´re hustled up into the tarp-covered truck bed, where you hang onto bars for dear life as the truck whips around corners and lurches to frequent stops in order to load more people than you ever believed possible.

After six blocks´walk from the bus “remember to stay on the shady side of the street,” we sat in the shade of Doña Ana´s modest garden and caught our breath with cold beers and colas. Then we trekked off along the unpaved roads for a few more blocks to the local tortilleria. It turned out to simply be someone´s back yard, where a larger outdoor kitchen was set up. Four or five wood fires burned, heating various bubbling pots and hissing griddles. It was shadowed and smoky and so unbelievably hot that we simply stopped noticing the sweat running down our bodies.

The patient tortilla makers paused in their patterns of slapping and pounding, and taught us laughingly how to form a decent tortilla. Then they fixed our results, and set them to toast on one of the hot surfaces. They told us they get up each morning at 4 am to start work, and produce about 2000 hand-shaped tortillas each day. Apparently they have a contract to supply the local hospital, along with who-knows-how-many other venues. Men sat in chairs nearby, watching the activity.

I spotted some kids, middle-school age, copying Winnie the Pooh drawings from their notebook covers onto some paper, so I sat down with them and drew a few little doodles for them on my own notebook. Kids and adults were mesmerized — whether by my drawings or by the sheer weirdness of my doing such a thing — and they seemed truly pleased. They asked for other drawings, asked me to sign them and tried to pronounce my name. It was such fun, so many smiles, a moment free from language and tourism and separateness.

We trundled our tortillas back to Doña Ana´s, and hung out with her, trying to be helpful while she cooked. She wasn´t entirely thrilled by the peppers we´d brought, because she warned us they´d be too spicy, but they were OK in the end. I have the recipe, and can probably reproduce it at home, except for one particular spice called Achiote. I´m going to try to pack some achiote home in my checked luggage, along with (Hi, Winnie) cocoa beans to share. I have no idea what Miami Airport´s Homeland Security will consider to be a threat, but it´s worth a try.

After a while we sat down with Doña Ana and we all ate, while her husband and son continued with their project of making crocodile stew. Mercifully, that hadn´t cooked long enough to taste while we were there, but we did take photos of the croc´s head with the jaws propped open with a stick. After lunch, Ana´s husband took us proudly around his yard and showed us all his fruit trees — most of which have names I´ve already forgotten. He had one each of maybe a dozen kinds of trees, some with fruit nearly ripe and others dormant in this dry season.

After the amazing lunch (with some packed up in plastic bags to bring back to Bob and one other absent partner), we took another wild back-of-truck ride and ended up near our hostel. It was a warming experience in every way, one small chance to connect with people without quite as many filters in the way. Bob having completed his morning errands (laundry, bank, another pair of sandals to replace the ones he wrecked while motorcycle riding) we settled in for a lazy poolside afternoon of chatting and daydreaming. An iguana sat silhouetted on the roofline of the hostal, watching the swimmers. Ah, vacation!

Our hostel is airy and lush, with brilliantly painted walls and a courtyard shaded with lime and mango trees. The other folks staying here are all less than half our age, though; nice enough young people, but it´s a bit like we´ve been airlifted into a really well-landscaped college dorm.

Last night, the only opening was literally in the dormitory section, in a room with six beds. Bob and I were assigned one pair of bunk beds, so I climbed into the top one and he set up two of the fans so that we each would have one blowing onto our beds while we slept. All the twenty-somethings took off at about 10 pm to start their night, and after they left we happily climbed into our bunks to read. Leon was raucous with celebratory firecrackers and whooping bar-fuls of partyers, since it just won the Nicaraguan World Series for the first time in 5 years.

Tonight we have our own tiny private bedroom (also with bunk beds). We may both try sleeping on the bottom one, since that´s the only one which can get air from the one fan. The showers are basic but refreshing, sluicing off the layers of sweat which accumulate as soon as you move around. There´s no hot water (at least, not anywhere we´ve stayed) but the water isn´t really cold, either. Just on the cool side of tepid, the perfect temperature to stand beneath and feel glorious. And the best part of the hostel (besides the computer) is the fridge of free COLD drinks of all sorts, that you can just take anytime and then add a little tally mark to your tab.

Tonight in the main plaza, el Parque Central, Saturday night was in full swing. The huge cathedral, with golden lights on its ancient facade, was the backdrop to the party atmosphere in the plaza. There´s a small flock of little electric kiddy-cars, which parents pay for their children to have a turn in. The vendors´kids run around guiding the small ones who are driving, so that they don´t crash into a food stand or something. The lush trees are lit with strings of light, and some of the jewelry and toy vendors have their wares hung from the branches. Teenagers stand in clumps and pairs, doing as much as they can get away with in the crowded scene. One couple was earnestly trying to pretend they were all alone, while within two yards of them on either side, parents kept corralling wayward toddlers.

Vendors sell ¨Hamburguesas¨ which I have to confess are not actually half bad. Along with the standard assortment of scary hot-pink cookies, and pizza, and plantains in every conceivable form, and fresh fruit, and deep-fried things. Bob and I have blithely indulged in pretty much any street food that strikes our fancy, and so far we´ve been just fine. Today we went to the big open fresh market, buying tortillas still hot from the griddle, and a HUGE avocado, and homemade salsa in a little plastic bag, and fresh pickles and smoked cheese and peppers.

Tonight, music spilled from bars in all directions, and in one square a block away from the main scene, deafening music poured out of speakers while youngish people in tight blue jeans milled around looking for action in the crowds of their compatriots. A police car stood watchfully by, but nobody seemed inhibited by its presence. People just swarmed by it on all sides, eating and talking and hanging out.

Leon is a university town, a town vibrating with youthful energy. We passed a mural of Sandino with his foot on Uncle Sam´s head, and another of Somoza being crushed. We don´t know how politically active the current young people are, or really much about the current situation here. I had a long conversation with a woman this morning, as part of an informal Spanish lesson she was giving me, and she told me of the hardships that Nicaraguan women struggle with. The men (in a similar pattern to US poverty chaos) tend to engender children with several women, supporting none of them, and the women in the extended family are the ones who hold the generations together. The women support the families, by and large, she said, and jobs are easier for women to get because they´re known to be more responsible than men. Her viewpoint may have been influenced by her own situation as a single mother, but a Peace Corps volunteer from just over the border in Honduras told me that, yes, that does tend to be the social pattern here.

We´re trying to learn about the poverty and the wellbeing, what works and what doesn´t. But I think it´s as Juan back in Flor de Pochote declared: that it would take at least a year here to even begin to be able to know the country. With only about a week and a half behind us, we´re utter novices to the whole scene, just absorbing all we possibly can.

Tomorrow we head to the coast. We don´t know if there´s any computer access down there, so it may be a few days til the next blog post.