Part I of ?
My husband has put the first part of our building process to video. Take a look of what we have accomplished in the last few weeks.
Azalea’s school, San Juan del Sur Day School, has been studying prehistoric times. They’ve learned about cavemen, fossils, and dinosaurs. The teachers of the classes for kids ages 3-5 decided to take a trip to Parquesaurio de Nindirí to see the local park that had 5 dinosaur statues in the grounds. I jumped at the opportunity to volunteer to chaperone.
We took the one and a half hour trip in a rented big, air conditioned van. It was a great field trip! This community park is open to the public with no entrance fees, and has the added bonus of these giant dinosaur statues. It is situated about 30 minutes outside Managua, so a great stop if you are making the trip to and from Managua to San Juan del Sur or other more Southern towns. I also hear that the dinosaurs light up at night!
My husband has been annoyingly videoing every part of the process of digging our well on the property we bought in San Juan del Sur. After finding water he made this amazing video documenting the journey in reverse order. He is now forgiven for my irritation.
Kharron made a little video of a day we took the kids to Surf Ranch Resort to ride their bike & scooter. Its a pretty funny introduction to our family. We live only 1km away from Surf Ranch, so we go their at least once a week.
We liked the idea of an easy office/storage shed by using a container. We had heard there was a surplus of them in Nicaragua so you could get one cheaper than constructing a regular building. We asked around San Juan del Sur and randomly stopped by places we saw containers while on trips away from town, but the quoted prices were much bigger than what we had planned for until a friend of ours came back into town and hooked us up with his contact. We ended up paying about $4,000 for the container with delivery.
Tying chains to the backhoe bucket Lifting the container off the truck bed
Rotating the container so it will go up our driveway
Gentling setting the container down on the cement feet we had built
Untying the chains from the bucket.
Kharron woke up one morning and decided he wanted to document our whole day at the beach, so here it is!
I’ve been attempting to try a Choco Banana for weeks. There’s a place in town with a big sign and I’ve stopped there 3 times asking for a Choco Banana. Each time the woman sitting inside hollers back, “Mañana!” The first time we failed at this location we walked around town looking for another vendor, but were unsuccessful. It turns out, she is the only permanent vendor of the Choco Banana.
Today Kharron, one of his employees Dayana, and I headed over for a little afternoon pick me up and they were finally in stock. The first bite was amazing, the cold chocolate & almost frozen banana was refreshing on this sweltering day. But after a couple bites the joy of the chilly treat wore off and the texture of the smooshy banana mixed with the chocolate that stuck to the roof of your mouth took over. The chocolate wasn’t strong enough to satisfying my chocolate craving so we bought a Snickers bar to share.
With all this said, while here in San Juan del Sur, give the Choco Banana a try!
A Hen in the Wolf House
First off, I love having chickens. I grew up always having at least 5 chickens. As an adult, at our house in California, we had chickens before we moved to Nicaragua. Any excuse I can come up with to own chickens, I’ll use it.
So since we have property with plenty of bugs, I decided we MUST have chickens grazing on it. It would give us something to visit on the property each day, good nature lesson for the kids as they laid eggs and created chicks, and I’d get to own chickens!
We started asking around where we live and quickly found out that we needed to go further away from town, “el campo” where people have more land, and therefore enough chickens to afford to sell some. We also learned that it being November which is close to December & Christmas, that the price of a chicken was going up. We decided to make a trip to “el campo” after our car was fixed.
Since I love having chickens, the weekend after we got our car back we took Juanita to “el campo” to look for chickens for sale. We had to ask several houses and kept hearing about a person who had “bastante gallinas” (a lot of hens). When we turned the corner on the dirt road, we knew we had found the right place.
Even though the woman had “bastante gallinas” she was not thrilled about selling some. Juanita & her spoke and she started rounding them up to pick out 4 hens. We put our chickens into a large dog crate in the car, buckled up, turned the key and the car wouldn’t start!
Our battery had been acting a little funny, but we were in “el campo” we can’t be stuck! The look on Juanita’s face said the same thing. After waiting and trying a couple more times, Juanita, Kharron, and a helpful gentleman pushed the car down the slope while I tried to get the car to start. I didn’t realize you needed to have the car in 1st gear, so with Kharron at the wheel and Juanita & I pushing down hill the car revved to life and I literally jumped for joy.
That night the chickens slept in the dog crate at our house. The next morning after jumping our car to start, we went out to the property to release them. Kharron left me alone in the drizzle with the crate of chickens, some chicken wire, and a machete while he went to buy a new battery for our car. I developed a game plan, spread some feed on the ground, filled a water bowl, and opened the door of the crate. Almost instantly one of the chickens had a scorpion in her beak. I was so proud and happy to have my girls cleaning the property.
I propped a large branch from the ground against the sturdiest tree I could find. While the hens picked around their new land I used the string that held the chicken wire in a roll to make the best coop I could for the night. I hoped that our day laborer, Manuel, could make something better the next day.
The next morning when Kharron went to the property we were already down one chicken. The other 3 had found a larger tree off the property to perch in. Our workers digging the well & Manuel kept telling Kharron how sad & scared the hens were to be left alone on the property. We had no idea Nicaraguans cared so much about their chickens! That day 2 more fled up the hill and off our property, so we were left with only one and by then I surrendered that the chickens indeed did not belong on the property yet. We caught the one and brought it to Manuel’s dad’s house down the street.
This morning I was hopeful that Kharron would find more, happily grazing on our property again, but there was no sign of their return. I am happy to report that one hen did show up later this morning and is now safely at another home with her sister-hen.
A few months ago we learned that there is a cheap taxi service option between San Juan del Sur & Rivas. Its called the “collectivo.” For only $C50 (less than $2) you can catch a ride from in town San Juan del Sur to the market in Rivas and visa versa. The reason this is such a good deal is because the Rivas taxis need to get back to Rivas & the San Juan del Sur taxis need to get back to San Juan, so they wait until they are full with 4 passengers and you’re on your way… fast! In San Juan del Sur you pick it up outside of the delicious pizza place, Don Monchis. Typically the wait is no more than 15 minutes, but if you happen to be the 4th person then you can be on your way in a matter of in minutes.
The day finally arrived when we could sign the paperwork and take ownership of our piece of land. We had already found & measured our lot and had been waiting for the surveyors to complete the required map. We did this crazy thing to pay the fee to get it approved & expedited. We put the needed $120 in an envelope, paid a “collectivo” taxi the $2 fair to Rivas, and sent the envelope of cash in a taxi to be delivered to surveyor’s office. I guess this is done all the time, but the process was very strange, and took some faith on our part.
We met at the attorney’s office at 2pm on a Thursday afternoon. Both parties did not fully trust the other. We were skeptical to wire the money before the seller signed and the seller didn’t want to sign before he received the wire. We worked it out that we wired at the attorney’s office and showed him the confirmation. We had previously wired a chunk of the money in our Solo 401k account to our personal bank account so that we could easily send a wire over the internet the day of. There were a couple hiccups like needing to have a SafePass account to wire an amount larger than $1k & not having a USA phone number, but a quick call to a responsible friend to see if I could use her number and she could send me the code made the process work out easily.
After a few minutes we showed a confirmation to the seller and then we stepped into the conference room where we were all read the whole real estate contract out loud. While in that room the seller and I received confirmation emails that the wire was sent, and the mood became much lighter. We paid a reasonable $520 attorney fee and drove back to San Juan del Sur with nervous & hopeful smiles.
The next day we quickly got to work clearing the property and looking for someone to start digging the well.
