There are no Easter Eggs in Nicaragua… Nor hot-cross buns. However, there is an overabundance of Semana Santa Processions (Holy Week Parades) and Easter is much, much more than an excuse to eat far too much chocolate and bread-and-buttery goodness. There have been parades all week, but the main parades tend to occur on Viernes…
In both of my visits to La Mariposa Spanish School and EcoHotel I’ve managed to luck out with a night hike 🙂 They are not part of the usual activity timetable and are scheduled when there is enough interest and willing guides available. 2 years ago we hiked through the pineapple farms to a…
Couldn’t resist – these birds (Blue-Crowned Motmots) are so beautiful! Look who brought a friend to visit me this morning at La Mariposa Spanish School and EcoHotel. This branch is just outside my bedroom window.
My conversation teacher for the third week at La Mariposa Escuela de Español (we change conversation teachers each week) was Layda. In our first class, we started talking about interests and I found out she’d recently done a community course on beaded jewelry making. Given my love of jewelry I asked her more about it and she suggested that…
It’s Semana Santa (Holy Week) here in Nicaragua and La Mariposa Spanish School put on a special trip for us so we could see the Vía Crucis Acuático around Las Isletas near Granada. After driving from an hour, we arrived in Granada at 8am and headed straight for our boat. We most definitely were not…
After catching many glimpses over the past weeks, I finally had a wonderful view of a Guardabarranco, the national bird of Nicaragua, this morning. It was just outside my bedroom window at La Mariposa Spanish School and EcoHotel and I managed to get a fairly good picture of it (see below on the right). Many…
What do you do on a Friday night in a small town in rural Nicaragua? Go to the Nicaragua international Jazz Festival of course! Touring Managua, Leon, and the tiny San Marcos and featuring groups from Nicaragua, Italy, Spain, USA and Germany, it was a surreal experience to be sitting in a little park…
About 2 weeks ago, 4 orphaned grey foxes were dropped off at La Mariposa Escuela de Español after their mother had been shot. They were nursed back to health at the school with the aim of releasing them once they were strong enough. A couple of days ago, we set them free in the Cañada Honda…
Another regular visitor to the garden around La Mariposa Escuela de Español is the Blue-crowned motmot. This guy looks a lot like the Turquoise-browed motmot (also called the Guardabarranco – the Nicaraguan national bird) but is distinct. The head colouring is different but the easiest way to tell them apart is through the look of…
Nicaragua is a country of volcanoes and right now, 5 of them are a lot more active than normal. The closest one to the Spanish school is Volcan Masaya – somewhere between 5 and 8 km away (as the crow flies) depending on whose map app you choose to believe (we had a couple…