Leon! (accent over the "o")
León!
I know, I just updated, but I got to León today and I am very excited about it. I posted pictures with descriptions in the midst of my excitement (and a much welcome rainstorm which has cooled things off quite a bit). Here´s the link.
I am down to my last 10% of free space on flickr, so I am not sure what to do when I run out of room as I think I still have a lot of pictures left to take since I´m not even in Esteli yet. I may have to wait until next month to post them all, and try to limit myself to the best ones for now.
I feel like this is the part of the trip I have been looking forward to the most, there´s not much time left so I have given up feeling homesick and I am in an interesting place with few tourists. I am also staying in a hostel-dental clinic, which is funny, but nice because it´s cheap and I have my own room and bathroom. I was getting super burnt out of the backpacker crowd. I love meeting people when I travel, but it gets to a certain point where you start to get annoyed with all the people who just breeze through places with no regard to anything outside of the normal tourist activity. It feels good to be forced into using Spanish again, too, I think I was ready for it and starting to wonder when I would get back to my goal of learning Spanish on the trip. I even felt so good about it I picked up a little $2 short story book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez that´s in Spanish.
Only a few minutes after arriving here, as I was taking a picture of a mural, a woman just walked up to me and started showing me all the murals and Sandanista spots in the city. It was kind of awesome, though I realized by looking in my guidebook there´s still a lot to see, which is nice because I have 2 more days here before heading to Estelí.
I also started reading Hopscotch, which is fantastic. I was just saying to someone about how I miss studying philosophy, and I feel like this book will fill that desire because there is a lot of philosophy in it. I am also excited by the brilliance of putting together a book that can be read twice in two different orders.