Thursday, March 12, 2009

Scratch that...

Sooooooooooooooo...........international travel is all about flexibility, right? Yeah. So we just got a "final" itinerary for the trip and apparently we are staying at the CGE house for a couple days (see pictures below). We will get to Managua late on the 22nd and have dinner and a general "don't lick the dirt" talk. The next day we'll have breakfast (totally crossing my fingers for fried plantains...*drool*) and get some basic history/economics info from a speaker. After that we'll go to the Free Trade Zone and a maquilla (sweat shop) which is probably one of my favorite parts of the trip. It's basically one afternoon full of smiles and lies. The best part is catching them in a lie or something so fantastically outrageous that they'll just flat out ignore your question. Last time it was in the maquilla when we asked if the workers were allowed to unionize (they aren't) and the manager guy looked straight at us and said, "They are so happy here they don't want to unionize." Sorry, buddy, but your credibility just went right out the window. After that hilarity we'll tour downtown and then dinner!! Can you tell I'm stoked for the food? Anyway, the next day is breakfast (!) and then we're off to Matagalpa and our host families. Still not sure if we'll get back to La Reyna or not but I'm hoping so. We're up to the 25th now, for those of you keeping track, so we'll get breakfast with our host families (yay!!) then some sort of community work and our itinerary says "soccer"...fat, lazy, out-of-shape American, let's think about this. We'll head back to Managua that afternoon/early evening sometime. Thursday we'll meet with three different groups and/or representatives from those groups. Friday is our relax/absorb/decompress day at Masaya Volcano and Lake Apoyo, little place called the Monkey Hut. Then back to Managua, dinner and the next day we're back on a plane. All in all the trip is way packed and sounds fantastic. I'm super excited and Cindy's super scared and it should be interesting!!

1 comment:

Jason Bowker said...

So great to hear more details. Sounds like a great experience. Hearing about it makes me think of Panama, remember the great memories, and miss all of you Sioux Falls folks.

Is this for a class? And you're going Lois? That's awesome. You two will have so much fun together. I will be excited to hear how the trip went when you are back in a few weeks.