North end of Jinotega
The Calle Yucapuca links the commercial road with the big hardware stores and Pali to the Sandinista neighborhood to the west where the German Pomares monument is. My particular neighborhood is slightly east of Barrio German Pomares and is lower to upper middle class, no truly poor people in it, lots of people with various businesses -- beauty salon, Makarony gas seller, pulperias, the intermittently open quick food place PicNic, and some families with large walled or gated forecourts.
We get all the parades apparently. It's a relatively safe neighborhood with the usual snatch and grab robberies from time to time -- no house breakings other than mine and that guy had keys and was a friend's ex-boyfriend (I'd seen it coming and stored most of my stuff with other friends when I was back in the US).
It's one of those "just people" neighborhoods that's perhaps not as colorful as some campesino countryside or neighborhood where quarreling couples provide entertainment to their neighbors. Occasionally cows get loose from a pasture between here and the industrial road and wander around until someone misses them and gets them back to the pasture. During the rainy season, cowboys move cattle between here and other countryside down the road the statute of the Virgin is on, out by the big black pipes that bring water to the city and one of the roosting spots for the black vultures that clean up tossed chicken bones in town and dead horses in the country.
My next door neighbors have a finca, 22 manzanas, and the wife works in town while the husband tends their daughter and pretty much smashes all the cliches I've heard about Nicaraguan men by doing laundry and mopping. Rosario still does the cooking, I think. Like me, they've got a gas cooktop, a blender, a refrigerator, and cell phones. Unlike me, they have a microwave, a television with cable, and a white pickup truck bought with coffee money.
Across the street, my landlady's sister-in-law and her son, who is the day by day part-time runner of the pulperia on the ground floor of their house, and the other son who helps out some, and a parrot and a puppy.
The next street east has a number of useful shops and restaurants three blocks south -- a bigger pulperia (I don't advise buying meat from them), a computer store with more geek kids hanging around than I suspect make their livings there (some speak some English and watch Dr. Who videos that some gringa burned for them), a coffee processing equipment seller, and the Hotel Sollentuna Hem whose wifi connection I used for C$20 a battery charge until I got my 3G modem, and which I go to still for excellent breakfasts from time to time, and scoldings for not mastering Spanish yet.
South on my street, down a couple of blocks, is the Chinese shop, run by people whose ancestors left China for Nicaragua and a life much like any number of other Overseas Chinese, selling a range of things: sewing notions, crochet and embroidery thread, cooking utensils, electric lamps, and bad quality black Jinotegan pottery that falls apart if it's soaked in water. Next door to them is the camouflaged rico's house behind a cracked adobe wall and battered doors. The house itself is very new and shows above the wall, even has a chimney. Local gossip says the owners are Costa Rican. Across from the Chinese store and maybe north is a huge art deco house that's for sale or rent, owned by people now in Miami. Next door to them is a trim smaller house that's been recently remodeled, small and elegant, with a pit-bull out in the front courtyard from time to time.
The shabby to not so shabby elegance falls off in all directions.
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Originally Posted by Daddy-YO
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