Third House in Jinotega.

[MizBrown]

My landlord had to cut expenses, so sold the house he was living in and planned to move back to the house I was in. I heard on Thanksgiving, started looking through friends, and found another house a block and a half south of the one I was in. It's more money and more bedrooms (three, two with toilets and showers). Place has more light than I feared it would have being a long skinny house with a garage front door with an inset smaller people door. I'd seen another house where the landlady had rented to two foreign girls before for $375 and so wasn't going down below $300. But it had no patio, which I'm finding is handy with Lola. This place has one bedroom with shower and toilet in the room (separated off with shower curtains) on the ground floor back, one above that, a courtyard (patio) between the front and back sections, and a third smaller bedroom with windows on both ends, but no toilet/shower. The third bathroom is off the courtyard, but the shower is now a laundry hookup for an gravity draining semi-automatic washing machine. Not sure what I'm going to do with the two spare rooms. I've thought about renting out the one with the shower and toilet and found myself cheerfully figuring that I'd charge a gringo more (too many gringos who want to rent only a room are not exactly reliable sorts). Total rent for the house is $220.

[IMG]NewHouseWideAngle (6 of 5) by Rebecca Brown, on Flickr[/IMG]

The sala. These are a bit distorted because I was using an 18mm equivalent lens and converter on my Sony a6000.

[IMG]NewHouseWideAngle (5 of 5) by Rebecca Brown, on Flickr[/IMG]

The study, showing a bit narrower due to lens distortion. House has cement floor tiles rather than ceramic, so not so pretty as the tiles in House No. Two.

[IMG]NewHouseWideAngle (4 of 5) by Rebecca Brown, on Flickr[/IMG]

View across the street.

[IMG]NewHouseWideAngle (3 of 5) by Rebecca Brown, on Flickr[/IMG]



Miss Lola, the big fish tank, and the new ropero, among other things. The sala used to be used for parking.


[IMG]NewHouseWideAngle (2 of 5) by Rebecca Brown, on Flickr[/IMG]

The patio with plants in place and laundry hanging. Both staircases visible. One bedroom is over the kitchen and the other two are in the back section. Really like having the courtyard. Shed roof is over the laundry and third toilet in the house.

[KeyWestPirate]

Sounds like a deal,, and I noticed that the fish tank hasn't collapsed the stand as so many predicted a couple of years ago.

What else is new?

You haven't posted for quite some time.

[MizBrown]

Sounds like a deal,, and I noticed that the fish tank hasn't collapsed the stand as so many predicted a couple of years ago.

What else is new?

You haven't posted for quite some time.

The stand's still doing fine. The German born builder did come by and check it after an earthquake that some felt up here. The fish also didn't die due to new tank syndrome (we had old filter media). My tank builder move the tank and fish and was sure that the parental cichlid would eat the babies once they were back in the tank together after being separated for several hours. Didn't happen, just like tourism up in the north Central Mountains. Mom and Dad gathered the babies together again. The mollies which had been eating the fry went next door to a pond except for four I've kept in another tank. My first housekeeper is now in a relationship with another guy; my second housekeeper is another employee of the same hotel as the first housekeeper. She's straight, married with children.

[KeyWestPirate]

Aaahh, tourism in the north.
A bit of a sore subject.

I just got back from Granada, stayed at the hotel Granada (would recommend it to anyone,, $72 double with breakfast and taxes). Almost all Nicas this time of year.

Stopped at the Camino Real in Managua to drop off a friend to catch a flight the next day. Again,,, mostly Nicas. Met a 73 YO orthodontist living in Chinandega with his Nica wife,, only Gringo I saw.


Nica world is changing . . I'm pleased to see all the prosperity, even if I'm not seeing tourists.

[MizBrown]

Aaahh, tourism in the north.
A bit of a sore subject.

I just got back from Granada, stayed at the hotel Granada (would recommend it to anyone,, $72 double with breakfast and taxes). Almost all Nicas this time of year.

Stopped at the Camino Real in Managua to drop off a friend to catch a flight the next day. Again,,, mostly Nicas. Met a 73 YO orthodontist living in Chinandega with his Nica wife,, only Gringo I saw.


Nica world is changing . . I'm pleased to see all the prosperity, even if I'm not seeing tourists.

Tourism job are great for teenagers who want to surf or ski between shifts. Or kids working their way through college (the hotel maid in Mexico City was studying Mandarin). We get a few international travelers in Jinotega, but the bulk of the clients at the hotel where I have breakfast are Nicaraguan or Central American. The rich like tourism instead of real development because they don't have to educate the masses all that much.

Jinotega has been visibly getting more prosperous and Apanas Lake Estates is still not getting any building done by retirees and such. Areas getting more tourist attention also seem to be getting more crime and begging. Boaco has almost no tourists, and we could sit in the park talking in English without beggars homing in on us, which would not even be true in Jinotega.

Mexico has more things for tourists, but some of those things end up being attractive to people who are selling things in a desperate and a bit scary way. Tourism as a side is fine. As a main course --- not so much. Country has to be relatively prosperous to afford tourism.

Patrick County has a tourism hustler who's attached herself to the county. I wish they'd do to her what the good people of Matagalpa did to a particularly obnoxious tourism promoter -- throw her in jail for a few days.

Always said tourism was the refuge of the unimaginative gringos here. The guys who have Nicaraguans making fishing tackle and quilt have more interesting ideas.

Mountain tourism from the Alps to the Sierras is mostly regional. That's the pattern I saw in the mountains near DC, in the Catskills, and elsewhere. Managua is the market for Selva Negra -- get away from the heat.

Saw Granada once from one of the horse tour carriages. I basically don't get it. Boaco, Leon, and Ometepe are what I recommend to tourists.

It's highly amusing to see people crashing into the reality of what and who their market is. If hotels up here don't get the Managua and Leon car owners up on weekends, they go broke. And something on the scale of Selva Negra is needed to make that work.

[el duende grande]

A Mexican-style mega resort is what is needed to put Nic. on the map. Cancun Sur, kinda catchy, huh? Will the Chicoms man up and do it?
Selva Negra is a jewel, the perfect confluence of inherited wealth skillfully managed. You won't see any more of them. What certainly doesn't work is foreigners trying to make a million dollar hotel with 100k.

And what happened to America? The Captains of Industry now want to settle for owning B and Bs.
Ditto that tourism is the last refuge of the unimaginative. Nic could sure use some light industry. Get the Gov to outlaw pacas and maybe you would have a textile industry. Bring in somebody with an assembly line mentality and you could push out the little wood butchers and have a furniture industry, etc.

[kwah2249]

A Mexican-style mega resort is what is needed to put Nic. on the map. Cancun Sur, kinda catchy, huh? Will the Chicoms man up and do it?

Introducing extractive tourism into Nicaragua at this point in time would probably hurt the country.

[MizBrown]

A Mexican-style mega resort is what is needed to put Nic. on the map. Cancun Sur, kinda catchy, huh? Will the Chicoms man up and do it?
Selva Negra is a jewel, the perfect confluence of inherited wealth skillfully managed. You won't see any more of them. What certainly doesn't work is foreigners trying to make a million dollar hotel with 100k.

And what happened to America? The Captains of Industry now want to settle for owning B and Bs.
Ditto that tourism is the last refuge of the unimaginative. Nic could sure use some light industry. Get the Gov to outlaw pacas and maybe you would have a textile industry. Bring in somebody with an assembly line mentality and you could push out the little wood butchers and have a furniture industry, etc.

My new neighbor the carpenter who I've commissioned work from has a mechanized shop with electrically powered tools. He's working with someone in Canada to do export work. Lots of small scale but mechanized shops can do quite well -- my cobbler has much the same set up. They can capitalize a small mechanized shop for about what a larger scale factory would put in a work station for one person. I did a photo project out of curiosity about what's made in Jinotega: https://www.flickr.com/photos/rebecc...57663034405079.

Some more sophisticated than others.

I suspect that my cobbler makes as much an hour as the Chinese workers who produce shoes for the western markets, maybe more since he's not supporting a couple of layers of management over him. The bakeries were larger scale and La Norteña is larger scale yet (haven't been in so far), so there are things that work here without being poor guys working with hand tools.