The first of my three weeks' leave in Nicaragua was in the old colonial city - and former capital - of León. I'd arranged a week with a Spanish school, staying with a local family so as to get a better feel for the place as well as more opportunities to practice my Spanish. The lessons went reasonably well although the teacher was more keen to teach me grammar than to give me the conversation practice I wanted. On the fourth day she was settling down to teach me how to conjugate the pluperfect subjunctive when I rebelled, and just refused to listen! Perhaps it is an important tense in Spanish, but as I can´t yet communicate in simple terms what I did yesterday, I felt that this was just going too far!
Outside of the lessons, I spent a lot of time just wandering around the city. León played a major role in the Sandinista revolution, and something about its characterisation as a place of left-wing revolutionary intellectuals appealed to me. The Sandinista side of its history was certainly evident, from the murals (and graffiti) around the city to the Revolutionary War Museum. What presented itself even more strongly however was the religious fervour of the place. The city contains many beautiful churches, and its cathedral is the largest in Central America. There always seemed to be church services going on and they were always full of people.
The end of my stay coincided with a local festival, the 'Chiquita Gritería'. This commemorates the time when a local volcano was erupting and covering the city with ash, and a local priest decide to cry out to the Virgin Mary to make it stop, which miraculously (or coincidentally), it did. There is a mass in the cathedral and a loud cry to Mary, followed by the whirling of some papier mache giant figures in the central square. Then the townspeople, plus many peasants bussed in from the surrounding countryside for the occasion, tour the city collecting free sweets from houses and businesses who have decided to participate. You can tell these because each has prepared a tableau in their front room with a statuette of the Virgin Mary with the blue Nicaraguan flag draped around her, and music will be blaring out from the property.
The photo here is one of the more impressive ones, which even includes an erupting volcano. The people touring the city go up to each such house and ask through the open door/window, "Quien causa tanta alegría?" (who is causing such happiness?), to which the answer comes back, "La asunción de Maria!" and sweets are duly handed out. Although I found the tableaux pretty tasteless, in some ways this seemed like a nice, social custom that got everyone out greeting their neighbours, but I did notice that some of the peasants looked suspiciously and sadly like this was the only time they would have the luxury of sweets, as they filled carrier bags with as many as they could get their hands on. Despite the opulence on show in some of the churches, Nicaragua is still a very poor country.
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