Well, we made it to Nicaragua and back over our four-day Thanksgiving break. We took off after school on Wednesday and drove until midnight to reach Leon. Leon is a very historic-feeling city as the city itself dates back to the 1600's and it has maintained much of the colonial architecture (including many old churches) from that period. Tegucigalpa, like most of Honduras, has the colonial buildings but they are not as well taken care of and it is not easy to find the old churches in Honduras. Although Nicaragua has been beaten about pretty bad by earthquakes overe the centuries, they have managed to keep their churches mostly upright. Some are in ruins but still present, unlike Honduras which seems to believe that anything newer is better.
Leon also has murals painted everywhere - mostly testaments to their revolutions and revolutionaries. The party colors for the liberal party are also present nearly where ever you look - especially in the countryside where lightpoles, bridges, medians and just plain rocks are painted in the red and black of the Sandinista party.
The traffic in Nicaragua is much more sane than in Honduras - apparently they enforce laws and therefore, people drive in their own lanes and usually only pass when it is safe to do so. Much easier to drive although I don't recommend doing so at night as the guantlet of cows horses, dogs, people and the occasional opossom make the crater-like pot holes even more difficult to spot. Luckily we have a beast for a vehicle and it has grown accustomed to absorbing the bumps and jolts of driving in Central America.
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