This weekend I went to Grenada, Nicaragua with three other fellow interns. Zanda is the one from Bahamas, Pinto is the one from near Barcelona Spain, and Jessica is from the U.S. Jessica used to do the same job as me, but now she has another job here. They all have experience going to Nicaragua and they all speak Spanish much better than me, especially Pinto. It's about a 4 or 5 hour bus ride if you go direct, but we spent a lot longer because we took a number of buses.

We took one bus up to the Costa Rican border post. We got our passports stamped and we walked about 1km across the border to the Nicaraguan border post. There were a lot of people with wads of cash hanging around trying to get us to exchange our money. Also there were people offering taxis and other services. We managed to find our way to a bus with only one guy asking for a tip for 'helping' us across the border. Nicaragua is much poorer than Costa Rica and going from Costa Rica to Nicaragua was vaguely similar to the experience of going from Canada to Costa Rica. There were less cars and more animals on the road. Some of the houses were mere shacks.

The bus continued down the Pan-American highway past Lake Nicaragua. The lake is about half the size of Lake Ontario, but has two volcanoes in the middle and is the only place in the world with freshwater sharks. We also passed a lot of banana plantations, which I hadn't seen in Costa Rica yet. The bus wasn't going to Grenada, but Pinto managed to make friends with a guy who was, so we hopped off the bus near Grenada and caught an old school bus which dropped us off in Grenada.

None of us had a map, so we didn't know where we were, but Pinto kept asking people and, despite a number of conflicting directions, we managed to find our hostel. It was full so we got an address of another hostel and had a nice tour of the city by the time we finally got our room. It was the cleanest hostel I ever stayed in, with a large bathroom and it only cost $5 per person. We toured a little of the city and had really good pizza at the Pizzeria across the street.

Grenada is on Lake Nicaragua so we walked down to the lake in the morning. We also went to the Grenada market which was full of action and made the markets in Busan, Korea seem clean. Grenada is a very beautiful city with many well-maintained and painted colonial-era buildings. There were quite a few tourists from around the world and many of the stores and restaurants catered to the tourists. We sat in the Central Park waiting for our return bus and a bunch of university students came up to us to practise their English.

The return trip was much faster because we bought a direct trip back to Costa Rica, and the bus driver dropped us off right here in Bagaces.

This week the owner of the company had two agricultural university students at his farm for just the week. He has cement handprints by his pool of every intern who has ever worked here, so he invited the two agricultural students, me, Zanda and Pinto to make our handprints. It was interesting seeing all of the different names. There were a lot of Canadians because the Canadian government used to run an internship program through here.

Work still keeps my attention for most of the week and I am still enjoying it. My family got another dog, this one a tiny puppy. Also, every morning there is random cow or two in the yard because the yard is one of the last places in the area where the grass is still green. With the howler monkeys, the mooing cows, the crowing roosters and the barking dogs, I definitely don't need an alarm clock anymore.