We left Ometepe with a rougher lake then the day we came. The lancha
(wooden ferry) was a mad rollercoaster ride, and as alway people start
to eat tortillas and other smelly food when in public transport, this
time it all came out again as well, a chorus of pukers..
The bus for Leon would only stop at the exit of the highway for Leon,
and we had specifically asked to be warned when we had to go off, but
after we had been sitting too long in the bus, we wondered if we hadn’t
passed. Ofcourse we had, so we had to track back a stretch. We jumped
out of the bus on the middle of the highway, all in such a rush that
we forgot things in the bus.
Leon is the most leftish town in Nicaragua, a lot of political
activists and students live here, and it was a center of the revolution
and Sandinist movement (and resistance against the Contra’s supported
by Reagan). People on the street, in the restaurant, in the taxi, they
all wanted to speak about politics. A very communicative town. The
walls of the town where full of murals, a politically tainted sort of
graffiti.
We went to a sort of shrine to the revolution, a shoe repair shop ran by
Marvin, with a room full of pictures, old newspapers and artifacts of
the revolution. He was one of the first ones to have joined the
Sandinist movement, and he had many stories. He had been tortured, he
smuggled arms and hide out in the mountains. He could talk the whole day
about the revolution, and he still had a revolutionary state of mind
towards the nowadays politics. He was wearing a moustache that was a-
symetrical, as a kind of caricature of corrupt politicians with two
faces. And he had had some help in the past from foreigners too,
including some guys from Amsterdam. Great guy to talk to, and we left
with a coin with an Image of Sandino on it, which 2 students could turn
into a nice necklace with fingerquick metalbraiding within
minutes.
It was getting towards Semana Santa, the week of eastern, which is
considered more important here then Christmas. Everybody gets a week
of and most of them want to head to the beach. The festivities already
started when we were in Leon, there was a procession again with some
window dummies. It was also palm-Sunday (palmpasen?), where I finally
found out where the name originates from; people walk in the procession
with crucifixes made out of palmleaves. As a part of the festival they
would also hand out free booze that afternoon. A taxi driver didn’t
think that it would be good idea, because he had just hit a bicycle in
the ride before us, his window screen was bursted into pieces.
Out of all places we found a Lebanese guy here, so after rice and beans
we could change our diet for once to humus and tabule.
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