Still alive!

My body has now almost recovered from the first week! My legs are certainly a sight to behold with all the mosquito bites and cuts, but my blisters are healed, which means that I may once again hold a machete! Through a wonderful group effort, we all finished clearing the land for the garden. Now we just need to outline the plots and hold a work day with the community for preparing the plots. We've got a lot of great soil (from our vermiculture bins) and a new compost bin which we are filling up as we go along. Otherwise, we've busied ourselved making a brick oven (on which we have cooked dinner these past two nights...I am learning to master Nicaraguan cooking from mi madre Maria, so good!). Learning to wash clothes by hand with an old-school style washboard. It's fun, but I feel I will have a new respect for electric washers and dryers when I return. And showers. We won't even talk about the state of my hair.
Otherwise, still chugging along with my Spanish...my conversations have progressed to Spanglish! Part of this is due to the awesome group I have with me. We speak and teach Spanish to each other. Still loving my little homestead in the jungle, it's a rewarding lifestyle, especially for hippies like me.

Adventura y cumpleanos

Hola all! In my last blog I forgot to mention that I ate iguana. It tastes like very dry chicken. Mmmm.

Anyway, it was our amigo John's birthday today, so we headed with Maximo to Popoyo yesterday to get him some pizza and enjoy the beach after working hard. Got to ride on the back of a truck the whole way in the pouring rain, it was fantastic.
Today...we woke up, had amazing huevos rancheros (sooo stuffed), then headed onto a 5 hour hike back to a bus stop to get back to Playa Gigante. I suffered a bit of sunburn, some scratches, and a nasty cut on my foot, but the views of the Nicaraguan coast....breathtaking. The shale rock and seashells, the tide crashing, and the black volcanic sand totally made the hike. Now I just need to sleep for the night, and hopefully I will be functional tomorrow, the blisters on my hand have healed in time for my legs to be in deep trouble. But it's okay, I'm making up for all the lack of excersize during school.

Gardening with a machete....?

Yes, it's true. My baby has been cutting down a ring of jungle overgrowth in one of our gardens. I spent yesterday hacking down shrubbery with a machete, then venturing into the forest to take down stalks of bamboo, which we cut into smaller pieces and split down the middle. Yes, it is just as much of a workout as it sounds like. I love usng a machete, though, you just grab a stick to protect your legs and hack away. It cuts the weeds like butter. All of this we were taught by our new father, Ruffino and his son Maximo.
Otherwise, we've just been building an oven, a firepit, a flat area for a composting box (which is what the bamboo was for), and extending the vermiculture bin.
For breakfast, we've had the most amazing meals, made by our resident mother, Maria. She uses fresh ingredients for everything, so we always have rice and/or bread, beans, plantains, scrambled eggs, different pork and chicken dishes, salads with tomatoes and onions with lime, and various other delicious things (plus snacks of fruit from the trees on the property like starfruit and coconut). I've been able to help Maria a bit in the afternoon, so I am learning to cook some delicious things :)
Then at night we head down to la playa (the beach) to do swimming and running through the sand (which, when the sweat drips from you like a faucet during the day, feels amazing). The beaches are beautiful, and the waves are huge.
The people here are wonderfully welcoming and nice. Our group has become really tight very quickly. My Spanish is improving exponentially, I get a lot of opportunities to speak with our family and other locals solely in Spanish. They're teaching me lots of vocabulary and basic phrases.
All in all, I am learning so much and loving Nicaragua. This is definitely the kind of stuff I have a passion for.

Well, the plane landed

So I am here in Rivas, Nicaragua! We are staying in a gorgeous hostel named Lidia, and in between errands we are getting piña, mangoes, y postres...muy delicioso! My Spanish is already being challenged being here, we´ll see how I hold up. We are fixing to take a taxi into Playa Gigante tomorrow to start the dirty work. For now, though, just enjoying the beautiful (and hot...) Nicaragua sunshine.

Monies!

Hallelujah for scholarships! I just found out that I received another $2,000 from STA Travel and the Foundation for Asia Pacific Education, which brings the grand total to $15,612! God knows I was beginning to wonder if all the scholarship writing I've been doing lately was just practice. Get this--this one requires me to take pictures and blog, ha! So, this will be my Nicaragua blog then, because STA will be my new blogger forum. Now even more people will see me rant on about food! Ha! But I'm sure anyone who takes time to read this blog will follow me to STA, right? Follow the money!

Welcome to KT's Travel Blog! (I'll think of a more creative name later)

As some of you may know, I am very bad about maintaining long-distance communication. So, I'd like to provide an all-encompassing account for you all to follow. Please please please email me with comments and conversations, I don't want this to be a one way thing! I'm at ktehrlich@gmail.com.

THE TRAVEL MENU:

First up: Playa Gigante, Nicaragua. June 21st-August 6th.

DU Geography Professor Matthew Taylor began this as a sister project to his work with DU in Guatemala (http://www.geography.du.edu/taylor/Site/home.html). Basically, this particular trip is a student-led project, and our group will be using DU research grants to create a fully functional and sustainable organic garden and nearby structures. The premise of the project is giving back to the local fishing community by generating produce and income. The locals paid a small fee for ownership of part of the garden, and they are to be an integral part of the formulation of our project and the work we do.

I am not sure how often I will have internet while I am there, but I will take every opportunity to communicate here and on email.

I will also be quite safe. I am with a group of DU students and graduates that I completely trust, and we are not the first group of students to work on this garden. Taylor and volunteer students have been working on this project for nearly a year now. The community knows Taylor and DU, as well as a couple students coming with us, and they are very warm and welcoming.

I expect this to be an immense learning experience for me. I will get to experience hands-on the concepts I have been learning about in classes like Ecology, Feeding the World, and Peacebuilding. I want to be able to incorporate myself into the local culture as much as possible by speaking Spanish and spending time with community residents. I think that is the part I am most excited about. Should be amazing!



Second up: Nanzan University, Nagoya, Japan. August 27th-May.

My Junior/Senior year will be spent in--that's right--Japan!

Nanzan University started as a Christian Missionary school, and eventually evolved into a well-known and respected international learning institution (http://www.nanzan-u.ac.jp/). I will be travelling with the Institute for International Education of Students (IES Abroad). Basically, they connected me with Nanzan and help me organize all my paperwork.

This trip is particularly significant, because ever since my family hosted our first Japanese exchange student I have been in love with the country, and all aspects therein. I don't think there is any place that I have wanted to go as badly as Japan. Serendip had it that my high school taught the only public school Japanese language program in the county, so I of course took advantage of it. I learned under the fantastic guidance of my teachers Scott Harguth and Atsuko Frederick for 4 years. But in college, figuring I would without doubt study abroad in Japan, I learned Chinese and Spanish instead. And traveled many places, none of them Japan. Finally Japan is tangible, and that is in the form of Nanzan University!

I applied to a home-stay option, but I don't hear about that until August. What I do know is I will be taking intensive Japanese courses the whole time. My courses taught in Japanese will include those on Japanese literature, teaching English as a foreign language, and various art courses. My English-taught courses for my International Studies major will be Japanese Economy, Japanese Foreign Policy, Japanese Politics, Political and Social Issues of Japan, Asia and Japan in American Foreign Relations, and Japanese Religions. I want to participate in clubs, language learning partners, and volunteerism as well.

But the food. The foooood. That will certainly be one of my favorites.

Japan will be foodie heaven. You will hear much about food.


Basically as the details roll in I will write about them. Watch my blog!!

Hooray for Google Maps!