6 things you didn't know about Nicaragua, and 1 thing you don't know enough about

There are people who could write entire books on things you don't know about Nicaragua, in fact several people have, but I'm going to try to keep this (relatively) compact and mostly limited to things you probably won't find when researching the country.

1. Most of the country has running water, but in many places it only comes on at night, which means that a lot of it is wasted
Wait, why does that mean a lot of it is wasted? My host family has a large basin with a faucet over it. During the rainy season, when the water works, they open the valve at night, and in the morning the basin is full. The water usually comes on at 10(ish) and turns off at 4(ish). Of course the basin never gets full right when the water turns off, so it usually overflows for a while while everyone sleeps, and there's no good way for my family to solve this problem. What are they supposed to do? Have someone wait awake every night until the basin is full? Have a different person get up every hour to check the water level? They're not going to do that, and I don't blame them, so the basin just overflows.
During the dry season this wasn't a problem for my family...because we just didn't have any water. At first the water was on for just barely long enough every night to provide enough water for the following day, but then that stopped. Then we got water from the well down the street, but then that became dirty. Then a truck with a large tank on it started coming every day to fill up all of our buckets with water, but then it started only coming about twice per week, with no set schedule or pattern. Without a schedule there was no way to know how to ration water until the next delivery, and sometimes we still had plenty of water left, and sometimes we had been out of water for days.
The truly sad thing about my town is that not all of the town has this problem. My town doesn't have just one water system, it has several, and some are far better than others. Some neighborhoods get their water from one of the nearby towns or the nearby city, so much of my town almost always has running water 24/7, just not my neighborhood. The problem is really that the system is set up very poorly, and a lot of people suffer because of that.

2. Drivers honk, a lot
In the US, honking your horn pretty much means only one thing: “Get out of my way!” It's also occasionally used to say “hi” to a friend, but that's pretty rare. In Nicaragua it can mean pretty much anything. Sometimes it means “Get out of my way!” or “hi”, but it's also used by taxi drivers to alert people waiting on the side of the road that they have space. The worst use is as a way of alerting someone that you're coming. I find this use incredibly annoying because it means that some people don't look for oncoming cars before turning onto a road. Seriously, I have seen people make a right-hand turn onto a road without even looking left first, because they assume that if someone is coming, they'll honk. They figure out where other cars are by their listening for their horns instead of by looking (to be clear, the vast majority of people look, but not everyone does).

This is especially annoying for cyclists, because we don't have horns, so sometimes people pull out in front of us because they have no idea that we're coming and we have no way to alerting them of our presence. A lot of drivers also seem to think that cyclists don't even have any right to be on the road, or at least that we need to always give them right-of-way, no matter what. If I'm biking on the shoulder of a road, and there's a car parked on the shoulder, I look behind me to make sure nobody is going to hit me, then I pull into the road to go around the parked car. Sometimes a car that is a good 50 feet behind me will honk when I do this, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why. The only possible reason I can think of is that the driver thinks I randomly pulled into the road for no reason and I don't plan to go back into the shoulder, an explanation which is beyond ridiculous. Then there are some drivers that don't look for cyclists at all, and don't know we're coming because we don't have horns to honk, and who pull out in front of us because they have no idea that we're coming. Ok, that got off-topic a little, but the point is that driving and biking in Nicaragua is pretty dangerous. Thank god it's impossible to find a helmet anywhere in the entire country.

3. People don't exercise
Okay some people do, but the vast majority of people don't, kind of like in the US. The main difference between Nicaragua and the US when it comes to exercise is that Americans who don't exercise don't do so because they're lazy (I welcome your hate mail!), but Nicaraguans don't seem to even understand why anyone would want to do extra work like that. Some people just stare at me when they see me running, and I occasionally get asked why I run. When I tell people that I run for my health, I frequently get stares of confusion. I think that a lot of people here think it's just some weird chele thing to do.

4. People give out their phone numbers two digits at a time

If your phone number was 1234-5678, you would probably tell someone it was “one two three four, five six seven eight”, right? A Nicaraguan would instead say “twelve, thirty-four, fifty-six, seventy-eight”. But it's not always two digits at a time. Some people might say that number as “twelve, three, forty five, six, seventy-eight”. I have yet to figure out why some people seemingly randomly say single digits in their phone numbers.

5. There are supermarkets
There's a national chain called Palí which has stores in most cities. It's owned by Walmart, which is pretty disappointing, but it's better than nothing, and they're honestly pretty nice. Rivas even has a MaxiPalí that's air conditioned! There are also two chains in Managua, La Colonia and La Unión, which have a handful of locations elsewhere in the country, and which have more or less the selection of American supermarkets. They even have bagels! They're not very good bagels, but have you ever had a bad bagel? There's another place in Managua called PriceSmart, which I believe is owned by Costco, and which apparently has basically the same selection as a Costco in the US. I haven't been to it because you have to be a member to go in, but I know that they have Kirkland Signature products, and Kirkland Signature is owned by Costco.

6. There are rich people
Look at this mall:

Where do you think this is? Maybe Spain? Costa Rica? Panama? One of the touristy parts of Mexico? Wrong, it's in Nicaragua. Don't believe me? Google “Galerías Santo Domingo” and see for yourself. It is, to quote another volunteer, “the nicest mall I've ever been to.” Nicaragua also has Central America's only billionaire, Carlos Pellas, who owns several resort hotels in Nicaragua and Costa Rica, as well as some of the national Nicaraguan chains (yes, chains that are only in Nicaragua do, in fact, exist). 

7. Ronald Reagan really did sell weapons to Iran to fund a war against a democratically-elected government in Nicaragua
The government was not originally democratically-elected, the Sandinistas first took power by overthrowing Nicaragua's Somoza family dictatorship in 1979, but they won an election in 1984 which many international observers called “free and fair”, but Reagan insisted that the election must have been rigged, and he didn't stop funding the Contras. Congress passed a bill ordering him to stop. He ignored it. Several people in his administration were tried, convicted, and sent to prison for aiding him in his effort to ignore the law and overthrow Nicaragua's democratically-elected government. He still didn't stop. He sold weapons to a country that we officially called a “state sponsor of terrorism” and sent the money from the sale to the Contras to try to overthrow a democratically-elected government. Now he's a beloved president with lots of buildings named after him, and some people even want to put his face on Mount Rushmore. The war only ended after Reagan was out of office and the President of Costa Rica negotiated a peace treaty between the Sandinistas and the Contras, for which he won a Nobel Peace Prize. Shortly after the war ended, the Sandinistas held another election, which they lost. Reagan failed to remove the Sandinistas from power by funding a war that killed 30,000 Nicaraguans, but Nicaraguans successfully removed them from power without shedding any blood. No matter how much you know about Reagan's involvement in the Nicaraguan Revolution, you don't know enough.

Things you can say in Nicaraguan Spanish that you can't say in English

There are some things that you can say in Spanish that you simply can’t say in English. My first two examples are really just ways of speaking that are different, but the last two really have absolutely no English equivalent:

Andar:
Andar is by far the most versatile word in Nicaraguan Spanish. By itself, it just means “to walk,” but used in conjunction with other words, it can mean basically anything.
To say “I’m wearing a green shirt”, I could say “Uso camisa verde” or “Ando con camisa verde”.
To say “I’m looking for the beans”, I could say “Estoy buscando frijoles” or “Ando buscando frijoles”.
To say “I have the flu”, I could say “Tengo gripe” or “Ando con gripe”.
Out of curiosity, I occasionally replace random verbs with andar, and it frequently works. Sometimes people don’t know what I’m trying to say, so I have to rephrase it, but often they completely understand. Also sometimes other people replace a verb with andar for no apparent reason, and it takes me a couple seconds to figure out what they mean. I can't think of any English word that's as versatile as “andar”.

Don/Doña:
In English, adults are usually addressed as “Mr. Lastname” or “Mrs. Lastname”, and Spanish also has words for that, “Señor” and “Señora”. Here’s the thing: nobody uses them. Nobody. Instead, people use “Don Firstname” and “Doña Firstname”. That’s right, people use the first name, not the last name, and that’s what I mean when I day that “Don” and “Doña” don’t exist in English. Kids might occasionally call adults “Mr./Mrs. Firstname” in English, but it’s definitely not the norm. The use of the first name is also true for other titles; in my school I’m not “Profe Smith”, I’m “Profe Alex”. I’m sure that some people will say that addressing adults as “Mr./Mrs. Lastname” is a sign of respect, but that idea, like table manners, is just, like, you’re opinion, man.

Adios:
I'm sure that right now most of you are thinking “You’re kidding, right? Adios just means goodbye.” Wrong. Adios is also used as a greeting in Nicaragua, and it is essentially a way of acknowledging somebody while also indicating that you don’t have time to stop and talk, but in a polite way; and we definitely don’t have an equivalent word for that in English. It is incredibly useful, and I’m definitely going to miss it when I return to the US.

Me lavo las sandias:
This one's a little harder to explain, but stick with me, it'll make sense in a moment. “Lavo” here is from the verb “lavar”. “Lavar”, when used by itself, simply means “to wash”, but the way I used it, as “me lavo”, comes from the reflexive version of the verb, “lavarse”. Reflexive verbs are generally used to indicate that someone is doing the action to themselves. For example, to say “I wash the plates” in Spanish, I would say “Lavo los platos”, but to say “I wash my hands”, I would say “Me lavo las manos”. So when I say “Me lavo las sandias”, I’m not just saying “I wash the watermelons”, I’m also implying that the watermelons are a body part of mine (also, this can be done with any other object, there’s no real reason why I chose watermelons). Saying something like this is generally done as a joke, and it is a joke that simply cannot be said in English.

¡Noise!

Nicaraguans celebrate everything by making a lot of noise. Everything. Thankfully, my town isn’t very loud relative to the rest of Nicaragua, except during holidays, when it’s nearly impossible to find a quiet moment. Last month Nicaraguans celebrated La Gritería (which literally translates as “the shouting”), a festival for the Purísima, or the Immaculate Conception of Mary. It starts with festivities on December 7, and continues through the 8th. There were parades during the day and fireworks at night. There were also bombas going off all day, and many at night as well (bombas are like fireworks, except they don’t produce any light, and they are WAY louder; sometimes they even set off car alarms). There were also bands playing music for many hours after sunset. I can’t wait until Semana Santa (a week of celebrations around Easter), when my town is apparently a very happenin’ place.

I really hope that nobody reading this is getting the impression that Nicaragua is only loud during celebrations. Actually, that may be a perfectly fine way to think about it, but there’s always something to celebrate. Always. “It’s 2 pm? Let’s have a desfile!” “It’s Wednesday? Let’s set off some bombas!” Sometimes the bombas give me quite the surprise. It happened once when I was shaving, and it almost lead to a disaster. In many towns that have multiple high schools, during the school year there are often frequent competitions between their marching bands, in the form of desfiles (parades). And when I say frequent, I mean about two per week. A couple weeks ago there was a small band that started ­­­­­playing near my house at around 12:30 AM, and went on for nearly half an hour. And yes, that says AM, not PM. I’m not really sure why they were playing in the first place; I think they may have been trying to wake someone up for their birthday, but I’m not really sure.

More about directions

Sometimes when there’s a major geographical landmark next to a city or town, people there use that landmark as a guiding point. For example, Lake Nicaragua borders my town to the east, so when giving directions here, instead of saying 2 blocks east, people will often say 2 blocks towards the lake. Also, people will sometimes use up and down to indicate east and west, respectively. So when giving directions in Managua, where Lake Managua borders the city to the north, south is never replaced, but north may become towards the lake, east may become down, and west may become up. Thus 2 blocks west, 3 blocks north, and 1 block east may be said as 2 blocks down, 3 blocks towards the lake, and 1 block up.