Nica Wedding Crashers

Hey everyone!  We've got a couple of fun things to talk about on this gray Sunday afternoon.  Let's start off with this picture of Chanelle towing her friend Jason off the side of her driveway.  I wish I had a photo from where the stuck truck started from but this vantage is nearing the end of Team Canada's efforts.  Chanelle's boyfriend Jeremy, is also from Vancouver Island and worked for nearly an hour shoveling mud and repaving different areas of the driveway with rocks in order to pull the car from a very precarious angle off the side of the hill.  We're still not exactly clear how the truck managed to find its way into the ditch in the first place, but it was definitely dark and stormy when the incident occurred.  Luckily the truck was towed out unscathed but unfortunately for Chanelle, it seems that her burly Land Cruiser is forever stuck in four-wheel drive.  Keep your fingers crossed that it's only something minor.

Well, the next order of business is comical indeed.  As you all know, yesterday was May 1st.  In Hawaii, this is also known as Lei Day and on the mainland of course, it's May Day.  Here in Nicaragua, they have Maypole celebrations which designate the start of spring, or so we thought.  Yesterday morning as we were making breakfast, Juana and Felix (our Nica maid and gardener) stopped in to invite us to some festivities at the local church.  Eager for culture, both of agreed that it would be something fun and different to attend.  Felix told us that he'd be back up to the house around 2:30 and from there, we could all drive down to the church together.  At two o'clock it began to rain.  We weren't sure if Felix was going to show but we showered and dressed in our finest garb anyways.  Sure enough, at half past two, there he was in his button down yellow collared shirt, rearin' and ready for a ride in the Isuzu.  We weaved down the dirt road to Amarillo and parked at Felix's dads house which was familiar to us both from our past walks to my favorite surf break.  Felix's dad turned our to be the old man we've seen sitting on the porch, every time we pass by.  The rain had ceased at this point and we waited at the house for Felix and Juana's kids to show up.  As we were waiting, a shocking discovery was made.  In so many Spanish words, Ian figured out that we were attending a wedding - not a Maypole celebration.  And it was Felix's brother who was getting married!  Classic.  What unfolded before our eyes, was a beautiful Nica ceremony involving not one couple getting hitched, but two.  A dual wedding complete with an out of tune electric guitar and a mariachi style synthesizer.  It was awesome.  At one point a ten year old boy got up on stage and rocked some mean vocals on what I'm assuming, is a traditional Nica wedding song.  After the painfully long (but fondly memorable) ceremony, we were invited back to the family's house for food.  Being the only gringos in a crowd of almost two-hundred Nicaraguans, we decided that we were satisfied with our experience and that attending the family's reception might have been a little weird.  Who knows though.  Maybe not attending it was weirder.  What we do know now though, is that we're not just the white people that walk the road with surfboards to Amarillo anymore.  We're the white people with surfboards that were at the Nica wedding on Saturday.  Hopefully, that's a good thing.  We're thinking it is.  By the way, maybe I'm an idiot, but Maypole celebrations are a pagan tradition and come from Europe.  I'm pretty sure they don't celebrate it in Central America.  And here are some photos from the wedding.

      

Lastly, I found these suckers in a pile of clothes today.  One dead.  One live.  Sprayed it with some Raid to slow the bastard down, then flushed him down the toilet.  Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiack.  I hate scorpions.