And now for an entry of some substance:

Some blog-worthy things have happened in the past few days! Above and beyond all, we found out on Friday (after an 8 hour monster marathon charla session) the 18 possible places we will be placed around the country to serve for the next two years (!!!). Tomorrow we’re having our Site Fair, where current volunteers or other representatives from the sites are going to come and talk to us about how awesome their sites are. But even just reading the abstracts about the sites we got on Friday, most of us have a pretty good idea of where we want to end up. What surprises me is how different the ones that stuck out as awesome to me are from the ones that my compatriots have expressed interest in. I want one of the biggest of the big sites, most of which are university towns, these being Estelí, Estelí (Sandinista stronghold during the revolution, now a bustling department capital in the mountains); Leon, Leon (biggest site, always hot, a college and tourist town); and San Marcos, Carazo (nearby training sites and Managua, and the only one with an all-English university in it, who we should be working with, but currently aren’t). Masaya, Masaya would also be on my short list (big, and with a community of artists to possibly work with), as would the two big cities up in the north in the mountains by the Honduran border in Nueva Segovia.

So, the likelihood that I’ll get one of those sites is, I’m guessing, pretty high, since all the university towns require people with prior teaching experience. I will find out in a week. While I long for a site as big as you can get in Nicaragua, most people I’ve talked to want either a small or mid-sized town, which I guess is good, since there are more of them available this go-round on account of TEFL 47 being in most of the biggest cities in the country already. But for me, I’d love to work with teacher-training in a university, and to have all of the options and anonymity being in a city would afford me.

Also, I went to the beach this weekend! And to Masaya to see their artisans’ market and guitar shops! The beach: amazing; the pictures are on facebook, and only begin to express how warm and calm and wonderful it was to be at a beach with seven of my friends. The market: a little more expensive for me than it should have been, but pretty cool, and a successful trip involving the buying of a t-shirt with the recipe for Gallo Pinto on it, a Nicaraguan flag, and a gift for my Mom. The guitar shops: a huge disappointment. One shop only had three guitars for sale, the only decent one of which was 500 U.S. dollars; the one next door had about a dozen similar-looking ones lined up in a dark concrete wall with lacquered-looking fretboards (a mark of low quality) starting at $400. This would be a large sum to pay for a decent guitar in the states, and would be outrageous to spend on the nylon-stringed toys that I saw here. In short, I have to wait until I can go back to the states and retrieve one of my guitars before I can play again. This makes me sad.