Last weekend our team meeting was held in Matagalpa...closer to where Joel, a fellow Strider from Northern Ireland, has been living and working, in the North of Nicaragua.
All in all it was quite a cultural experience. As well as meeting together as a team we spent Saturday afternoon taking in the city, including a trip to "El Museo de Café", a museum not only explaining the history of coffee in Nicaragua (a money making scheme after the failure of the gold-rush in Nicaragua) but also the history of Matagalpa itself. I always encounter slight apprehension on entering small museums where it appears nobody else has chosen to visit but our lively guide and some interesting text made it a fairly informative hour or so.
Afterwards, inspired by the explication of the coffee making process we went in search of a good cup of the stuff in the city. Unfortunately we only managed Nescafé (probably from Brasil) accompanied by an odd selection of cakes, a disappointing state of affairs.
We then wandered through the city streets and stumbled upon a group of men in bright yellow suits, tuning up their various instruments to begin a street performance. This was a group of evangelical
Mariachis from a local church, obviously popular with the local residents. Their singer cannot have been more than 12 years old but had an amazingly powerful voice...and beautiful shoes! I must try and look for a similar pair.
Matagalpa Mariachi
The beautiful shoes of the youngest Mariachi member
Then, as we walked back to our hotel a "hípica"; a parade of horses stepping in time to music blasted from a pick-up truck at the front of the group, passed us by. It was slightly surreal to see horses, essentially dancing, to Boney M Rivers of Babylon in the mountain city of Matagapa, Nicaragua.
Dancing horses: una "hípica"
