Full house.... - Empty Nesters on a Green Global Trek

Wow! We had a wonderfully FULL house for about five weeks…. People coming and staying, with some occasional overlapping as well.

Here’s a list of friends/family over a five week period:

Monica
Lolo the capuchin monkey
Charo
Brook
Nikki
Rasa and Kris
Gili and Maya

After a couple of weeks of Monica (see previous blog entry about Lolo the capuchin monkey) staying with us, we also had “old”, yet really good friends: Brook (originally from Montana), Nikki (from Chicago) and Charo (from Peru), for a few nights. (More about them in a future blog.)

We met all three of them at different time periods and over almost a year (maybe more?) have become solid friends. All through YOGA (naturally)

New friends Rasa and Kris stayed a few nights until their apartment, on the same street, was ready. Rasa is from New Zealand and her partner Kris is from Belgium. Both passionate about animals and in fact, they fostered three baby kittens within days of “landing” and have recently adopted a little street stray dog. We met them on the street outside the house and they immediately wanted to meet all our animals. Rasa is a ( fabulous) chakra yoga teacher at Pure (the gym/spa/yoga studio across the road from us.)

Not sure how we all fit in the house, but somehow we did. The guest room was constantly occupied, the couch was taken and we ate a lot of amazing kale salads, organic greens, agedashi tofu, and yummy raw vegan soups and desserts. Many wonderous communal meals with friends.

My nephew Gili, (my sister Niki’s oldest son) and his wife Maya started a bicycle trip in Panama in January and made their way by bike through Panama to Costa Rica to Nicaragua. They arrived in Granada, coming down the road on their bicycles.

We had two wonderful weeks with them here, while they took a “vacation from their vacation” as they termed it in their blog. (After Nicaragua they were headed up towards their final destination Belize.. ) It was great seeing them and having down time with them here in Granada. Gili and Maya are “foodies” and we were treated to some yummy meals of homemade pizza, foccacia bread with black bean soup, Maya’s challah and chocolate rugelach (Jewish croissants – Maya’s terminology) and homemade baguettes and passionfruit cake. My oh my did we eat well!

The mango season had just started and I am sure that Gili timed the trip this way.. as he loves mangoes more than anyone else I have met. He and Maya rode their bikes in the morning to the bambu house where Oren lives to collect the mangoes there, and to the lake to go pick mangoes from the fruit trees that line the lakefront (along with their Nicaraguan counterparts who sell the mangoes in the market daily.) He made mango lassi smoothies and dehyrated mangoes and Maya made mango crumble. We worked our way through the daily piles of fresh mangoes. We also had a lot of good discussions while cooling off from the heat of the dry season, in the pool. Here is the link to Gili and Maya’s blog which has an entry on their time in Nicaragua. Great photos and well written. (Runs in the family.)

http://inmagicland.com/2013/03/nicaragua/