Wonderful Weekend

Ah...I love Sunday nights, when I re-realize that it's still my weekend and I don't have class until Tuesday!  This has been a particularly wonderful weekend, mostly spent with Kate and the rest of the Greenway family.  They pseudo-adopted me for the weekend, and it was great! Friday night Kate and I were just going to go grab some dessert and hang out for a bit, but plans changed and I ended up spending the night at their house.  We watched a movie and lounged around and ate key lime pie...mmmmm :)

Saturday, I joined the family outing which turned into more of a larger-chunk-of-the-day adventure.  We drove up to El Crucero to go to a garage sale and look at a car Jeff was interested in.  First off, the road up there is so beautiful...it runs along the spine of a hill/mountain and the view rocks--you can see Managua and the Lago de Nicaragua on one side, and the Pacific Ocean in the distance on the other side.  And the air is so much more fresh and crisp up there, I love it!  So we went to look at the car and the garage sale, and I ended up spending $20 on clothes but it was a lot of stuff: 2 pairs of shorts, a skirt, 2 dresses, and 5 or 6 shirts.  Woo hoo! I love bargains and new clothes, and it was great to get so much for so little because I've been wanting/needing some cooler lighter-weight shirts and tank tops.  After the garage sale, we went to Catarina, which is a little town where just about every other house is a plant nursery!  Jeff and Marilyn are doing some landscaping at their house, so we loaded up the back of the pickup with plants, and headed off.  We spent a few minutes at the overlook directly above the Laguna de Apoyo, which is a crater lake that is very clean, thermally heated, and at 200 meters deep, the deepest point in Central America.  Here's a picture of Kate and I at the overlook:

Afterwards we went to Papa Johns for pizza for lunch, which was a fun treat, then headed back to the house.  Kate invited me to spend Saturday night with them as well, so we lounged around made a yummy dinner, watched an Australian tv show called McLeod's Daughters (it's so good! Kate has me hooked now...), then laid out in the grass looking at the stars and talking.  After a couple hours out there, we actually were a bit chilled--which felt SO very good!--so we made hot chocolate and watched another episode of McLeod's Daughters, then headed for bed.  We went to church today, had a big brunch afterwards, hung out relaxing, then Kate brought me back to my house.

We went to a concert with Carmen and Emilio at a cathedral, which was a really interesting experience.  The concert was actually outside, and it was this nun from Chile who plays the guitar and sings.  It was definitely a Catholic, faith-based concert (obviously, with a singing nun...), but the thing that struck Kate and I was that it was pretty much a concert to the Virgin Mary.  All of the songs were sung to Mary or for her or in honor of her.  I think that Latin American Catholicism emphasizes Mary moreso than American Catholicism does, or at least what I've experienced of it growing up.  Here's a picture of people and the stage at the concert: