Hi everyone

In a just a few short days from now, I will be done with training and will say goodbye to my host family. We are being sworn in on July 25th, 2008 in Managua and will no loner be trainees but volunteers! At first I couldn't wait for this, but now I realize that training has gone way too fast and I have become accustom to seeing my friends everyday and having more Charlas (training sessions) than anyone could ever need in a lifetime. Soon this will all be over and we will spread out over the country to live for the next two years in our own cities. Its a very bittersweet thought because I am going to miss the hell out of all the friends I have made during training, but I am very excited to get to Masaya and get to work teaching English to the youth of Nicaragua. It will be nice to move from a town of about 5,000 people to a city of around 159,000 people but I will also miss walking down the street and random people saying, “adios John” or “Adios Chele”. (chele= white person)

So I have been trying to think of things to blog about but I cannot seem to think of anything. Mainly because I haven't done anything exciting in a while, but also the things that I thought were weird or different when I got here have become part of daily life and I no longer find them weird or different. So with that said, I will need your help on things to blog about. If you have any thoughts or blog ideas, let me know. I think in the next few days I will go around the city and take pictures of Dolores so I can put them on the internet. I do have a shutterfly account where I would like to put all of my pics, but it takes forever to put the pictures on the internet because it is very slow here.

Lets see what can I say about the last few weeks. Umm Ive taken up reading again... I know right?! ME...READ? BLASPHMY. I am currently reading Janet Evanovich's One for the Money which seems like a promising book. Before that I read, Two Dollar Bill, Me talk pretty one day, Possible Side Effects, and The Kite Runner. When I went to the Peace Corps office I hit up the library that they have there and I grabbed a few more books which I'm sure I will have read in the next month or so.

The other night I was asked by my sister's husband if I could help him look on the internet for a soldering gun; he fixes TV's and his old one broke. I assumed this could be a simple task because he said that we could buy it online and ship it to his brother who lives in Miami and then his brother would send it here to Nicaragua. Well we went online and I looked on Google, of course, to see where I could get a nice one at a good price. After about an hour of looking he asked me if it would be faster if he gave me the name brand and the model of the gun he was looking for. LOL After we got the model number we looked for a while longer and he kept saying that it was not the one he wanted. I was getting a little impatient because we had looked and found the same model on 20 different sites, but they were not what he was looking for. After a while he found the one he was looking for on Craig's list. Turns out that the model I was blindly looking for is over 20 years old and is made out of bronze instead of aluminum or copper like they are now-a-days. He said that he wanted to find it at a store new, and not used. I had to explain to him that we were not going to find this model new ANYWHERE because of it's age. He kept insisting that we HAD to find it somewhere new because it was a good model. I then had to explain to him how things work in the US, and that although it may have been a good model, companies are always finding ways to make products for cheaper by using different and cheaper materials; I also said I was content to keep looking but I honestly thought that we were S.O.L. He finally agreed and I sent the website to his brother in Florida to look at and inquire about.

Last night we went out to the bar to celebrate everyone's July birthday in our group. There are four of us celebrating July birthdays: Me, Sonia, Scott, and Erin. A few of the girls left the bar saying they had to make a few calls home before the places closed. A few minutes later they came back to the bar with 3 cupcakes and candles and sang happy birthday to me, Scott and Erin and we enjoyed a delicious treat! Thanks for the birthday cake guys!!
Today is the day of the Revolution so we are unable to leave our sites because they feel that it is too dangerous for us to be traveling all over the place. Starting last night they began lighting off bombs to celebrate. When I say bombs, I don't mean bombs as in car bombs, but more like fireworks that just explode in the air without the colors. These things are loud! Many times when they begin lighting off the bombs, the car alarms start going off because these bombs could raise the dead. They are not thoughtful by any means when they light these things off; they start lighting them off around the clock. 3 AM is the earliest that I have heard them go off.