The weekend is only starting

My best Nicaraguan friends visited me today, Katy (who is ten) and her five-year old brother Martin, they came to Managua along with their mother, the SOS village director from Estelí (if you are a regular reader of my blog you will remember Estelí as the city where I mainly subsisted, for a week or so, on cheese sandwiches).

We had a wonderful time: We went to a viewpoint to see the city and the huge Managua lake, then we went to play at the arcades, at noon - it was hot as hell - we visited Managua’s Metropolitan Cathedral (clarification: not because of religious issues, but because of its post-modern, minimalistic and child-friendly architecture), if you got curious, I have a photo album of the cathedral on facebook called “Nicaragua”.

At 1 p.m. we had lunch: Burger King for the children and Chinese food for the adults (big mistake, I only realised the Chinese food was bad until I had the plate in front of me). Those who know me well, know that I love cooking above everything. They also know I only prepare vegan/vegetarian food (although I do eat meat) and that I use less oil, salt and sugar when preparing it. Well, today I sent my “do-yourself-a-favour-eating-good-food philosophy” to hell. I wanted Katy and Martin to have a good time, and for them; having a good time means eating junk-food. As a matter of fact, Katy told me today, I quote: “today is a junk-food day and I love junk-food”. I have no guilty conscience for buying then non-healthy food since I know that they are regular fruit and vegetable eaters.

After describing the eating preferences of Katy and Martin, I have to list some personal culinary data: I did not chopped my first onion for self-consumption until I was 15, Innsbruck was the city where I first tried fresh tomatoes (it was weeks before turning 18) and only I tried papaya this summer.

As I wrote on my first blog entry, I came to Nicaragua to study how children and young people describe the life they value. One of the hypotheses I have, is that we adults no longer know what is important for a child. Many people (including myself) see childhood as a stage in human life in which people increase their body mass and height at unbelievable speed and acquire important knowledge for their future life; however Katy and Martin reminded me today that being a child is also living as such. Children love and hate things that may sound strange to adults, like hating garlic-bread and loving over-sweetened drinks (does the adjective “over-sweetened” exists at all?).

Well, today is Saturday and Kathrin is going back to Cuba in a couple of hours (with a valid tourist visa this time), Katy and Martin are asleep right now and I am writing something new for my blog. Usually, I try to write using a fixed narrative structure, but in my last entry, the one about the iPod and the Antennas, I violated this self-stated-canon and have now the feeling to go back to my rule and write down a conclusion…let’s try to summarise this blog-entry:

- Managua’s cathedral is a nice and friendly building (go to my facebook album)
- Junk-food is bad, but it makes children happy
- Junk-food is bad and it makes many adults unhappy
- Grown-ups cannot understand children because they are no longer children, they are adults
- Kathrin is leaving and I will miss the cool conversations with her and also talking in German

See you, have a nice day,
Oscar