a very warm welcome

Hello everyone! We have all arrived safe and sound here in Managua. After a long but pleasant day traveling—most of us had a three hour layover in Atlanta which we spent chatting, eating, and exchanging book recommendations (this is what happens when 13 librarians travel together)—we landed in Nicaragua at 8:30 in the evening. Managua is the capital city of Nicaragua, and we will be here until Tuesday when we travel to San Juan del Sur, home of the Biblioteca Móvil.

Those of us flying together out of Dulles arrived at the airport early and decided it would be a good time to take perhaps an inordinate number of photos...



Approximately 10 hours later we went smoothly through customs (one of us is missing a bag, but we've been promised it will arrive at our rather luxurious hotel, El Camino Real, about 30 seconds from the airport).

From the air at night, Managua looks like any other city. We'll find out what it's really like tomorrow.



Jane Mirandette, owner of Hotel Villa Isabella in San Juan del Sur and founder of Nicaragua's first public lending library, met us at the airport, which is brand new. Sandino, the anti-imperialist folk hero who inspired thousands of Nicaraguans to take up his name during and after the revolution of the late 1970s, greeted us too.



We were shuttled to the hotel, where we settled in and then met for drinks. Everyone got one free bebida on the house. Nicaragua is famous for its ron, the best of which is Flor de Caña. With coke and lime, that gets you a Nica Libre, only a slight variation on the well known Cuban cocktail. Jane gave us gift bags—decorated by children from the biblioteca—full of bottled water, hand sanitizer, maps and snack bars, and talked to us a bit about how she ended up in Nicaragua (she came on a trip 10 years ago and realized she had left her heart here) and how she became such an integral part of the library community here without ever wanting to be a librarian. She is quite an amazing, gracious woman and an inspiration for anyone who has ever wanted to work, live, volunteer, or all three, in Latin America.

Tomorrow we're set to visit a local art gallery, a hammock maker in the city of Masaya, several markets and a bookstore. It's a small world here—some of us had connections with various expatriates and nicas, and Jane already knows all of them!

For those of you anxiously waiting to hear from us, we are quite safe and well cared for. We have Internet access at the Camino Real, but it is limited and not everyone brought a computer. And we are also quite busy! We will check in as soon as we can, and on Tuesday when we arrive in San Juan del Sur we will be able to call you for free. For now, be assured we are all thrilled to have left our winter coats behind.

¡Hasta mañana!