Where In The World Is Lila Noffsinger?: Closing Thoughts and a Few Pictures

We're in the Panama airport now. I wouldn't recommend it. Our tickets say "Stand By", despite us buying them a few months ago and arriving at the airport a handful of hours early because we had an early flight in and then a long layover. Still, nobody will help us until 45 minutes before our flight. Apparently they only have one person who is able to help with questions like this for each flight. So. . . that's a good time. So we're camping out near our gate (at least what we hope is our gate. It's already changed once, and the screens that say what gate is for what flight have broken and keep flashing the destinations beginning with "A" & "B") in hopes that we can be first in line for seats. "On the plus side," says Ken, "at least the air conditioning works over here." What. A. Punk. The hot, humid air streams in every time a gate door is opened, and we're at a cul-de-sac of the airport so there's no hope for air conditioning coming down the hall. It's moments like these that make going home a little bit easier. Emotionally, I mean. Logistically, not so much.

But this seemed like an appropriate time to add a few more thoughts and pictures! Eventually I'll post a video from the trip, but for now, these will be my closing thoughts. Ken's too, if he cares to chime in.

Crazy Cathedral Ceiling

I'm making this picture extra big in hopes that you can see it well. This picture is from the ceiling of the Cathedral in Granada. Any idea what it's representing? Ya, we have no idea either. Maybe Noah's

Ark? That would explain the bear and the sloth, I suppose. What about the cherub? The guy cuddling the tiger? Ya. . . we didn't know either.

Crazy Market Items
There were two super weird items we kept seeing at the markets in Nicaragua. The first were these super odd toads holding alcohol bottles. The horrifying thing is that these oddly posed toads are real. Somehow inflated or stuffed to look fat and grumpy, and then posed to entertain you and hold your alcohol. Weird.

The other weird thing was so funny, we almost considered buying one. Everywhere we went, there were humorous paintings of people on the toilet. All types of people doing multi-tasking with all types of activities. There were so many different ones, it was incredible!

Ken's Thoughts on His Favorite: It was a picture of a lady holding a bottle of alcohol in one hand and with a wad of toilet paper in the other hand. She couldn't have seemed happier about it.

Ken's Thoughts: Crossing The Border
Crossing the border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua was extremely surprising. I've always thought of a border as a thin line - either you're on one side of it, or you're on the other. Between these two countries, there is quite a large no-man's-land that is neither Nicaragua, nor Costa Rica. To leave Costa Rica, you pay a flat $8 fee, but to enter Nicaragua, which is a few hundred feet ahead, you have to pay an additional $14 fee. On both sides of this no-man's-land, there are barricades and on the Nicaraguan side, there are armed soldiers. But in between, there is an unorganized maze of people going from one parking lot to another parking lot to speak with a different uniformed agent and submitting a different form, trying to get across. There also seem to be tented areas of people that had been there for awhile. It was extremely odd to me because I couldn't imagine what would happen if you didn't have the money to cross both. It seemed like you would be stuck like Tom Hanks in Terminal. And the lack of organization of it was utterly surprising, too. You'd think there would just be a clear order of operations or line to go through, but it was all very disjointed and a lot of people were looking around, just confused as to what to do next. I was thankful that our bus that we were on handled most of the leg work and made it very easy for us. To give an idea of what our instructions were from our guide's after submitting our forms and submitting our passports was for us to go around this building and "stand by the first mango tree" and they'd bring our passports back to us after an unstated amount of time. I'm glad to have that done, and I'm glad everything worked out. I think that's all my thoughts.

Ken's Thoughts on Getting the Painting:
I'm shocked I forgot to talk about this! I'm also really excited about a nice painting that we found a purchased in Granada. It was a really talented street artist that had done a beautiful painting of Ometepe Island, the island that we had stayed on for two days. I thought it was incredibly beautiful, and was very excited to have closed the deal after a good amount of haggling, since I didn't have enough cash on me to be able to purchase it. I got him down to a low price, but I was still too short on cash and I didn't want to pull anything else out of the ATM as we were still within budget for the trip, so I threw in my cheap, digital travel watch - and he agreed. It was pretty funny because it was all the cash we had left on us, as we had budgeted for everything else. So I paid in two forms of currency, and a watch. I think that was money well spent. I think that's it.

A Few More Pictures: