Cultural Differences-Food and Daily Life

• You will see many street venders selling bags of liquid. Yes, this is how they sell sodas, water and juices for people to drink on the streets. After you buy it, you bite the corner of the bag and suck the liquid out or sometimes the bag will come with a straw. Even if you go to a stand in one of the parks and ask for a soda, they will pull out a liter bottle, pour your portion in a bag with ice and give it to you to drink that way.

• Food is also frequently served in bags as well. 

• Drinks in glass bottles cost more than cans and you usually aren’t allowed to take the bottles. The restaurants and shops have to pay a fee per bottle for beverages that come in glass. When the restaurant or shop returns the empty bottles they get their money back. This is because they are good about cleaning and reusing the bottles. They don’t want them to end up getting thrown away. For liter bottles you can usually return them to the shop you purchased them at and get your bottle fee back. 

• One of the biggest shocks and hardest thing to train yourself to do while you are in Nicaragua is not throw your toilet paper in the toilet. When you see a sign that says don't put anything in the toilet, that includes toilet paper. The plumbing and sewage systems in the whole of the country are not able to deal with any paper in the pipes. Get used to seeing trashcans full of paper in every bathroom. 

• There are not addresses with a street name and number like Americans are used to in the states. Even though there are street names and some building numbers, it is not consistent throughout the city and the locals will not know what you are talking about if you use the address that way. Instead locals describe where the building is located with cardinal directions and surrounding well known landmarks in town. If you don’t know your cardinal directions use the setting sun for help! For example, our apartment's address was-The red building 1-1/2 blocks north of the old shoe store El Club.

• We thought surely the postal service would use a more reliable address system for the mail, but it turns out this is also their method. There are no mail boxes on the streets or mail slots in doors. You just have to be home to open the door at the exact time you happen to get mail. As you can guess there’s not a lot of junk mail, magazines and newspapers being delivered daily. 

• Not many places have air conditioning. You'll get used to seeing fans mounted on walls and sometimes ceilings to circulate the air.

• Most doors do not have buzzers, doorbells or knockers. You have to be creative and find a way to tap on the door through the metal gates. I’ve seen most people using their keys to tap on the metal.

• There are frequent water and power outages. Sometimes this is due to storms, other times it’s unknown what the cause is. The services can be shut off for hours at a time without warning. Keep in mind that some rural communities have only had water and electricity for the last 5-10 years so it’s not a big surprise that they are still working out the kinks. 

• In rural places the wildlife roams freely through the streets grazing on whatever they can find. It is unclear how they keep track of whose animal is whose or how they stop them from going too far, but no one seems particularly concerned with it.