McBerkoBlog

The Monday after we arrived, the girls and I walked the few blocks over to Casa Nica Spanish School to start our week of private classes. The girls are both learning German in school at home, so they shared a teacher to learn some Spanish basics. They also lucked out - their teacher's 8 year old daughter had the week off from her own school, so she joined them each day. In their two hours/day over the week, Judy covered several topics and played a lot of fun learning games. Zadie even started to like Spanish, which surprised me because she generally refuses to learn any Spanish at home and was not overly excited that I'd signed her up for the class. Ruth, much less surprisingly, learned a lot, and was comfortably reading menus and ordering for herself during our trip. She had already picked up many words from us in Guatemala and at home, but further expanded her vocabulary and started learning verb conjugations here.  Can you guess today's topic? 😄 My teacher and I were ac...

We spent one of our first days in Nicaragua volunteering at the Granada English Academy, where kids can learn English on Saturday mornings. We connected with the owner, Manuel, on Facebook after he'd reached out to an expats group for help. (We had joined the expat group because we've found it's a great way to get advice and current info on a location.) Manuel told us that regular schools don't teach English, so he started this school because knowing English can be more valuable than a college degree.  Working in an English-speaking call center, for example, can earn you multiples of the average Nica salary. Even though his English is excellent, he likes to include native English speakers so the kids can practice with a range of accents. He'd started the school in 2016 with five students and had some up and down years, having to shut down during the political unrest in 2018 and again for COVID. When we visited, the school had four concurrent classes running for diff...

After hearing that the Airbnb we stayed in is on a local home tour, I googled our house and was surprised to find that it was once written up in the NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/realestate/real-estate-in-nicaragua.html "Casa Blanca" was built in the 1750s, so it's older than the USA! The house was a splurge, but had everything we were looking for in a rental for the month, and I'm glad we were able to stay here. The location is great: It's smack in the center of the city, a block from the main square behind the beautiful yellow cathedral that is the first picture in any story about Granada. It's at the top of a pedestrianized street, Calle La Calzada, surrounded by tons of restaurants. The only problem with the location, actually, is that we were a little too close to those restaurants at times - the bars don't close until after 3 on the weekends and they can be loud. Fortunately, the girls are solid sleepers and the noise didn't reall...