Food in Nicaragua

Food in Nicaragua is very good, not as limited as in say, Cuba, and offers up such typical dishes as rice and beans (Gallo Pinto - a mixture of fried rice with onion and sweet pepper, red beans boiled with garlic, mixed and fried together.), chicken, beef, pork dishes fresh fish, tropical fruits, shell fish such as lobster and shrimp, fried cheese and plantain. There is also salads you can eat. Eggs with rice are served for breakfast.

My favorites, believe it or not were the rice and beans and the fish and lobster. Yum, yum, good! They call the daily diet of the Nicaraguans "comida typico." You can eat comida typico or what they call "international foods - which is anything you can get anywhere else in the world. They also eat a lot of corn and corn based foods such as Nacatamal and tortillas. Nacatamal is made of pork or chicken, with rice, potatoes, tomatoes, onion, sweet pepper, packed in plantain leaves and boiled for a long time. I tried it, but I didn’t like it that much. I wanted to try it because it is one of the most famous and well known dishes of Nicaragua.

In season, you can eat a wide variety of tropical fruits which grow in abundance in Nicaragua. While I was there, I had a variety of melons, watermelons, mangos, and lots of pineapples. There were also many tropical fruits I’d never heard off before.

The food is generally healthy, organically grown and very tasty. I didn’t gain weight in Nicaragua maybe because the food is pure and I did lots of walking.

Nicaragua also grows coffee and I had plenty of their organic fresh coffee. You can also drink many kinds of fresh fruit drinks, fruit smoothies, (sometimes with rum in them), wine and Nicaraguan beer.

Other people enjoying Granada

It isn't only me that has enjoyed the time I spent in Granada. This happy family also went to Granada. They flew into Managua and then took a taxi to Granada. We actually went by tourist bus from Costa Rica. Enjoy the video. I found this Granada video on YouTube. Nicaragua is now becoming more popular as a tourist destination and there are several reasons - it offers a lot to tourists and the way of inexpensive restaurants and hotels in Granada, Nicaragua and the cost of traveling there is cheaper than other places in Central America and the Caribbean. It's also the safest country in Central America for tourists, so it's worth considering as your escape destination this winter.

Shopping at the Market in Masaya

Our tour bus and guide let us of at the market at Masaya in Nicaragua, which is housed in a very old Colonial building. It's a large market with lots and lots of market stalls for tourist shopping.



You can find just about anything here at this market and some of the prices are really great.



There are so many different things you can buy such as clothes – t shirts, blouses and dresses. I bought a lovely light yellow cotton blouse with some white embroidery on it for a a friend– sort of like a Chinese blouse. I also bought few t-shirts with Nicaraguan designs on it for the friends because I know back home nobody has a t shirt from Nicaragua.



I also bought some Nicaraguan cigars. They actually make cigars in Nicaragua. I bought plenty back – some for the boss at work and some of my colleagues.



I even bought a little piece of pottery made by Nicaraguans, covered with native designs.



I met up with a guy who took our group around the market at Masaya. He gave us a great speech which I recorded on video. He helped us bargain for lower prices, something my wife wasn't very willing to do because she is acutely aware of how poor people are. We gave him a tip at the end of his tour around the market.



When we had to leave the Masaya market and get back on the tour bus, there was a young guy about 13 or 14 years old. He was selling something that nobody needs, grasshoppers made of a dried grass. I bought one. I don't need one, but this guy needs money and is doing the best he can to survive in Nicaragua.



Our tour guide was in a hurry to get us back on the bus. It's just a job to him so he wanted to hurry us around back on the bus to move on to our next destination. But there was so much to see and everything in Nicaragua was so new for us!