A day in Leon

Yesterday Sally, Ian, Amy, and I woke up early and took a 2.5 hour drive to Leon. It's an older city in Nicaragua and is home to one of the oldest cathedrals in the country. Bergman took us and also served as our tourguide. On the way there, we had a great view of several volcanos. After stopping for breakfast outside of Managua, we arrived in Leon and walked around the Cathedral. A service was starting shortly after we arrived so we didn't have too much time in the very ornate church.

We spent the rest of the morning going to the Museum of the Revolution (It was a room that had newspaper clipping and pictures detailing the events of the revolution. Nothing was protected or preserved but the man that was giving us the "tour" was very proud of what he had to show us. This is something that I don't remember learning in school in our history classes and hearing about it from a Nicaraguan perspective is very interesting.

We also went to the home/now museum of the famous Nicaraguan poet, Ruben Dario. They had some furniture there and his personal library along with some original writings of his on display. Our final stop of the morning was an art museum that included work from all over the world but the more modern paintings were mostly from Nicaragua.

After lunch (where I had chicken on bone--yes, I took the chicken off the the bone myself), we went to the ruins of the first spanish church in Nicaragua. It was on the property of this older woman and after walking around the remains of the church, we talked with her for a bit. She had a picture of her grandmother (who lived to be 114) and I think her family had been on this property for several generations.

On our way back into the main town, we stopped at the house of a man who was a woodworker. He carved saints out of tree trunks and is well known for this in this region. He showed us some samples of his work and gave us his card in case we needed his services in the future.

Leon is a very nice city with beautful architechure and it supposedly wasn't as touristy as Grenada (I'm going there later so I'll let you know what I think). It was rather quiet and a nice place to walk around.

The cathedral in Leon
The museum of the Revolution