!Estoy en Nicaragua!

Hola familia y amigos!  Estoy en Nicaragua :)  I am safe and sound in Nicaragua.  We arrived late in the morning after our VERY early departure from DC, and now we are at a hotel for the first few days of training.  We are very fortunate to be in a hotel with AC, free wi-fi, pool, tv, and nice rooms.  Of course, we are absolutely exhausted!   I can't wait to sleep tonight because I did not get any sleep last night, and had some interrupted sleep on the plane.

Tonight is fairly relaxed, as our Peace Corps trainers know we are tired.  We will have dinner soon and then maybe a meeting, and hopefully bedtime soon after :)  I'm so excited/nervous/anxious for the approaching days!  I'm most nervous for our language interview because I haven't been using my Spanish in awhile, but I know that whatever I can do is what I can do, and I'll just improve from there.  I need to stay positive about it and not stress out ;)  Anyway, I am really excited and anxious to meet my host family and find out where I'll be living for the next few months of training.  It's crazy that I'm already here in Nicaragua, but it's also crazy thinking that I started this process 2 years ago!!  I hope that I can embrace every moment and look for the good in everything, not dwelling on disappointments.  Speaking of that...funny thing when we checked into the hotel.  Peace Corps had talked to us about losing luxuries, etc. and we know that Nicaragua is certainly not like the U.S. in forms of accessibility to electricity, clean water, internet, etc. but we experienced our first loss of luxury as we went to take our bags to our rooms and realized that our rooms were upstairs and there were no elevators.  This was pretty funny because it's something that we really take for granted, but in actuality, in many places, people have to walk up and down flights of stairs to get to their homes or apartments.  We weren't mad about this, it was just inconvenient lugging our huge suitcases up the stairs in an open-air hotel in the tropics :)  We managed to survive and the sweat has dried. 

Pictures from DC are on my Facebook page at:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2048875&id=51701128&l=8dd9967157

Pictures from my first day in Nicaragua are here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2048879&id=51701128&l=b618ef13be

More pictures to come later...