Managua

Managua is a filthy avenue of tree stumps, dirt clouds, and plastic trash.  The streets are the color of dusty feet in bright green shower flip flops.  Managua is the mammoth Sandinista billboards that rise from the ash and trash of the ground, and feature the smiling president waving to (seemingly) another billboard of the president smiling and waving.  (Daniel waving to himself.)  Managua is the huge roundabouts with abandoned parks in the middle featuring the skeleton of a christmas tree whose christmas lights continue to blink on the hottest of days of July. ("Here in Managua, it's Christmas year around," goes the saying.)  A city of cars, where the only people walking are the menacing and miserable faces of poverty; shoeless and shirtless, their dark skin glistening like a lake, selling small bags of water and candy.  The men, in camo pants or cargo shorts, intimidating and unapproachable, moving their shoulders purposefully as they walk like a puma pacing in its cage.  Managua is the suffocating heat, and the nauseous humidity of a packed school bus with all the windows closed.

Managua is also the air-conditioned malls, fast food chains, and five-star hotels, that people get to in their air-conditioned cars, after leaving their air-conditioned gated community mansions.  The people who live in these air-conditioned bubbles, traveling from one air-conditioned oasis to the next, sit at the American-style food courts and eat nutella flavored gelato ice-cream, they go to European-style discotecs, and Japanese-style karaokes, they watch the newest 3-D films at the mall cinema, and reflect on their lives in coffee shops.  These reflections are made in phony valley-girl accents, (movies having mislead them into believing the California valley-girl culture is the ultimate representation of modern-day "high society") which include English words and sayings like: "Oh my God!," "nice," "fancy," "cute," and "cherry." ("Cherry" being synonymous with "fancy.")

And so, these two Managuas co-exist, and are only forced to clash when those street kids jump on your new Lexus and start rubbing window-cleaner on the windshield as you yell and sign, "No!" But they don't seem to listen or understand you.