Because this was our last free full day here in Nicaragua, today was the first time we were truly able to explore Leon in a new perspective. We started our day off  by eating ham and eggs, Gallo Pinto, a tortilla, accompanied by chocolate and corn juice. After breakfast, we headed back to the hostel and throughly planned out our Community Action Project to prepare for our presentation tomorrow. We split up into our behind the scenes groups and played our roles. I was assigned Visual design with Tomiyuri and Kyla along with our honorary member, Eli. We sketched out the Anti-Domestic Violence mural and decided on a quote from Nelson Mandela, “I learned that courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.” Others researched pricing on supplies, contacted the people of La Goyena, or wrote their speeches for the presentation.

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After everyone finished, we began our game of Darts (not your average game of darts). The game is played over a long amount of time (the rest of the trip) and everyone has imaginary blow darts. At anytime of the day, if you make eye contact with someone else you can “blow a dart” at them and if they don’t correctly block it, they must “die” and drop to the floor. The only times we can’t play is when we have a speaker or are in a seminar. As you can imagine, the game gets slightly out of hand. At one point Jessie had killed everyone, like a true assassin. After our CAP prep and the beginning of our group game, we headed over to Deja Vu for lunch. We enjoyed the familiar Gallo PiIMG_5042nto and chicken paired with a side of salad and Piña juice.
After lunch we had 4 hours of designated free time, which was absolutely amazing. It was such a treat to be able to tour the city without a guide and holistically experience what the city is like. It was challenging at times like crossing the street safely and finding our way, but it was such an incredible experience. We all started off together by going to the bank to exchange money and the large local supermarket, but after that we split up into groups. Most of us went souvenir shopping, some went to the movies, and watched the World Cup. My group of 5 ( LKTEA ) went to the central park to shop, dropped our souvenirs off at our hostel, and then went to get fast food. Throughout our adventure, we all truly got to know each other and learn new things about each other. Once our free time was over, we met back up at the hostel to eat dinner. For dinner we had a cheese enchilada with the side of Gallo Pinto with melon juice. In my opinion, today was one of the most memorable days of this trip, even if we weren’t all together the whole day.

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