Hello Families!

We’re here safely in Leon! After quite a bit of traveling (some of us started Monday evening), including a 2 hour bus ride from the capital Managua, we arrived mid-afternoon Tuesday, 2 July, to our hostel Iglesias de felipe in Leon.

This is our hostel from the street.

Many of us are from the San Francisco Bay Area and first met at SFO, and we all gathered for the first time in Managua after arriving from places like San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, and New York.

This is all of us, taken on our way to Leon from Managua.

The hostel here in Leon is fantastic and compares favorably to some hotels I’ve stayed in. The weather is warm here and very humid, but the hostel has may open spaces that allow breezes through. We use fans at night to keep cool, but it probably won’t take us long at all to adjust to the heat.

This is the view inside our hostel once you enter.

Entrance to the hostel

So far, I’m very impressed with Leon. Managua looked much like you would expect for the capital city of one of the poorest nations on the planet. There were wide streets and many buses, trucks, and the sort of noise that comes with city living. Leon, on the other hand, is very quaint: narrow sidewalks, one-way streets, and many motorcycles. For a college town, it has a very comfortable feeling and seems very different from many cities I’ve seen.

This is one of the 17 churches in Leon.

There’s a lot planned for our first, full day in Leon tomorrow including a tour of the city. I’ll be posting another blog then, and after the students themselves will be writing these blog entries. Thanks everyone for helping us get here and we’ll see you in a couple of weeks!