Power cuts!

Had a little rash of power outages today, mostly small – just a second or two – but long enough to knock over the whole internet, which was a bit annoying. Coming back from an awesome chicken dinner at about 7pm, I was walking up a street when there was a sharp crack sound, and a huge plume of bright blue sparks shot out from a power line. Everything still seemed to work, but it was pretty dramatic!

My buddy Christoff just found this video from Burning Man this year – it’s shot at the Deep End, the day-time party, right at sunset. There’s not actually that many videos around as video cameras are quite tightly controlled due to all the weird stuff happening everywhere, but this is a pretty decent one: hundreds of people in costume, dancing for hours in a dusty wild west mock-up in 100ºF heat (in the shade)

Only 292 days until next year’s festival!!

San Juan del Sur

Another week, another place. This time I’m staying in San Juan del Sur, a surfer town on the Nicaraguan Pacific coast.

It seems a good spot, so I’ve decided to stay here for a while; I’ve rented a room from a nice American guy called Lee for a few weeks, and am in the process of settling in.

It’s got good wifi, 5 minutes walk to the beach in a town big enough to have a bank but small enough to still feel like a village.

I’m getting myself into a pretty good routine – up at 6ish while it’s still nice and cool, go to get breakfast at a little rice & beans place in town. Stock up on fruit, which is ridiculously tasty and cheap – I normally get about 5 bananas, some limes, a papaya and some other bits and pieces, which invariably comes in at less than a dollar. Then it’s back to the house for some work, broken up with fruit breaks. I’ll normally go out for dinner – I’ve found a couple of good places so far, but still looking around for my favourite spot.

I went to see some turtles laying their eggs on a beach a couple of nights ago, which was awesome. No pictures unfortunately as using a flash is a no-no, and we were only using red lights, which turtles apparently don’t see. Did still seem quite invasive poking around under the things as they were popping out the eggs, but they seems pretty chilled out. Do turtles ever not seem chilled out?

The word on the street is that surfing around here is world-class, so I might invest in a couple of lessons next week…

Municipal Elections

There were national elections here in Nicaragua two nights ago. Apparently, Latin Americans take their polling day horseplay a lot more seriously than Europeans; there was to be no alcohol sold or consumed anywhere in Nicaragua for Saturday through to today, in an effort to prevent disruption.

There were some reports of voting irregularites and violence, but there was a polling station right next door to the hostel I was in in Granada, but apart from a few fireworks when the incumbent Sandinistas were re-elected, and I didn’t see anything sketchy. Apparently there was a little bit of rock throwing going on in the capital, Managua, apparently.

I did get a great photo of a stray dog shitting in the gutter, in front of a fat dude sleeping in a chair with a ‘policía elección’ t-shirt. Which I then deleted by accidental.

I’m in San Juan del Sur at the moment, which is a small surfer town on the Pacific coast. Internet situation is not so great, so I won’t be here too long unless I can find a hostel with wifi.

Snap decision

I was planning on heading up to north-west Costa Rica to do some kitesurfing and stuff, but there were a few niggles. Finding a hostel with wifi, close to the places I wanted to be was turning out to be a bit of a mission, so I decided to come up to Nicaragua immediately instead.

So I’m in Granada at the moment – the oldest city in Central America apparently – and it seems awesome so far. Colonial architecture, dirt cheap and in a really good spot to kitesurf on the lake, see some volcanoes and so on.

I’ve found a nice hostel, and the plan for tomorrow is to go and get a Lonely Planet and a book to learn Spanish.

Street names in San Jose

I was wandering around in San Jose today when I noticed they have a strange approach to naming streets. It’s similar to the system in the USA where they have a large swathe of blocks split by numerical avenues on one axis, and maybe alphabetic streets on the other – something like that. But in San Jose, they’ve put the origin at the centre of the city, not at a corner.

So, in San Francisco, 1st Street is way out to the east, and numbers increase as you head west. In New York, there’s more random streets lying around, but 1st Street and 1st Ave is at the south-eastern corner of the swathe of blocks, with numbers increasing as you head north and west.

In San Jose, there’s an Avenue Central and a Calle Central, which cross at the heart of the city. From there, you find odd-numbered avenues and calles as you go north and east, and even numbered avenues and calles as you head south and west.

Not much of a change, but still enough to confuse a clueless gringo wandering around looking for the National Museum.

So, if that was confusing, you’d think that a city laid out using polar co-ordinates, rather than Cartesian, would be completely bewildering. However, that’s what Burning Man did: see? And considering I was wandering around the place in a complete daze for most of the week without getting lost once, I think polar city layouts could be the biggest advance in town planning since Napoleon came up with the idea of putting odd- and even-numbered on different sides of the street.

Costa Rica!

So my visa waiver for the US runs out on the 5th November, meaning I had until Wednesday to leave the country or face dire consequences; orange jump suits and such.

I was originally planning to head back to the UK, see friends and family. However, after some ponderment, I decided it would make more sense for me to delay that trip until Christmas and head somewhere else temporarily. This place had to be in a similar time zone to California, easy to get to, have good internet access and preferably nice countryside and things to do. I was toying with Canada for a while (as our first hire is currently based there), Baja California in Mexico, as well as Belize and a couple of other Central American countries.

In the end, I’ve settled for Costa Rica because it’s pretty stable and developed for a Central American country – the only unarmed democracy in the world – plus there’s a huge range of natural deliciousness. It’s got reef, dry and wet rainforests, volcanos, beaches, lakes, mountains, … There’s rafting, kayaking, world-class surfing, kiteboarding and windsurfing, … And internet.

I flew down from San Francisco via Houston, arriving in the capital, San Jose, at about 4pm, cramming Spanish phrases all the way. The plan is to stay here for a couple of days then head somewhere a bit quieter and more rural.

Warehouse Project

Well, it’s been quite a while since my last post, but not for lack of stuff to report. One big thing I’m pretty excited about are plans I have to move into a huge warehouse slightly north of where I’m currently staying.

The building has been used for a few things – the owner ran an import/export business out of it for a while, and most recently it was Hillary Clinton’s campaign office here in San Francisco. There’s a group of about 14 of us who are all going in on the warehouse together; I knew about half of them before we started planning this project, and luckily I really like all the rest of them who I’ve met over the last few weeks.

There’s a definitely lean towards a Burning Man sort of crowd, and all the fun and games that go with it – we’re definitely going to have some sort of workshop on the ground floor for building projects, idle tinkering and Burning Man preparation. It’s also a nice blend of arty and techie types, a mix I think could work really well when building out a living space.

The warehouse is in the Soma district of San Francisco (about 10 minutes bike ride north of where we are in the Mission at the moment): , in a good spot near most of the nightspots we find ourselves in at 5am nowadays. There’s a little community garden straight across the street from us, and quite a few other group living spaces too, which we’ll use for inspiration and tips.

The building itself is absolutely enormous – it has three floors, totalling 12500 sq. ft., plus a flat roof. It’s big enough that we can comfortably use the bottom floor for a party space, workshop, secure storage, bike racks, spare rooms and so on and still have ample room on the middle and top floors for nice common areas and bedrooms. There have been lots of floor plans flying around (seemingly led by the techie people), and the more artistically creative people are throwing about some awesome ideas about how we can put our own touch on the space.

There’s still a lot of open questions about whether this will all go through – trying to coordinate 15 people is not easy – but we’ve got a lease from the landlord, and a bunch of committed people who seem to understand what a big undertaking it will be to convert an essentially empty shell into the sort of comfy, safe and unique place we want it to be, so I’m bullish.