The beautiful Catedral anchors the busy and boisterous Parque Central, or town square. It was a pleasure to look out at its sunny yellow façade from our hotel balcony. Here it is as seen from different angles.

Horse-drawn carriages lined the street in front of the park and right underneath our balcony. We tried to pick the best cared for horses when we took our carriage ride around the city as some were not as healthy looking.

They shared the streets with buses and cars pretty seamlessly.

The square was filled with vendors selling food, souvenirs and handicrafts. Every morning they were set up from scratch and taken down at day’s end.

My favorite, of course, was the elderly woman with her food stand. We are still not quite sure what it was she was selling and we were really tempted to try it, but it contained a lot of salad or some kind of raw slaw and that’s a classic no-no when visiting a third-world country. No street food! Plus we did watch her pick things up from the ground a few times and then serve food. Whatever it was, she served it in a neat banana leaf packet. Lots of white rice, some salad on top and lord knows what else. Many people ate it for breakfast. Here she is dressing the salad/slaw.

Every bowl had to be ‘just so’  in a certain position, her banana leaves stacked by the big bowl of rice (she also used a banana leaf to stir the rice), along with all of her other ingredients. We mostly watched her setting up her food stall, but one day we managed to be on our balcony when she was leaving for the day. Unlike the morning where she presided over the setting up, in the afternoon she strolled off clasping the hand of what appeared to be her small granddaughter, leaving the taking down of the stall to the same crew that brought all her things to her in the morning. Here is the cart being loaded up at the end of the day.

It was such a wonderful peek into the daily lives of real people. It’s one of my favorite things about the entire trip.

Here is our hotel as viewed from the square. Our balcony is the one partially obscured by the tree.

The only drawback to our room on the square were the noisy birds the guidebook calls “jackdaws.”  These birds nested in the trees in the square and woke up very early in the morning, squawking and generally making a great deal of noise. It was impossible to sleep through! Every night as the sun was setting it was the same thing all over again as they settled in for the night. Kind of endearing though in an strange way.

Everything in Granada is colorful (the subject of yet another blog post.) If you look closely you will see that the car in the background is the same color as the table and chairs.

I loved the bicycle in the fountain in this shot. This color of green is very popular as the photo of the table above was taken on the opposite of the park from this one.

Next entry: Granada, Nicaragua: From the Bell Tower