Expat Community > Nicaragua

the2bearsandme
Joined 2013
Posts: 293

Time to LOL ... or cry ... I chose LOL

11 years ago

Well, my friend and I arrived on June 28th and 29th respectively. Due to good fortune, we have been surrounded by VERY good, caring Nica's who are bi-lingual. We also have managed to find a rental home (true old sytle Nica) in Managua where we will stay put for 2 years and then decide to stay or move to another part of Nicaragua. So what's there to laugh about? Oh my goodness. I'm sure you have all heard the expression "on Nica time". It's worse than that! Setting up house (which includes telephones, cellular and internet) is a "process" I wouldn't wish on anybody. Oh my! First, NOTHING is done by phone. You have to go to their office. Then, after 'mountains' of paperwork (even with the existence of computers on their desk), you pay for the service, in portions. Meaning, you lay out the money for the equipment and get a receipt, and then you lay out the one time hook up fee and get a receipt and then you pay the monthly contract fee and get a receipt. By the way, the paperwork includes 3 references (our landlord, the maid, and our cab driver) ... ALL of whom we have known for only 1 to 3 weeks. Some references! But it worked! THEN you wait a millennium (no joke) for the technician to connect everything up. Which NEVER happened. The phone worked but the internet didn't. Fortunately, our Nica landlord, is VERY accommodating and called the company we were using. He got some action ... but then he's Nica. It seems, according to our landlord, that they forgot to turn on our internet. Well, Duh! Simple equation in my book but then I come from an expensive but easy / fast living country (USA). (2) Telephone in the house (not cellular): you can only call other desk phones. You can't call anybody's cell phone (like for a taxi). Soooo, god bless our landlord! He called AGAIN and found out that our phone line had a block on calls to cell phones and he had to request removal of that block. Now there's a new one on me. I know one can block calls but I never thought you had to unblock something. Can we say frustration? Wait! I'm not done! (3) Gas company, no problem. What a relief. (4) Bottled water delivery took 7 days. They were supposed to come the next day but the Sandanista gathering got in their way. Then, they didn't work for one or two days, then they said "day five". THEN, god bless our landlord, he called and got action. What am I? Mashed potatoes? Second hand child? Okay, I'm getting over it ... laughter is helping greatly. (4) Cell Phones: now this is a very real problem that we have yet to solve. The competition between Claro and Movi is very stiff. So stiff that it costs an arm and a leg to call a Movi # from a Claro cell or vice versa. So we took the advice of locals and got one phone from Movi and one from Claro. Now, of course, before you program in the number of the person (i.e., mototaxi), you have to ask which phone they use and then correctly program the # in the correct phone. We have made MULTIPLE mistakes calling and now are literally out of minutes after 2 weeks because the fee for calling Movi from Claro (for example) costs MEGA minutes. Even though I want to say "why is everything so darn complicated?" ... I'm actually laughing at the ridiculousness of all this. I wonder how it got to be this way? Well, now I feel less frustrated and I think I'll go to bed. Hello to all the expats we have yet to meet! Good Night!

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