If you want to have a package sent over to Nicaragua, you need to know a few things. As a tourist, if you’re completely clueless, you might have a hard time tracking your package. It’s a rather tedious process, and one in which your things might easily get lost amidst all the bureaucracy.

The circumstances: I was waiting for a package to arrive from the United States and tracking it online, I learnt that it left the States December 5 and arrived at the Nicaraguan customs office December 10. But by December 17 my package still had not been dispatched to my friend’s address in the capital city of Managua, which I’d designate it to be posted to.

Increasingly frustrated and anxious because I was supposed to have left Nicaragua 3 days ago, I decided to look up the customs office and request for my package in person.

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All the guidebooks seem to give you the idea that you won’t miss much if you skip out on the capital of Nicaragua entirely, but I disagree. At least, it warrants about two days of your time.

Sure, there is nothing singularly exciting about it, and it’s not exactly a ‘city’ by your first-world standards. It’s an everyday sort of place devoid of anything to romanticize… in fact, it is exceeding hot and impossible to navigate solely on foot or public bus, but it’s a place where you can spend your day roaming around shopping malls, perusing the shelves of La Colonia supermarket to decide what to cook for dinner, watch plays and listen to live music, visit art galleries and poetry readings… you can even go and have a very decent haircut for $8 at Galería Santo Domingo, have your left-too-long-unshaved legs waxed, see the doctor if you have to, extend your visa at the foreign office (direct your taxi driver to Direccion de Migración y Extranjera), buy a ‘Joy Sport’ (a bastardization of ‘Jan Sport’) backpack for 50 Cordobas (about $3!) at Mercado Ivan Montenegro which looks perfectly good and seemingly hardy (we will see about the latter), chase down your long-overdue package from overseas from post office customs (Los Correos, near El Malecon)… you get the idea. It’s a place you can comfortably run your errands, so long as you know where to look. People fly in from the Corn Islands to see the dentist, that kind of thing.

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