Locked-In & Locked-Out

The pigs that live across the street!

On Saturday, December 4th, we packed up our things and said goodbye to our host family in Managua.  It was time to head to Teustepe for the week so our house could get some needed repairs!  We were excited to get out of the city and see our place again since it had been one whole month since we had been there.  We arrived safely with clothes, towels and bedding, in addition to a week's worth of fruit and veggies.  The following morning we went to our landlady's house to pay our rent and check in about the repairs that would be done.  We returned to our place and unlocked the front gate when I noticed a mother pig and her baby were being let outside down the street from us.  They were walking around like a pet dog would be, sniffing in the grass and walking up the sidewalk.  I found this to be quite amusing and ran inside to get the camera.  After a few photos, I locked our front gate (from the inside) and went in our front door (which we usually leave open for more of a breeze.)  I heard someone at the door, so I went to see who was there.  A woman was standing at our gate, and she introduced herself as Megan, who just arrived in town with the Peace Corps.  She lives across the street in the house where the pigs live.  How ironic, right?!  Another gringo living a couple of houses down from us.  Nate heard that I was speaking English with someone and came to introduce himself.  Moments later a gust of wind blew our front door shut.  Our mouths dropped, as we realized that neither one of us had keys - we were locked out of our house and yet locked in our porch.  The front door can only be opened with a key, and the gate needs to be unlocked with a key to get out - plus there's a roof over this area, so there was no way to climb over the gate, and metal bars over the window prevented us from entering that way.  We stood sheepishly on our little isolated porch, and asked our new neighbor to go to our landlady's house for help.  Off she went, and returned with our landlady and her husband.  They looked worried and weren't laughing.  Nate and I were just embarrassed and felt stupid that the situation occurred.  Luckily, they had a key to the gate, but not to the front door.  So we went around to the back yard and scaled the the fence .  We have two doors in our backyard (one to our bedroom, one to our kitchen), and each of them has a metal gate with a padlock and a wooden door with locks on the inside.  Luckily we had left the wooden doors open, so we just had to somehow access the key for the metal gate, which was on a table, out of arm's reach.  Sticks were not long enough to reach, but then Nate had the brilliant idea to reach in and move the table towards us so we could access the key on the table!  WOW, quite the impressive break-in!  Could have been much worse, but we learned several valuable lessons.  #1: Keep your keys in your pocket at all times.  #2: Use a brick to hold open the front door.  And #3: Make sure your landlady has a copy of your house key as well!!  The adventures never cease in the lives of Nate and Liz, so stay tuned for more!!