Couch potatoes rejoice! Nicaragua is a paradise for television viewers. The main local cable provider Estesa is expanding throughout the country, taking over small mom-and-pop cable operations in different towns, offering more than 80 channels. DirectTV has been supplanted by SkyNet with its different packages and DishNet has entered the fray, offering even US network channels along with hundreds of others.
If you like watching DVDs, there are plenty of rental shops and bootleg versions of even the newest movies are available along the streets or in parking lots for a dollar or two. A word of warning though for those of you who may use English-language movies with Spanish subtitles to help learn the language. Those subtitles may be somewhat misleading. For example, in the film 3:10 to Yuma, when Russell Crowe’s character says upstairs in the hotel room, “Discretion is the better part of valor,” the Spanish subtext says, “Por eso usted es maricón,” or literally, “That’s why you’re a fag.”