Experiencing Honduras

Up until today, it's been all play and no work.  The school start date has gotten pushed back twice and, as of now, it will start on September 3.  Today was the first day we were able to get into our classrooms and see our textbooks, which was great.  

There are 17 American staff members here this year working at Minerva.  We've spent our time up to this point roaming our little town of Gracias and getting to know the best grocery stores, produce stands, restaurants, coffee shops, etc..  I have acquired a slight addiction for the coffee granitas - a frozen blended drink better than any Scooters or Starbucks!  I was surprised to find them here, since it's an Italian treat, but I will not complain!  I'm also liking the food for the most part, which is a lot of beans, rice and tortillas.  I'm also now pretty used to the fact that I can't use the water from the faucet.  Even the locals don't drink the water.  They either drink bottled or bagged water.  This was my first time drinking from a bag and, as you can see, I made a mess:

Besides roaming around or hanging out at home, we are also able to use the pools at a resort, the Villa de Ada, by our school.  We had to walk down the road next to the school and jump over a barbed wire wall to get to it.  There is a main entrance that wouldn't require such a task, but it just seemed too far away at the time!  This is the road and also a side view of my school (more school pictures to come in a future post):

The pool:

This poor little monkey is on display at the Villa de Ada:

There are chickens everywhere, even carried around in bags:

There are no real taxis in Gracias, just these mototaxis that are about the size of a golf cart.  It costs 10 lempira for a ride (50 cents):

We all went to the nearby hot springs via the mototaxi.  With 4 or 5 people plus the driver it sure chugged it's way up the hills pretty slowly!  One of them even got a flat on the way.  Our driver had black lights and music pumping.  It was like a dance party but without the ability to move or dance!

Here is a (poor) picture of the hot springs:

Some recent developments at the house: we are babysitting 3 couches for a couple of months for a missionary family in town that left to help out in a different city until November.  Our living room looks so much better now!:

Our landlords were so kind to hang a hammock for us:

And, our shower just got tiled today!:

On Saturday, 14 of us went on a little vacay around the western parts of the country.  We first took a 2 hour bus (really, it was a van) ride to La Esperanza.  They sure pack the people in on every vehicle!  This was a 4 row van that you would think would hold 14 people max.  But just went you think it's full, they stop and pick up more people.  I think we had 19 passengers at one point.  Not to mention, it was HOT! I was in the way back corner and tried to get a shot of the madness, but this picture, I feel, doesn't accurately display the sardine state we were all in:

This is our hotel in La Esperanza.  It was "nice" for Honduran standards:

This is a large produce stand that I was in awe of.  The biggest one in Gracias is maybe a third the size:

We had a lot of fun in La Esperanza.  We went to a restaurant and had a delicious feast.  For the 14 of us, all our food and drinks were only $75.  At night, we went out dancing and enjoyed making fools of ourselves by pretending to salsa and merengue.  On Sunday, we hopped a couple more buses and made our way to Lago de Yojoa and stayed at the D&D brewery/lodge.  It had cabins in the middle of the jungle and, again, very yummy food.

There were two big highlights of this trip.  One was tubing down a canal into the big lake.  I felt like a ping pong ball bouncing off the sides of the canal.  A couple times we had to get out and walk around some trees that were down.  I was wearing sandals and there was ankle deep mud - not a very good combination.  Good thing we got back in the water after that because I was pretty covered in mud! I don't have any pictures of this adventure yet, but we were on the excursion with a couple of people from Belgium that had a waterproof camera.  I'm hoping they will remember to email us the pictures!

This is another canal that feeds into Lago Yojoa:

The second highlight was climbing through Pulhapanzak waterfall.  It was exhilarating!  We jumped into the water and climbed over many rocks and through the extremely strong water falling on us.  At some points we couldn't see anything at all.  The tour guide would reach his hand through the water to guide us and we just had to trust what he was doing!  He even had us climb through a little hole and into a small cave.  Again, we were with the tourists with the waterproof camera - those are bound to be some crazy pictures!  Here are some "before" shots:

On the way home, we hitched a ride with another family that was visiting the falls.  They were visiting from Texas, but are originally from the area and was in town seeing family.  They even stopped to show us their little neighborhood.  Here we are with the "mom" of the group in front of her family home (note that we had just been battered and bruised from the falls so we aren't really sporting our cleanest looks):

On a final note, I need to say that the kids here are so cute!  We stopped to watch a soccer game and these two little boys were playing off to the side putting on a show for us.  I can't wait to meet the kids in my class!