Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Lolita



This post is mainly for my mom and for all of you who really like the story of Lolita whistling at me. Lola only wakes us up about once a week now and only when she hears other people awake. She gets really excited and starts sqwaking and talking and whistling. Now she really likes it when I scratch her head. We're buddies.





New lunch!

We had a new experience yesterday at our house. In the morning while we were getting ready for our last day of language class, I was washing out our water bottles at the sink in the kitchen. As I was washing them out I noticed some kind of meat sitting on the counter beside me. Mami Gollita came into the kitchen and I asked her what it was. And she said, "meat....what do you think it looks like?" So I said, "tongue?" (with a disgusted look on my face) and she started laughing and I realized I was right.

Then we got home from language class at lunch time and the tongue was frying on the stove. Fortunately, we have to provide our own lunches so we were having peanut butter and jelly. As we were finishing our sandwiches, Mami Gollita brings over a plate of tongue and rice for us to share. Wasn't that so generous of her??? So Shaun ate most of it and Gina and I each tried a small piece just to say we've tried tongue before. It was not the most pleasant experience of my life.








Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Birthday Party at the Park

Our host mom turns 60 today so on Sunday we went to the park to have a cookout for her. It was freezing!!! And by freezing I mean it was probably 50-55 degrees and raining. I know that doesn't sound cold but when you're used to 80 and sunny its freezing! We were there from 10-3!! It was a lot of fun...food, pinata, cake, soccer.....you can't beat it!


Now for the pictures:

First is our family and our host mom with the cake.
Second, Shaun and Walter fighting over the ball in a wild game of soccer with the men of the family
Third, The pinata with Gollita (our mom) and the family
Forth, Walter grilling the amazing food
Fifth, Jenny pushing Sofia on the swings

































Saturday, January 17, 2009

Honduran Culture


Aside from language training. We have spent the majority of our time doing culture study. Often times that includes spending a few hours every Mon, Wed, and Fri afternoon walking the streets and talking to people about differnt topics. Such as education, security, religion, and economics. Here are a few pictures about some of the "cultural" things we´ve experienced. This first picture isn´t part of culture study. This is just us remembering part of american culture. We finally recieved our Christmas cookies from Jenny´s mom in the middle of January!!!

Monday, January 12, 2009

Locked out or in?

This past week was rather uneventful. At this point we have sort of gotten in the groove of going to class each day for 4 hours in the morning and then we have culture class or talking to people on the street each afternoon.

The other day we went to use an internet cafe. Our one brother had come over to ¨house-sit¨ at our house. (There always has to be someone in the house and our host parents were away and we left to use the internet cafe, so our brother came over to house-sit). He was supposed to stay there until we got home, but when we got home he had left. We rang the doorbell numerous times and nothing happened, we also tried knocking on the door...still nothing happened. After waiting on the front porch for about 20 mins, our neighbor from upstairs let us walk through her house to get to our room located at the back of our house. Unfortunately once we got into the back hallway where our room was we realized that we still could not get into the main house, because the back door of the house was also locked! We could get in our room. However, now we were locked in because you have to go through the main house to get back outside. Needless to say we found it rather humorous later on that we had been locked out of the house and then locked in the house!!

Yesterday Jenny and I got to go to the first soccer game of the year of the Honduran Professional league. Montagua, a team from here in Tegucigalpa (the team we were routing for) played against Real Juventud from Santa Barbara. Montagua was a better team, and hit the post once and had a couple of great opportunities to score but failed to do. The final score was 0-0...kind of boring, but it was fun to see the national stadium and experience a Honduran crowd. The ¨student section¨ was hysterical. They sang the whole game, sometimes about the game, many times making fun of the opposing team. They also set of fireworks and started a few fires in the stands. One guy tried to body surf down the fans and flew off and landed on the cement stands...he was probably drunk. The best part was when they gathered around the police and started singing songs to the policemen! The cops didn´t find it too amusing...but we thought it was funny.

Sunday, January 4, 2009

Copan

This past week, we took a trip to Copan Ruinas where we visited the Mayan ruins. We left early Monday morning and we were expecting to be able to sleep on the way there but.... First of all, the vehicle. It´s a 12 passenger van with over 200 thousand miles. The air conditioner doesn´t work and remember it´s 90 degrees down here. The shocks are completely shot and when you open the windows, the rubber around the windows as well as the pealing tint make a horrible rattling noise. Also, there is an ugly exhaust fume that comes out of the vents in the front of the van so you have to keep the windows open! Second, there is the road. Honduras is only mountains so you´re always driving up and down really steep slopes. There are no guard rails and many times half the road is missing so there is only one lane. Futhermore, there are potholes everywhere and no road rules. People drive as fast as they want and pass when they feel like it. Not the most conducive conditions for sleeping. (oh, and did we mention that the trip is 8 hours long?)

Finally we arrived in Copan about 4 in the afternoon and decided to take a trip to a nearby bird park. We got to ride in a mototaxi which you can see in one of the pictures. At the bird park we got to not only see the birds but interact with them too. Jenny really enjoyed the bird park because there was not only 1 bird whistling at her but about 100!
On Tuesday, we went to the ruins. We got a tour guide and to walk through all of the ruins and the tunnels under the ruins it took us about 3 hours. It was truely amazing! It´s really hard to describe using words so we posted a few pictures (we have many more we´ll show when we get home).
Happy New Year everyone!!

Christmas in Honduras 2008!!