The weekend

The week of testing is over thank goodness!!! I'm definitely ready to stop grading tests, it took so long, especially on the last day of grading them. Today was a half day, so things in school were pretty chill, and the students were allowed to dress in normal clothes if they paid 5 lempiras (25 cents), so everyone dressed in their normal clothes of course. I got to chat with a couple of my students today, whcih was pretty cool, made a little visit with the doctor for some minor difficulties I've been having, and then played some chess with one of my students the last 20 minutes of class. Oh, and I bribed a class into giving me some pizza, even though they bought it themselves, it was pretty cool.

We went down McDonalds for the first time and I sunk my teeth into a nice Big Mac, just like home. Then we went to Centro, downtown after that, I did a little bit of exploring into different stores, had a little pastry, and then we went to the enourmous outdoor food market, the biggest by far that I've ever seen, it's in the parking lot of the national stadium. And the whole parking lot is entirely filled with tons and tons of vendors mostly selling fruits/vegetables/cheeses,eggs, and any other non-canned food you can think of. I got some food, and some of the biggest and best grapefruits you've ever seen and then we went home, and watched the sound of music.

I'm going to post a picture of the only picture I have of downtown, I'm hoping to get more in the future.

Last weekend

Sorry for not updating more, I’ve been getting a little lazy in blog-world. Last weekend I went downtown and picked up a few caribeeners for my new hammock that’s made out of mesh (very comfortable), we have it hanging on our balcony right now. We also went to the national stadium, in the morning on the weekends there is a huge market there and tons of people are selling every single fruit/vegetable grown in Honduras. On Sunday I went to Valle de Angeles, which is a huge tourist place, they sell a lot of souveniers and hand made stuff. A lot of it is pretty high in price though because so many tourists go there. I bought just a few little things there. We also ate there, they were having their annual fair, a couple musicians were there and a ton of different vendors. We at some amazing pupusas, pastelitos and tamales. I’ll explain those later if you want to really know. And we went to an English church service for the first time here. I’ve gone 2 weeks in a row now, the first time was interesting, the people were so friendly there but the preaching was a bit less than I had hoped for. However I came back the next weekend and it was much better, a missionary from Haiti preached on Hebrews 12, God’s Discipline, and a couple of my friends and I signed up to go to a picnic up on the school property of Academia los Pinares, which is the big-time, amazing teacher school. That’s this Saturday so I’m looking forward to meeting new people up there. We also got invited to go play volleyball every Thursday night by a Honduran name Aben. He seemed like a pretty cool guy, so I’m looking forward to getting to know him more.

This week was final exams of the quarter, the students have a whole week at the end of the quarter in which they have a cumulative test of what they have learned throughout the quarter. Mon-Thursday this week that’s all we’ve been doing and since I teach 14 different class, I have to grade 14 different sets of exams, which makes for a busy week for myself. But I do have a break from teaching for a little while, which is nice.

I Think we might be going down south for thanksgiving, which should be pretty fun, down to Choluteca, apparently the beaches down there have black sand.

The Carribean and San Pedro Sula

Wow, I've got so many pics I want to post, maybe I'll have to put them on facebook. Anyways, this past weekend I went to the Carribean, about a 4 to 5 hour drive. We went with a teacher who grew up in Puerto Cortez which is right on the coast as well. We spent the night in San Pedro Sula on Friday night and then went to Omoa which is right on the coast. It was really nice, we stayed at Ms. Sabillon's friend's house right on the beach!! And there were hamicks all over her yard which was really nice.

On Saturday we went to the largest fortress in Central America, I got alot of pictures of that although I forgot it's name. Then we toured all around Puerto Cortez where Ms. Sabillon grew up, and we saw the most amazing marching band rehearsing in the street that I had ever seen. They were dancing all over the place and were throwing down some amazing rhythms. It was awesome. During this whole time Ms. Sabillon had a 4 year old boy named Alejandro that I played with the whole time, he was so fun. He liked to tap me on the back and when I turned around to see who it was he would shake his finger and say, "Yo no fui" (it wasn't me) it was really funny.

The water was really clear but it was cloudy the whole weekend, so the water didn't look as blue as I've seen in other pictures. We had some amazing food on the trip too, real fish caught in the Carribean, really good tortillas, coconut bread, and some of the best pancakes with homeade strawberry syrup that I've ever had. There was also homemade orange juice and pear juice which was really good too.

Ms. Sabillon's dad enjoyed telling us how old fashioned Honduran men feel about gender roles. His dad always told him, "A man who doesn't know how to control his women isn't a man at all." Women should always be in the kitchen or in the household while the men go out and provide for the family. It was pretty interesting....

The soccer game on thursday was unbelievable!! I loved it, Motagua beat Olimpia 2-1 but it was an amazing game and the Olimpia fans were jumping up and down probably 3/4 of the game and they had many many different chants and cheers. While the Motagua fans burned an Olimpia flag and everyone was shooting fireworks off in the crowd. I was in the calmer section where there are seats, but most of the stadium was standing room only. There was also riot police everywhere, after the game was over they were beating uncooperative fans and chasing them down, it was amazing to see like 100 people darting away from a few police officers. I'm going to a national team game on Sunday, so that should be really fun, Honduras is playing Panama.

Oh yeah, it's my birthday today and everybody make huge deals about birthdays here, so all of my classes tried to sing happy birthday to me, so that was a bit awkward and tiresome but it's my birthday so I need to get into the spirit I guess.

This also marks the 2 month point since my arrival, it's gone by so fast, I can't believe how fast it's gone by. And teaching is still very very hard, and very very tiring, but some of my relationships with my kids are starting to progress, which is pretty cool. Please continue to pray though.