...and back again

On Friday (this is still on our backpacking trip. yeah i’m behind) we headed toward the Guatemala/Honduras border. I made it there with $1 left in my pocket! But now that we were in Honduras, I had all my Lempiras, so we had no longer had to worry about it. We took a series of buses to Tela, Honduras, which is a small beach town on the north coast. On the way we met a bunch of backpackers going on the same route. One was an Australian that had just been traveling in the US, and he had stayed in Fullerton and had been through La Mirada! This was very strange, but funny. He said everyone he met there was super friendly, which was encouraging to hear. Americans aren’t so bad, ok? When we got to Tela, we started to look for a place to stay with some of the travelers from the bus. The town was inexplicably full that night, but we managed to find a small room for about $3.50 each, sharing with one of our new friends. The room was reminiscent of a prison cell, with no door on the bathroom or soap or toilet paper, but complete with a curious little cockroach who greeted us from over the bathroom wall. In the morning we ate breakfast on the beach and wandered around the town. We found a new room which was a little cheaper and cleaner. We tanned/burned on the beach, drank milk out of a coconut, explored, and watched the sunset from an abandoned pier. That night we ate a ridiculously huge dinner (since we saved so much on food in Guatemala), mused under the bright moon on our hotel’s ramshackle balcony, and played Rummy on our hotel bed. That was when we saw the inside of our room door, on which someone wrote something like “Don’t stay in this hotel, don’t pay for your room before you sleep here, it’s a place for prostitutes and gays!” There were some girls on the balcony, but...no....Well it made for some interesting dreams. Nothing happened, though.

After we got back to San Pedro Sula, we spent another week in Cofradia studying. We heard from immigrants (people who had been to or had tried to go to the U.S.), visited banana factories (one of Chiquita and one of Dole), and interviewed Catholic and Protestant church leaders about their role in social issues. We returned to Tegucigalpa last night, and it feels good to be “home,” and in a less hot and humid climate. We are more than halfway done with the semester, which feels strange, but we still have a long way to go. On Tuesday we are doing group presentations on one of the topics we’ve covered (mine is immigration), and then from Wednesday to Sunday we have our break for Holy Week. Yay for Catholic culture.