I am in Honduras!!!

So I am in Tocoa Honduras. It is a town of ten thousand plus about an hour south of the Caribbean Sea. I came here to teach English to youngsters, and will be doing just that through the middle of August. Woo!

Getting to Tocoa was a journey though. Back last Friday my friend Jake drove me to Minneapolis. I spent the evening packing and repacking all of my things, which included a backpack full of school supplies for my new classroom (pens, pencils, notebooks, textbooks, activitybooks, markers, a whiteboard, flashcards, etc etc etc).

At 3 AM Jake, Nelly (good friend and Jake´s fiance) and I left for the airport. We forgot which was the Airport was the international terminal (humphrey of lindbergh) and I was accidentally dropped off at humphrey (woops!) Finally, I got to the Lindbergh terminal where my Boss Anna saw me off.

So I went through the security check, nothing particularily new to me, and I FORGOT TO TAKE MY LAPTOP OUT OF MY BACKPACK! So I got held up by three guards who wouldn´t let me touch my stuff until they could verify I wasn´t a terrorist, or something. If it couldn´t get worse, they didn´t assign my flight a terminal until a half hour before departure!

Not such an auspicious start.

Things smoothed out after that. I flew into Houston by 8:30 and flew out an hour later. By 11 AM I had arrived in San Pedro Sula, Honduras´second largest city and their industrial capital. When I disembarked their was a team of workers screening passengers for the swine flu. I had to sign a statement saying I wasn´t sick, then they filmed me for a second so they could record who they checked. I waited outside of customs for like twenty minutes until Cindy, Anna´s in-law found me.

She drove me around San Pedro, a veritable circus of activity and a traffic nightmare at that. She showed me the cathedral, anbd then bought me lunch from SUPER CATRACHO fast food place (rice, yuca, chicken and tortilla). Then she drove me to the bus terminal, which seemd larger than the airport. Getting on the bus, I was told by Tony (relation of Cindy´s),
¨cuidado cuidado en el bus!!!¨Errrr................not such a good thing to hear...

I rode window seat on this old bus that didn´t have air conditioning. It wasw probably ninety degrees inside of their for the first three hours of the trip. Although it was intense, I pretty much stuck my head out the window for that entire time, even after it started raining, which was such a relief.The bus ride lasted from 1 until 7 PM, and we rode through La Ceiba, Sava, a bunch of little towns.

My socia Diany picked me up in the Tocoa bus station a little after seven and brought me to the Banegas compound, where I will be spending the next three months. I get my own room with a private bathroom, and even an air conditioner (threw that on right away).

I spent Sunday getting settled in. Orlin, Anna´s brother in law took me to a soccer game in Sava, about 20 minutes away, during the afternoon. With us went his friends Joel Caballero, and Jose (don´t know his last name). We ate at some Argentine parilla (grill) restaurant ($4 entree pf grilled beef, beens, fried maduro chips, ensalada and tortilla) then drove to te stadium. There was an armed guard protecting the parked cars. Tickets were 30 lempiras, which is like $1.50 or so. It seemed like a high school level game, and each team had their own hinchada (crowd) banging drums and blowing horns constantly. It started raining an both hinchadas crowded underneath the stand´s awning. Players kept getting injured from the wet field, but they finished after 90 minutes anyways in impate (tie).

Today is my first day of teaching classses. It starts at 6 and goes until 8. My nine students are elementary age, and I am keen to see how we will get along. I dont have any pictures up, and probably won´t until i find a faster computer. I am well, and hope you all are too.