I live on Calle Ocho

the Banegas family, my hosts here in Tocoa, are big fans of soccer. They love soccer so much that the founded their own club here in town. The club is called the Boca Juniors. If you're not familiar with international soccer, Boca Juniors is the biggest club in Argentina. It is the 8th most successful club this year. It was even the club where Soccer Idol Diego Maradonna spent the majority of his career.

This is funny because Boca is the arch-rival of my favorite Argentine club, River Plate. Once I told everyone I was of the Banda Roja (River) and not a Bostero (Boca), ha we exchanged the expected trash talk between teams. River has done fairly poorly this year though (#87 globally, I think). I still think it's cool that they are such huge fanaticos, though. They've gotten sponsors (like Orlin's friend don Vidal), and have their own barra (superfan group). Orlin wants me to help him write a letter to the original Boca Juniors in Buenos Aires so that the Tocoa Boca Juniors can get some international recognition. Maybe some sponsorship??? Even though its my archrival, I like this little club since they're the underdog and just getting started.

They are also for Real Madrid while I am a Barça fan.

Note: We are writing that letter tonight.

My classes have been going fairly well. I have 13 students in my evening class, all in the secondary school range. They all have fairly advanced English textbooks they use at school, but don't seem to be able to construct English sentences without help. The established purpose of this school was to assist with English conversation, so being able to form a sentence would seem to be pretty important.

We're just getting started with nouns and the simple present tense of verbs right now, along with some vocabulary practice. Last week my students made family trees, with key words like mother, father, brother, sister, etc. There is a strong sense of family in Honduras so I figured this would be a practical place to begin. Otherwise we have been reviewing numbers, the English alphabet, and basic phrases, which they seem to already have a basic grasp. I feel like everything is going well in class, and that these kids will make a lot of headway in the next 3 months.

By the way, I found out the street I'm living on is called CALLE OCHO. They called it this because there used to be a big nightlife on this street. Cantinas lined both sides of the street and it got to be pretty crazy. I guess a bunch of people got killed so the government shut it down like four years ago.

Red Card=MP5

Hey I haven't blogged in a week but I will tell you what I know...

Every morning for the last 2 weeks I have been waking up at 7 AM to a gratefully cool 82 degrees, and enjoy my coffee. By 9 AM we're back up to 89 degrees or so. I have an air conditioner in my apartment and am loathe to shut it off when I start my day. At 8 AM I teach a small group of 4 sisters. We play word games, practice vocabulary, and work on pronunciation in the morning. Their ages range from 7-12 years old. One of their favorite games to play is big karuta. I hide flashcards around the Banegas compound, shout them out in English (one at a time) and the girls have to sprint around the yard looking for the right word. This activity usually tires them out enough so that they will sit through a quick grammar lesson. Even so, they are fountains of energy and are ready to leave by 10 AM, when classes end.

After that I usually eat breakfast, tough it varies. Today for breakfast I ate an omlette, some kind of fried bean/chile, crumbly white farmer's cheese (not my favorite) and some sort of fried banana/maduro/platano/verde. I am a pitiful judge of what kind but I know its served at every meal! By 11 AM I amsettled down into one of the five hammocks hanging from varying mango trees on the Banegas Compound. I usually prepare my lesson for the night class at this time, though I usually nod off for a bit during the midday sun. There is a breeze right now, but at a price: the majority of the roads in Tocoa are dirt and as such blow a lot of dust into the air. Sweeping is a regular chore.

1 PM is usually lunch time. I don't know what we will be having but maybe I will blog about it tomorrow. Banana!

My associate/hostess Diani has a 4 year old son named David. He is a precocious and energetic little boy that made friends with me the night I got here. David calls me Elik. He likes to show me everything, like food, tables, hammocks, locks and explain how they work. He also likes to ask questions and He invited me to his birthday party. Which happened on the 28th of May, haha. The goodwill was there though.

For the last two Sundays I have been hanging out with my host brother Orlin. I go with him and his friends don Vidal and Joel Caballero to Sava to watch the Division 3 soccer playoffs. His club, The Boca Juniors, were knocked out a couple weeks ago so Orlin was there merely as a fanatico of fútbol. This last Sunday was the championship, between Juventud of Sava and Trujillo, a coastal city an hour north of Tocoa. After 90 minutes Sava was up 1-0 and gameplay became continually more agressive. In the end, a Trujillo player unsuccessfully tackled a Juventud player from behind. They started fighting and the Trujillo player got the red card. So the T. player charged the Ref and started roughing him up. 2 cops came onto the field to subdue this guy. One of them had a pistol and the other held back, brandishing an MP5, making sure the teams nor the fans started getting too rowdy. I have never seen automatic weapons on the soccer field, so of course I thought it was awesome/hardcore/ messed up.

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.

Molten Hot Magma!

I had little idea of what Lenay and I would be doing for our last weekend in Costa Rica, and for that matter, South America. There had been much speculation over the past week. Would we go to Lake Nicaragua with some Ticas Lenay had met? Victor and some students were planning a trip to Perez Zeledon as well. Even our expatriate friend Nicole was trying to get something going! What Lenay wanted was to speak our second language for our last few days. I was just about having a good time.

That friday night I had walked to the bus station in the pouring rain (don't worry I was wearing a poncho) to meet up with some friends at El Avión (A restaurant centered around a hollowed out B-17). I had left some clothes at a friends two weeks earlier and was trying to tie up all of my loose ends. I ran in to my friends Seth and Ashley, who were coincidentally about to hop on the 8 o'clock Manuel Antonio bus. Offhandedly I mentioned making a road trip to them, without any real expectations. 'Think about it,' I said, and left it at that.

8 Am the next morning I am walking to Lenay's house to make sure she is almost packed. She lives only two blocks away so the walk was short. Nearing here house, I notice she is getting into a sedan with some gringos. 'Lenay! Lenay! A donde vas???' Everone in the car turns toward me and I realize: Seth, Ashley, and Jared (Lenay's roomie) were coming to pick me up. We were roadtripping across Costa Rica to Arenal, an active volcano famed for its near perfect cone.

Saying goodbye to my host parents, we left. Retracing our footsteps back to Jacó, we even stopped at the bar Lenay and I nearly spent a rainy night at! An hour later we were enjoying TCBY ice cream (pistacchio anyone?) and spying a couple of tourist shops. Leaving Jacó, a police officer directed us away from the exit back into town. Confused, we kept driving until we returned to the town's main drag. There was a parade!!! I saw traditionally dressed dancers, stilt walkers, clowns, drum lines, bands, and seven foot tall masqueraders! It was completely out of control and all of us were so excited to see this surprise. Coincidentally this was the opening event for Jacó's cultural week. Talk about seeing out of the ordinary!

Continuing down the road, we spent the next several hours navigating based on the national map Seth had gotten from the rental place. We crossed a river-spanning bridge that was infested with crocodiles below. A small herd of cattle approached the river to slake a ninety degree thirst, so I began praying to see that Discovery channel-worthy kill, demonstrating the power between the jaws of these fearsome reptiles. It never happened, so we moved on, climbing into the mountains.

The next four hours of muddling through the roads of this country were marked by several features. We stopped (several times) to back track and ask for directions. In the town of Palmeras we stopped at an ancient looking cathedral to calm ourselves (and to gape in awe). The road quality varied between a fully paved asphalt highway and twenty degree grade, gravel nightmare that would have been better suited to Travis Pastrana. Call it 'Tour Arenal.' We stopped at a CR fast food joint, watched a little spanish Jack Sparrow, and by five o'clock were driving beneath the shadow of a towering volcano.

By this time of day Arenal was shrouded in fog and rain had begun to fall. We found some D'Amore friends at Baldi, a classy resort with twenty some volcanic baths and six dollar beers (ugh!). We found their hotel, checked into the presidential sweet (reduced price, thanks to yours truly, and the power of spanish). It was a three bed number, complete with sectional, tv, fridge, jacuzzi, and a killer view of the volcano. Social hour began when the other group came back. The mood was jovial, as this would be the last hurrah for many of us. Unfortunately the electricity went out (as it often does in this country). Undaunted, the twenty of us lit candles and continued festivities until past midnight.

At 12 AM we were driven to the base of the volcano. Itwas an 8 kilometer drive through some of the bumpiest road that I have been on to date. After following a short pathway through the jungle we came upon a thirty foot wide suspension bridge. There we stopped, dead in our tracks. Arenal was spewing out lava from the cone, and four hours we watched. This experience was absolutely stunning. When in my life have I, or for that matter will I see lava erupting from an active volcano? It would pour down the slope in a matter of seconds, only to be replaced seconds later by the next wave. I couldn't believe it. I was seeing some serious 'Land Before Time' shit and simply could not believe the communion we were sharing with the planet in this very moment. There are moments in life when a human being feels intimately connected with the planet. I am unsure if this will be topped. It was as if I was bearing witness to the fury emerging from the iron and nickel core of the planet, some hundreds of miles within the Earth. I went home humbled, unable to sort out what I had seen.

The next morning we left for a national park in the area. Fully rested (though keeping everyone awake with my cacophonous snoring) we followed our friends to a waterfall on the otherside of Arenal. While Lenay and Jared set off on a two hour hike to explore a massive caldera, Seth, Ashley and I took the easy 15 minute hike down 400+ steps to a freshwater pool. From the bottom we saw the 80 foot faucet pouring down into a fourty foot wide pool. When I jumped in my body was shocked by the Superior-like coldness of the mountain stream. Seth and I swam to a cavern on the other side, and after being whistled back by the park guards we set off further down stream. Nearby I spent damn near close to an hour trying to catch fish out of the shallows. There was a school of hundreds, so Seth and I were sprinkling crackers and trying to scoop these little guys onto shore with our bare hands. It was fun, but we are no jungle natives.

At the end of the day we met back up with the rest of our party at the Arenal Observatory lodge. This is normally a precious viewpoint of the volcano, but fog had moved into the area and the daily rain had begun once again. Nevertheless, we were satisfied with what we had alreay witnessed, and drove home exhausted, getting back to Manuel Antonio after midnight.

Thanks for the PB and J's Ashley!

Jungle Shenanigans

When we visited the park, I decided to make some videos. While it's a chance for you guys to see my mug, they're stupid.

So Enjoy