YEEEhaa!

Hey!
About time i wrote another one...
Well school is still really fun...though lessons have ended now. We’re in the middle of planning and rehearsing for the Christmas show, this coming Saturday! The kids are going to do some dances and sing English speaking songs...like Jingle Bells and We Wish You A Merry Christmas... and Barbie Girl – Aqua and The Way You Make Me Feel – Michael Jackson! Haha its funny, the girls are doing Barbie Girl, and they’re strutting their stuff so brilliantly, I’m so proud of them! The boys are doing the MJ song, and i’ve been trying to teach them how to moonwalk, though they’re not really getting it. And yes, i CAN actually moonwalk, and it’s not because they have a crap teacher, thank you very much. So we’ve been singing a bunch of Christmas songs, we’ve been teaching them the words in English and i swear... i have never heard a group of more TONE DEAF people in my LIFE! They are absolutely horrendous. As a nation, Honduras is pretty tuneless it has to be said... It’s soul destroying! I love music, and i love singing, and for all these kids to be so utterly CRAP at singing is painful to more than just my ears. It’s hilarious, i tried getting them to sing a scale, i started them all off on a starting note, and not one of them could hit any correct notes...it’s a lost cause, but it’ll be fun to watch on Saturday. I’m going to try and film what i can of it, but i don’t have any camera battery life left, i’ll see if i can use Emma’s to film it...
Into the bargain... i have been teaching them the Gay Gordons! I’ve got some Scottish music (thanks Stephen) and i’ve been teaching them how to dance, i am SO EXCITED and i have to film that...you should see them. They’re fantastic! In their little pairs (the girls are all bigger than their partners of course ahah...) and they got the hold correct, they know how to twirl their partners, and our major achievement of today was that they learned how to polka! Emma is my partner (she’s the man, i know technically i should be the guy cos i’m taller, but Emma didn’t know how to dance either part, so she picked up the man’s part pretty quickly haha) and i taught her how to polka all the way around the campo (a pitch near the school that we’ve been using to teach them how to dance). Eventually we got the kids to follow suit, twirling their partners beautifully like little twirling pairs, all over the field :)
We then sat down on the stands, and put one couple on the pitch and we watched them dance the full Gay Gordons with no help, and then i corrected their mistakes. The wee boys just loved dancing with Miss Jennifer because she knows what she’s doing haha! Okay i’m joking, they were bright red all the way through it, just like the boys in my year when they had to dance with the teacher :P
It’s going really well though, they picked it up really well, and some of those girls are naturals! Punta is the style of dancing specific to Honduras, and that involves a lot of hip waving and bum shaking, so the girls are all pretty good at that, as they’ve been showing off during the Barbie Girl rehearsal. I’m so proud of them!
We’ve been to Gracias every weekend since my last blog – it’s keeping us sane, and i managed to send off some letters, so you’ll get them soon (it cost me A LOT OF MONEY so my apologies if you didn’t get one, but please write to me and i will write back). We are supposed to be paid 1500 Lemps a month (equivalent to about £70) but we haven’t seen it yet, but when i get my allowance that’s going towards sending letters out to people :) but please write! The address is 2 blogs previous to this.
Gracias is so good, we stay with Holly, and every morning we have yoghurt and alpen and fresh fruit and it is just AMAZING. So refreshing and healthy. Yolanda still loves hanging out with us, she’s so sweet, but she can be SO annoying sometimes. She reminds me of me, making a racket and dropping things. I’ve had some kind of homemade ice lolly called paletta... those little white plastic cups are filled with fruit juice and bits of fruit, or they are filled with milk and cereal, or any flavour that takes the cook’s fancy!... my favourite paletta is milk with fruit loops haha..that multi-coloured cereal. Its pretty yummy!
We were sitting munching these ice lollies in Guancascos, the hotel in Gracias with the free internet ;) when 2 American travellers popped in and sat with us, chatting to Holly and Emma. The girls had gone up to a fort near the hotel previously, but i had to stay behind and do my washing so i didn’t go, but while they were there, they bumped into these 2 guys and had casual chit-chat about Central America and so on... so the guys sat with us (they were hilarious... camp as a royal tent!) and started telling us a story of what happened when they went back to Gracias. They decided to go to a barber shop in town, and ended up chatting away to some Honduran local for a good 20 minutes, when all of a sudden that guy just jumped on a passing bloke and started battering him with his pistol! Meanwhile the 2 guys bolted into the supermarket next door to take refuge. They heard gun shots, but apparently he was only shooting at the ground (no bloodshed thank goodness). Then the police came and took the weird bloke away. We’re warned ‘don’t go out in the big city late at night’ when really the safety advice should be more along the lines of ‘don’t go out in the day to the barber shop in a small town.’ Haha...
We returned from Gracias for another school week, before our rehearsals for this Saturday’s show. The bus we get back is literally a people carrier...and from time to time, they can get VERY FULL. It was packed, and everyone was literally sitting on one another. There were a good 25 people in the teeny wee van, it was no wonder my knees were under my chin!
We headed to the campo for football (Mercedes had gone to La Esperanza, a town nearby so we were all alone) and it was awesome. Jorge (sounds like Horhay) is amazing at football and was showing off his skills, meawhile the girls were heading off in pairs to sit on the stands, because they didn’t like playing (who could blame them, it’s a hooligans’ game!) There is a water pump at the corner of the field and the boys headed over and started having a water-fight which was definitely a challenge to calm down!
While we were there, there were 2 mini-caravanas...but the peope were all so SOLEMN looking, they didn’t have anything to celebrate...and Jordy turned to me and told me in French that 2 people had died, and this was the funeral. I was shocked! I asked Mercedes about Honduran funerals, and they are basically an excuse to drink and eat in excess apparently! Pretty much like home then eh? Kidding on, but the people do literally get completely out of their box here, the cafe was FULL of people who were so so drunk...as Mercedes said ‘if you want fed, go to a funeral!’
There is a a wee dog that lives at the hotel where we STILL live... and when i first moved in, he was proper terrified of humans, like he just bolted away as soon as i went near, but gradually he started coming closer until i could stroke him. He now bounds towards me every time i go into the hotel! The first time he did that, he had his gums pulled back over his teeth, and i was absolutely terrified, though no growl came out. I just ignored him, he could have taken my hand off! But every day he did this, and i stopped ignoring him and he just wagged his tail all around the place and i realised he was SMILING! He now just loves me to bits, and walks the 15 minute walk to the cafe with us, sits outside for 45 mins while we eat, and then walks all the way back with us in the night, protecting us all the way up the road :) he came to school with me a few times (cos i couldn’t stop him, he’s out the hotel faster than we are!) but Mercedes didn’t like it. i’ve named him Homey... like ‘ma homey’ as in a friend. I suppose somewhere inside i was thinking about ‘home’ when i named him, seeing as he is from the hotel, and that pretty much is our home. Come tomorrow, we’ll have been there for a month :|
We’re supposed to move into the house hopefully before the end of this week (we’re going travelling so we don’t want to leave our stuff in the hotel over Christmas and New Year). I am so looking forward to it, though i don’t have my hopes up, we were only meant to be in the hotel for a week or ten days, and we’ve been ‘moving into the new house’ for the past 3 weeks, according to Mercedes. I’ve learned the need to see something to believe it here...
We’re going to Roatan this Sunday, to spend Christmas there :) i think we’re going to the port – La Ceiba, on the mainland to spend new year, its seeming the party city. We’re going to stay with Ian, one of the volunteers from PT, he’s from Scotland, his partner is currently in England, and will be back on the 22nd. YES HIS PARTNER CAME HOME blooming heck! I don’t know if i’m jealous... i don’t want to come home just yet... this experience is too precious to leave right now, and i would have a hard time leaving the kids even now! Anyway, we’re going to Roatan to hang out with Ian for a few days cos CaseyAdam are away travelling to renew their visas... they wont be back til the 23rd, so we’re going to hang out with them then. All of the Honduran PT vols are going to Roatan for Christmas, so it will be nice to hang out with everyone during the holiday period! Better than spending it alone away from home anyway, 2 people isn’t really much of a party it has to be said haha.
On the bus to Gracias on the Friday there, i had a pretty fun journey, there was a wee boy sitting in the row infront of me, and he was adorable, he had big black curls in his hair, and huge brown eyes as per usual here, and he was so sweet. He was playing with my hairband, putting it in his hair and calling it a corona (crown) and giving me high fives and fist punches! It was so cute :)
That evening, we went out to Cafe Kandil, a wee bar type place, with such a cool atmosphere! It was mainly gringos there, but there were a few locals. They played loads of English music...KINGS OF LEON and TRAVIS were involved too! It was so much fun, and we played uno (the card game?) for ages, and Holly kept winning. I never won :(
One of the American teachers, Natalia was there (she’s kind of our Gracias friend...she’s dead nice. i bumped into some gringas on the bus one time and just got the balls to say hi...turns out she lived in Gracias and when we went to Kandil the first time she recognised me and we’re pretty much friends now!) and she told us about another bar type place called Bohilo where they were playing live meringue music. We decided to take a look...BAD MOVE. It was full of horrendous drunk Honduran men, and as soon as we walked in (it was literally a shack, no doors no nothing, more like a kinda outdoor tent thing) a man shoved so hard past me, and went straight to the bar and grabbed the barman by the collar of his clothes and started screaming in Spanish at him... it was bad. We retreated into a corner, and then basically RAN from the place as fast as we could. Natalia got a mouthful for that i can tell you! She forgot to mention the part where you go at around 7-8pm...not 1am...LEARNING CURVE MUCH!?
We were going to go to San Pedro on Saturday to see New Moon in the cinema, but Natalia has mentioned that you can buy it off the street in Gracias for L35... and i was TOTALLY up for that, instead of wasting a mass amount of money going to the city. So we bought that and it was a WRECK. A lot of people were going to the toilet, it was dubbed in Spanish, and there were NO subtitles hahaha... could it have gotten much worse?! Luckily i knew exactly what was going on (cos i’m obsessed of course) so i was telling Emma (who had also read the books...not quite as avidly as me) and Holly (who understood everything that was said because she speaks very good Spanish) exactly what was going on... i enjoyed it despite the quality drawbacks! SOMEONE SEND ME NEW MOON ON DVD AS SOON AS IT COMES OUT PLEASE. I still prefer Edward by the way, none of that crap about Jacob being the new fav...PUHLEASE.
But that was an enjoyable Sunday night...Saturday was spent sunbathing in the extreme heat on the driveway of Holly’s home... it was awesome heat (my back was burned but hey it’s gone brown now) and Holly and I helped wash the dog...with clothing soap :| we felt so bad about it so we conditioned him afterwards hahah! And we used the hose to soak each other cos it was proper boiling. Initially we were somewhat concerned this would be ‘socially insensitive’ but the family joined in and were having a great time too! So we didn’t feel so bad...
We headed up to the carnival part way up the mountain that evening. There were LOADS of stalls, people selling perfume/beauty products, toys, authentic bracelets and bags, flip flops, sweets, food, jewellery...all sorts. I bought a pair of really attractive elastic flip-flops which i love, but that was all. I’m becoming VERY money conscious i should let you all know. I will return to Glasgow stingier than i left!
There was a ferris wheel, a magic carpet, and some kids rides. I wouldn’t have minded going on the wheel, but this is Honduras...it would very probably have fallen apart the time I went on it... so i avoided that at all costs. There was supposed to be a dance type thing, but we heard that they locked the doors once you were inside, and didn’t let people out til 5am! We had a look and it was bogging, so we ran back out before they could lock us in!
Sunday, we spent at a rodeo! It was a tiny circular stand made of wooden planks which were a HORRENDOUS health and safety hazard. I could have fallen straight through the gaps and that is NO exaggeration. My camera has run out of battery cos i have no charger, so Emma is the photographer – she got a lot of awesome pictures (check facebook over the next few weeks). No one was mauled, unfortunately, and they all rode bulls, not horses, but a few horses were being shown off by old experienced riders., the horses were hopping, dancing, side stepping, walking backwards, bowing, and LYING DOWN one man actually stood on the horse’s side as it was lying down in celebration of ‘man over beast’. I was just waiting for the horse to get annoyed..i would have been on the horses side! It was really fun though a great experience, as i can’t remember the one we went to in Dakota all that well...
We headed to the Chinese again (as per) and it was good, but there were 3 drunk guys...one of which was MINGING and hung over my left shoulder talking to us, asking for our numbers on repeat for 5 minutes, not accepting no for an answer. Holly put a fake mobile number in his phone and as he turned to walk away he planted a kiss right on my shoulder. I just focussed on not vomiting into my plate, Emma and Holly thought i should have slapped him but that was worth too much hassle. He left eventually, and i washed my shoulder repeatedly with antiseptic. I didn’t catch anything thank goodness hahaha...
So that was our experience! That evening was spent with the terrible version of New Moon, and we headed back to San Juan this morning, with the whole family. Andrea, Ernesto, and Scarleth have returned from San Pedro, and came back with us this morning to San Juan, so it’s nice to have more people around again...might spur Mercedes to move us all into the new house?!
WISHFUL THINKING.
Will keep you informed as things progress...hope all’s well!
Love, Jen xxx