UNA and £L$

Okay so Una was going to come out to visit me, but it wasn’t definite, so we ended up finding out about her coming like 3 days before she actually did.

I told Mercedes I would have to leave school on the Thursday night so I could be in San Pedro to collect Una from the airport on Friday lunchtime.

I headed to Gracias after school on the Thursday, and went to Nena’s house again, as she’s beside the bus stop. She mentioned something about a friend of hers driving to San Pedro at 5 the following morning, so she said we could go together, she was going to go too.

We woke up, crossed the road by her house and hopped in the car and drove for an hour or so, then we stopped at a little diner place. I had egg and fricolitos (beans), then melon, pineapple and watermelon, and a cup of avena (my favourite, milk and oats and sugar, kinda like thin porridge) and then we were back on the road, and we arrived in the centre of San Pedro at 8.30am! that was amazing... on the bus with only passenger stops, I wouldn’t have arrived until about 11am! So that was a major relief...but what was I going to do with myself alone in the big city for 4 hours?

I called Jorge, the family friend who has a taxi, and he picked me up and I asked him to take me to city mall, and collect me again there at about 11am...

So there I was, standing outside city mall at 8.45am, waiting for the doors to open at 9. The shops then opened at 10, so I decided to walk around the whole mall deciding what shops to go into when they opened an hour later :)

I went to a kinda homeware store called Lady Lee’s where I bought a glass candle smelling of cherries for my room, to make it smell a little different from Honduras. I still remember coming off the plane and thinking ew...the general smell was pretty musty, and immune though I am to it now, I still want to freshen up my room thank you very much. I also bought a little orange smelling candle for Emma :)

I didn’t want to waste my money, so I just kept wandering, and I spotted a mannequin in a shop window wearing a pair of multicoloured pants, and I was just immediately drawn to them, impulse buying style... so I went into the shop and asked the woman how much they were and if they had my size (XXL) ...but they only had a XS, a S, and the model was wearing M ... so I thought why not, use it as inspiration! I really liked these pants, so I bought the M, and have set myself the target of fitting my fat ass into them by the time I come home. I tried them on when I got home and heard a few thread stretching noises and immediately threw them off as a lost cause though, just going to have to keep ploughing on with the diet in the hope my butt shrinks enough to put them on! (Brief insight into the working of Jen’s mind...)

Jorge then picked me up and drove me to the airport, where I waited for an hour or so for Una’s possible arrival. It wasn’t for certain she would arrive, it all depended on whether she could get the connecting flight from Houston on the Friday morning.

So I was standing at the gate, waiting for the Houston passengers to arrive, and I had a kind of flashforward...of standing at the gate waiting for Kevin to arrive (one of my best friends is coming out in couple of weeks for two months, but I’ll tell more about that later on), and then for my family arriving in June...it was surreal, and I was totally excited and I could picture their anxious faces as they scanned the crowd to see me waiting for them... and all of a sudden a red head was bobbing around in the crowd, I could see the person mouthing the words ‘where is Jennifer, where is Jennifer...?’ and then Una saw me, and I saw her, and she walked around the barricade and we hugged, tears in my eyes...

:)

So after our meeting, we headed to the car rental places and bargained with them most efficiently to get a car for Una’s trip...they tried to diddle us on several occasions, but we were both too quick for them ;) I remember after checking the entire car to make sure there were no mishaps they didn’t write down, and we drove around the car park once, for me to point at the dashboard and say ‘why is the petrol tank only 2/3 full?!’ and I ran across the car park to grab the guy who vetted the car, because he wrote that the tank was one notch away from being full, and I was like naw change it, so he changed it on our sheet and went to walk away and I was like aaaye right, nice try, fix it on the original sheet too mate, and so we walked in and I stood over them while they changed it, and then came back to the car...Una said she wouldn’t even have thought about fixing the original, so I felt quite chuffed with my achievement for the day :)

So we drove out of the airport, and headed to Baleada Express, where I got 2 baleadas stuffed with stuff, and Una had a taste but she wasn’t hungry so she never experienced the true baleada culture of Honduras! :(

Then we drove around the city a little more, and we spotted a wholesale fruit market, where we bought 30 oranges and 14 bananas and 2 melons, that place was amazing but it smelt pretty awful... the banana woman tried to diddle us as well, I was watching her counting the bananas and just skipping a number, she was trying to give us 11 instead of 14 and I was like ‘NAW’ and she was giving it all ‘oh im sorry, pardon, pardon...’ and I was like damn straight.

We then drove around the city more, because I wasn’t entirely sure how to get out of it and back on the road to Gracias, as there are about 4 really crap road signs in the entire city... so we called Jorge who came and drove in front of us, out of the city :)

I spent the entire journey having a heart attack over the number of potholes that Una would have missed if I hadn’t pointed them out, much as she didn’t like it and claimed she noticed them all... so i just sat back and didn’t look out the car and the number of potholes we nearly lost a tyre in was ridiculous... but we eventually arrived in Gracias, after dark, and we checked into Guancascos.

Our room was up at the top of the hill that the hotel is on, so we had a classic view over the whole of the town, it was beautiful. There was a hammock outside our room too, which was relaxing!

We just went to sleep that evening, we were both really tired, I’d been up since 4.45am!

The following day, we just hung out around Guancascos and Gracias, Holly, Lena and Emma came over in the evening to hang out with us...we went to the Chinese restaurant, then back to the house. We had Smirnoff vodka and orange juice and coke, and I bought a bottle of Flor de Cana, so we were pretty well sorted for the night :) we talked about PT farces, and the like, Una didn’t like how we work in a private establishment... we talked about that for ages, then Lena and I went out to cafe Kandil for a little while, where we met Liam and the other Americans... we ended up staying there for a bit, then we walked to another open air bar called Bohio, which unfortunately was closed, so we trekked back, but the Guancascos was closed, so I had to sneak into Holly and Lena’s for the night!

The next day, we spent out and about in Gracias, and decided to head back to San Juan in the evening. The journey went so fast in the car, much better than the bus! Emma had a bout of that horrible sickness thing I had before, the acid thing...so she wasn’t feeling too good, but we got back to San Juan in one piece. That night, we had a couple of pupusas, tortillas with some cheese in the middle, but Una didn’t really want to eat them, she thought she’d rather wait for dinner... little did she know that tortillas ARE dinner! So she was kinda confused about that, didn’t like the lack of nutrition (I agree...) but before dinner we sat and had an aperitif which was lovely, some red wine and banana chips (tajaditas) in my room in secret which was nice!

The next morning we all had to get up super early for school, I left with Emma to get on with the day, Una popped along for a little while and took a couple of photos of us, then about lunchtime she, Mercedes and Sergio all drove back to San Pedro so that Una could make it in time for her flight the following day, and that was the end of Una’s trip!

Because my charger had broken, I gave Mercedes my visa card to lift money and buy me a new one in the city (I know what you’re all thinking, and in a sense, YOU’RE ALL RIGHT). I knew I had enough money in my account to take care of one charger, but not that much more. Mercedes called me the following day to say she’d found one, but it wasn’t the right one and she was going to get the right one, I was like okay... go for it.

The next day she come back to tell me she’d emptied my account in order to get the second one...i was like ‘but why didn’t you just return the first one and use that money?’ and she just sort of shrugged it off as she always does when she doesn’t know what to say...

So I thought okay, I’ll just wait til she can get the money for the first one back to me.

A few weeks later I was in Gracias, and mum called me to say that I was OVERDRAWN AND HAD BEEN FOR A WHILE...and had fines of about £80... so that was a complete DOWNER, and I was so stressed by it.

I came back and told Mercedes what had happened and would she perhaps reimburse me at all for it...and she was like ‘no I didn’t know that would happen, you didn’t tell me how much you had in your account, so I just took it all out and didn’t know you would get charged’ and I was like ‘but I knew I had enough for one charger, why would I expect you to take it all out, surely common sense would have been to return the first one and use the money from that?!’ and she was not in the mood for that argument and was just like ‘I am not paying you any money, it was your fault and I will never do you another favour again’ and now I am completely hated in the house by her family for even bringing it up, she obviously translated it to her family in a way that made me out to be the bad guy...so that’s a bit of a shit situation at the moment.

The one thing that really really annoyed me about it, was when I told her it was around £80, she put that in the calculator and said ‘so that comes to about 2,400 Lempiras...the cost of your charger. Is that what you want from me? You want me to buy your charger for you?’ and I literally saw red and had to stop myself from throwing something. I was sooooooo angry, I hadn’t felt that frustrated in 5 months... but I just walked away. I said ‘that never entered my head and it is just a coincidence it comes to that amount, I’m sorry you think that of me’ and just left.

So that really hurt.

But for now, I’m sitting in Gracias in the sun, drinking a cup of homemade lemonade, letting time pass and the stress float into the air...

You sometimes have to deal with things that you really don’t want to, that you wish had never happened, but it all makes you stronger in the end. That’s a learning process that will last your whole life, but at least I’m taking the steps to learn it now :)

Will update you again soon... Kevin comes out in a week for 2 months. I really cannot wait...lots of good things are happening soon, but I’ll tell you those plans next time!

Love, Jen xxx