Mc Mariachis

We love these guys.  We've driven by these well-dressed gentlemen countless times on Bulevar Morazan as they wait for a gig.  I assume that they are hoping to get hired to play a party rather than serenade the patrons at Mc Donalds.    Anyway, we passed by one weekend night and we had a camera in the car.  We stopped, chatted them up, and asked to take a picture.  They obliged and we gave them a tip for their time.

No Menorah? No Problem!

Finding Chanukah candles in Tegucigalpa is a bit of a challenge.  Especially when we didn't start looking until the days of light were literally upon us.  Unable to find the right size candles, we simply made our own modern version of a menorah and gathered up the appropriate number of candles, lined them up, used the tallest one for the shamash, and voila!  

Our Menorah.

Trick or Treat - Tegucigalpa Style

Some of our Embassy friends were orchestrating a Halloween parade and party.  This also included a well planned walk through our neighborhood to go trick or treating.  About 50 kids plus their parents showed up for the hike through the hills in our part of the city.

Making our way up a big hill.  The group started to spread out at this point... older kids running to the next house and the stroller brigade bringing up the rear.

The cowgirl getting some candy from Dorothy.

Ninja and Cowgirl

Up another big hill.

After a short while, cowgirl took off her boots and went back to the sneakers.  We walked for about an hour, looping through our neighborhood to different houses where embassy people were expecting trick or treaters.

And at the end of the night, you gotta dump the candy bag to see what you've got.  Sort the candy, count it and trade.  Good stuff - Twix, Reese's, Snickers, Sweet Tarts, m & m's and Starburst!

Extension Cord

We needed an extension cord, and this is what we were able to borrow.  It worked fine and did the job.

But, does any part of this look sketchy to you?

  

(to be fair, there are real extension cords available here)

Gardening in the Capital

When we first saw our apartment, we were giddy over the gigantic back yard.  Despite the steep slope because we are on a hill, we thought of the playing possibilities for the kids.  You also have to use your imagination here and picture this field with a lot of tall grass... the kind you could flatten to make paths from one kid-lair to another.  The kind of tall grass that made the field seem 10 times larger than it really was because when you would lay on your belly, you would only see grass, not the unsightly cinder-block wall.  

Well, as it turned out, this was not our back yard, but simply an empty lot next door.  Over the year, we watched the grass grow taller, a tree would take root here or there, and throughout the dry "rainy" season that we had last year, it changed from green to yellow to brown.

Until last spring, just before the rains came back.  Manuel, a man who is the care-taker for a home across the street,  spent several days cutting the grass and preparing the slope for his garden.  Then he planted the empty lot full of corn.  He also planted the empty lot next to his house.  He planted every vacant dirt patch near the house that he could find with corn, beans and squash.

These are the guards helping out by weeding the corn one morning before work.

Now the vegetables of his labors are coming to fruit.  This is not just happening around us in our colonia, but all over the city.   Squash plants are sending out their little, yellow trumpets which are playing second fiddle only to the Paul Bunyan sized corn plants.  Hundreds of thousands of capitolinos are getting by, nutritionally, with their jigsaw gardens strategically placed around their homes and places of work.  It makes me miss my garden boxes in our old sweet, little yard in town.  I'll just have to make do these days with the rosemary, basil and some other mystery herb growing on our balcony.

Bottle vs. Can

During our first year here, we muddled through the different Honduran beers... Salva Vida, Barena, Port Royal, and Imperial.  After a short stint preferring Salva Vida, we switched to Imperial.  Every once in a while, we'll find Stella Artois, but that has happened only twice.  When we saw the Stella, we should have bought them all.  *sigh*

Since we returned to Tegucigalpa at the end of July, we have been hard pressed to find Imperial in a bottle.  We've asked Colin and Elisa if they've seen it in bottles and they are just as perplexed.  So we've been buying the cans, but not enjoying the experience of drinking it as much.  Just look at the condensation forming on the amber bottle.  It looks so much tastier than the can.  The can is squatty and bland.

We found Imperial in a bottle today, but there were only a few.  We bought them, but we are still left wondering why the bottle shortage??

Mercado de Mayoreo

We headed downtown this morning to buy fresh veggies and fruit at the open air market, Mercado de Mayoreo.  Our maid has been bemoaning the less-than-fresh produce that's available to us at La Colonia, the market where we do most of our shopping.

We drove toward the National Stadium and parked across from the main entrance of the market.  Today we found sweet potatoes, cucumbers, broccoli, tasty tortillas, onions, beets, avocado, and pineapple.  There was, of course, so much more.  Last week, I bought fruit (can't remember the name at the moment)  that looked like a greenish-yellow pinecone.  I cut it open at home and it had pale colored insides with big black seeds.  I spooned out the flesh.  There weren't any other takers in the household to try the mystery fruit.  Needless to say, we didn't buy another one today.

Last week, I bought some delicious caramels from a lady who was walking around the market, selling them out of her bag.  They look like kitty turds wrapped in cellophane, but they were so rich and delicious that we couldn't wait to find her again today.

You guessed it, no caramel lady today.

These have to be the tastiest tortillas in Tegucigalpa!  10 lempiras for a bag of 16 tortillas (50 cents)!

Mopas... Escobas... Limpiadores

This morning we awoke to the sounds of many birds, a neighbor singing,  mufflerless motorcycles, faraway construction, and the door-to-door sing-song announcement of the man selling cleaning supplies.

It's good to be back in Honduras!

Chiminike!

I still don't know what the word means, but when we went there, we sure had fun!  We had heard that the museum was fun and modern, but we were amazed by how great it was!  We knew about Chiminike long before we moved here.  The superintendent who interviewed us used it (I think) as a selling point to get us to move here with our kids.  "Tegucigalpa even has a children's museum!" she said enthusiastically.

So why has it taken us almost 10 months to go there?!  I don't know. They had tractors we could drive, a tv studio where Linnea gave her first newscast, a children's grocery story that had everything from sushi to batteries to Big Sexy shampoo.  We played with a wind machine, got sneezed out by a giant nose, played in a trippy light/projection room where our psychedelic image was projected on a wall, operated on a person, "Operation!" style where the buzzer sounds if your forceps hit the edge of the person.  We played in the water room where we could divert the water and cause floods on a seaside town, we created energy by peddling a bike.  We even went in "La Casita de Equilibrio".  The view was not quite as dazzling as the Discovery Museum in Sausalito with the GG bridge and the San Francisco skyline in the background.  But the view was pretty good!  We had a great time.

Obligatory Smoke Post

Well, if you are a blogger in Honduras eventually you will write about the smoke.  We figured that we would be the type to always frame the challenges of living in a developing country in the most positive way possible.  It is always better to be positive right?  Well... you would not believe the smoke!  It pretty much sucks! How's that for positive?  Truth be told the fires are very beautiful at night.  Actually it is not that bad, you learn to deal with things that might have seemed out there but when you are faced with it... it's not really that much of a big deal.  We are happy, we have electricity, water, we are all healthy and tomorrow we all drive out of the smoke to the beach because we are on VACATION!!!

Obligatory before and after pictures:
It is hard to see the smoke but as a blogger in Honduras it is our duty...

Before:

After:

Things We Love About Honduras

We are loving some things about living here.  Some of them we have just discovered.  Some of them are things that we have noticed all along, but we are just beginning to appreciate them.

This is the feel good.  Our grocery bags are 100% biodegradable.  If you've seen all the plastic garbage bags that are a normal part of the "ecosystem" here, you would know why this is so exciting.

Last night we went to a Jazz Festival.  Great music at a great outdoor venue.  We sure do miss seeing/hearing live music!  Gotta love it, it only cost $3 to get in!

Caramel made with goat's milk.  Mmmmmm... super tasty in my latte.

Monkey Licker (pretty much goes without saying why we like this!)

A herd of horses (there were about 6 or 7 of them) on the side of the road.

It's hard to see these little beautiful flowers because they're covered in dust.  This is at the side entrance of another bilingual school just outside the city.  We've seen this climbing vine growing in Sebastopol, and now we've spotted it here, decorating the chain link and concertina wire.  Gotta love the contrasts of nature and security.

We saved the best for last.  The thing we love most about living on Honduras is that our kids have discovered that their greatest playmate is each other.  They can play and play for hours making forts, playing with Legos and Playmobiles, Dempsey reads to Linnea, drawing and painting.  Yes, there is of course, fighting.  But that's all a part of being siblings, right?

Kid Update

A lot of times, our blogs are about places we've traveled to and the fabulous pictures that go with them.  These are designed to make you feel envious of our rock n roll lifestyle where we jet set all over Central America, frolicking in the waves of pristine beaches, hiking around breathtaking lakes and waterfalls, and coming eye to eye with some amazing animals.


Well, the reality is that we are working stiffs, just like you.  The only difference is that we are doing it in a different country.  Entirely.  So, this post is not to bore you with the ins and outs of our jobs, but to let you know what's going on with our cherubs. 

For a couple of months now, Linnea has taken much pride in making numbers with her body.  Here is a 4.  She can also masterfully create a 1, 2, 3 (this is tricky), 4, 7, and 8.  They have been making numbers with their bodies in pre-K and she thinks this is quite swell. 


She is learning about careers and was visited by a doctor and nurse (both women!) last week.  She informed me that one of them made medicine (are they bringing in a pharmaceutical scientists to pre-K?) and the other one took care of sick people.  Now she wants to be a vet.  "Oh, you want to veterinarian and take care of sick animals?" I ask her.  "No, I want to be a vet," she tells me. 


She is learning about the letter "Ss" this week and she took her Sylvia doll to show-and-tell today.  This is also number 11's big week!


I had to cut and paste this from her class blog, because it's kind of funny, but also really nice:


Virtue of the month: Tolerance. Our goal is:  "I will show my love by caring for others."


Now to Dempsey.  These are his spelling words for the week:  find, night, right, ever, head, should, shout, toad, from, and hike.  Since about October or November, Dempsey has been getting 100% correct on his spelling tests.  Today, his homework was to read a story out of his basal reader.  Remember that from when you were a kid?  A basal is a collection of leveled stories that you read.  I remember them being pretty boring.  

Well, today he was so excited because the story was from the Frog and Toad series by Arnold Lobel.  It was the story where Toad made a kite, but it wouldn't fly.  He excitedly came home and shared that he got to read a Frog and Toad story for homework.  He read it to his sister.  So sweet.  


In math, he's learning how to count by 2's, 5's and 10's.  


He made a ceramic bowl in art class last week.  This is a school-wide fundraiser  where each student and teacher makes a bowl.  The bowls will be sold for 100 lempira each on March 18 to raise money for a day care center here in the city that provides free care for children whose mothers have to work, but can't afford child care.  The money raised will provide breakfast and lunch for the children of the day care for almost a year.  Linnea and I made bowls, too.


Today was picture day.

Dempsey is the "Person of the Week" in his class.  He made a poster to tell about himself and it was his idea to made the American flag.  Tomorrow he is taking the ipod to school to play some of his favorite music.  Here is the playlist:


"Puff the Magic Dragon" by Peter, Paul and Mary
"The 3 R's" by Jack Johnson
"Happy Lemons" by Ralph Covert
"Shape I'm In" by Free Peoples
"The Sharing Song" by Jack Johnson
"I Love the Mountains" by Orange Sherbert
"Mr. Moon" by Orange Sherbert
"Rhinoceros Tap" by Adam Bryant


On Friday, to culminate his special status in his class, he will bring a snack of Rice Krispie Treats to share.


I think this probably gives you an idea of our typical day/week.  Now that I look at it, I can see that it's a lot!  No wonder we're always wiped out by Friday.


So, we'll keep posting the beautiful vacation pictures of exotic and beautiful places, but just remember that our weeks are just like yours...

Take your breath away-beautiful

I cannot take the credit for finding this video.  There is a woman who lives on the North Coast and we follow her blog from time to time.  She posted this video from You Tube and it's stunning.  Honduras is such a small country, that in the 5 short months that we've been here, we've seen many of these places, and plan to see the others during our two years here.

Take it with a grain of salt... this video was produced by the tourism board, but it is worth the 4 minutes to take a break from your normal routine.  Hell, I even enjoyed the "break from the normal routine", and I LIVE HERE!  And the music is nice too.  You can file this under "Stuff White People Like" (that's another funny website, if you've never checked it out).
Just watch it...  it is everything Honduras deserves to be.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQv6OZxsCdg

Eric and his dad went to Roatan today.  They got in two dives, despite the rain.  My parents arrive tomorrow and we're driving to La Ceiba Tuesday, will spend the night there, then catch the early ferry on Wednesday morning.  There forecast calls for sunshine from Wednesday through the weekend, with a high of 82 degrees F.  Yay!  We plan on spending a lot of time on the beach, in the water, playing Uno with grandparents, visiting the pina colada lady's shack, swimming with dolphins!!

Then we will be off to Copan until New Years.

Happy Holidays!

While Papa Bruce was in the city with us we took a drive up to El Picacho.  It's a giant statue of Jesus on a mountain overlooking the city.

Jesus

The gardens around Jesus' park were beautiful.  One might even say, Garden of Eden-esque.  It's not really Jesus' park, it's called Parque Naciones Unidas (United Nations Park).

Linnea at her Pre-Kinder Christmas concert.  They sang "Santa Claus is Coming to Town".

Oh brother!  So much for trying to shelter our kids from the commercialization of Christmas and the over-emphasis on Santa and gift-giving.  Actually, it's been good because our kids have been saturated with Santa.  He is EVERYWHERE!  We saw him in the grocery store today.  We've seen him riding in the back of a pick-up truck.  One day we were at the mall and there were FOUR of them!  Nothing like 4 Santas to blow the mystic and myth out of the water...

Oh, and that scarf tied around her tummy is her own personal flair.  She has her own style, and no one is going to stop her!  See how the other boys are dressed?  It was 85 degrees that day, but it doesn't matter.  These kids are dressed to the 9's on non-uniform days.  Love the red scarf and hat!

Happy Thanksgiving!

            Just under 400 years ago, some brave souls left the Old World for the New World for better opportunity, a new start and the dream of riches.   They landed on the eastern shores of the New World in the cold of winter and these city slickers that had inhabited the Mayflower for nearly 3 months were now were faced with illness, lack of food, and inadequate shelter.  They were not farmers by trade and therefore were ill-prepared to farm in the poor soil of what we now know as New England.  These were the Pilgrims, or pelegrenos (according to my Spanish teacher).  They sought refuge in the kindness of strangers, the Wampanoag, to help them through the harsh winter.  These kind indigenous people taught them how to plant crops successfully, find ripe hunting grounds and prime berry patches.

             Jump to 2009.  An unassuming family of four from bucolic Northern California hops on an airplane to a foreign country.  Only seen on a map and on the wondrous internet, this family blindly sets up house in a large, Central American city.  With only work contracts and the hope of adventure, the family lands in the new world in the midst of political crisis and strife.  Poco a poco the family meets new people,  known as Hondurenos.  The Hondurenos take this family in and provide important information; like how to navigate a city where only 1% of the roads and streets actually named and how not to be afraid of men on motorcycles with huge shotguns - because after all - they are guards, not robbers.   In fact, we are feeling increasingly safe with the pervasive presence of weaponry.  Maybe that's not such a good thing, but I digress....  Over time, this North American family starts to feel more a part of the new world.

              Tomorrow is Thanksgiving.  We have celebrated Thanksgiving twice already - the first was last Saturday at the high school principal's house.  We ate all the traditional foods.  Someone even made creamed green beans and broccoli with fried onions sprinkled on top.  I ate some, that was a first.  Yumm.  And as you can imagine, the principal lives in an outrageous neighborhood with a view of the city I had never seen.  I thought we had a great view from our 4th floor roost.  But this was amazing.  Wish I had my camera.

               The second Thanksgiving feast happened today.  Our school celebrated the first meal of the pelegrenos and the indios.  A little strange, if you ask me, that we are celebrating this event in Central America, but at this point I'm not going to complain about getting 2 days off of work.  From kindergarten to grade 12, each student in our school partook in the traditional feast of turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce and corn bread.  The room moms organized each class's feast.  I wasn't sure how the kid's would respond to the food, but they went crazy for it!!  Our class ran out of turkey and my students were going to the other 4th grade classes to see if they had extra turkey!

The picture at the left is our Thanksgiving spread, with some room mothers dishing up the food.

Instead of pumpkin pie, we had turkey shaped shaped sugar cookies.

               So many Hondurenos have asked us if we will be celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow.  We will not be celebrating it in the traditional sense.  We haven't had a day off of work since Sept 18, so no, we will not be cooking a turkey tomorrow.  We are heading for the mountains of Nicaragua for some rest and relaxation at a beautiful coffee plantation.  We will, however be celebrating the spirit of Thanksgiving.  We are thankful for our health.  We are thankful for a roof over our heads and good food on the table (I won't rub it in that it is cooked by the maid).  We are thankful for a supportive family that didn't disown us when we told them we were leaving our cozy life in Sonoma County for the unknown life in a not-so-stable country.  (*NOTE: The presidential elections are on Sunday.  Keep your fingers crossed that all goes well.  Just remember not to double cross your fingers - that's bad luck.)  We are thankful for hope that Honduras will be able to return to "normal" and that the play-ground politics that have plagued this country for too long will give way to a more even handed government.

                We are also thankful for our family and all our friends who have kept in contact with us as we have chosen to travel so far from home and set up a life in a new place.  You may not know it, but even a little message from home goes a long way.

                GobbleGobble.