Our arrival in Honduras!

Well we made it to Honduras! We arrived on Tuesday morning after about 9 hours of traveling. All of our flights went as planned and we became even more excited to be coming to Honduras as we looked out the window and saw fields of fruit trees and beautiful, lush mountainsides. Our friend Zach met us at the airport in San Pedro Sula and we took a taxi to the bus station. We then got on a bus to go to Copan Ruinas, a small city in western Honduras. The bus ride was very comfortable and we tried so hard to stay awake to take in the sights. After traveling through the night we had a hard time keeping our eyes open. The parts we managed to stay awake through were however beautiful. It is so green here and the fields are full of different crops. We were surprised to see an abundance of corn fields. Apparently it is one of the main crops in Honduras.

We arrived in Copan Ruinas at about 4pm just after an afternoon rainstorm. We were met at the bus stop by the director of the school and a few other staff. They helped us get our stuff to our new house and the left us to get settled in. We have a nice little house in a part of Copan called Las Brisas. We felt so welcomed when we saw they had provided us with new dishes, a fruit bowl full of great fruit and a blender. We are very comfortable and feel very lucky to be where we are.

We met up with the director for dinner later that night at a restaurant in town. Apparently it is tradition that the school treats the new teachers to dinner on their first night in town. During our dinner the power went out and a huge rainstorm started which encouraged us to take our time eating. We fortunately finished just after the rain ended and had a dry but muddy walk home.

Today we met up with Zach in the central park in town and walked with him up to the school. It is quite a ways from our house and is uphill basically the entire way. We hope that walk will help get us in shape. The school itself is beautiful and has a great atmosphere. We toured the grounds, met many of the other Honduran teachers and found our classrooms. Right now they are pretty bare and contain various mismatched pieces of furniture. We are going to spend the next week or so putting them together and will be ready for the students when classes start September 1^st.

As we complete a full day and half here there are a few things that we have found that are exactly as we expected, and several things that have really surprised us. We were surprised that they grow corn here. There really is a lot of it. We were also surprised at how big our house is. Our new bathroom is quite a bit larger than the bathroom of our Bellingham house, although that isn’t saying much. It has also been surprising how many pickup trucks there are here. We were told that they are used to get to the surrounding aldeas (villages), where the roads are pretty rough. Today as we walked to the school we saw many trucks full of about 20 or 30 people standing in the back. We found out that when it rains hard, like it did around 3 o’clock today, that water comes in under our door and covers almost the entire first floor of our house. It also blows in through the windows even when they are shut.