Rain and Ruins

Today was our first day back to school after a nice relaxing three day weekend. Actually it was the third (and last) three day weekend we have had this month! It has been raining a lot lately due to a tropical storm hitting somewhere on the east coast. We have noticed that we aren't as sticky in the afternoons since it is cooler and the rain seems to keep coming all day. It reminds us of what fall is like in Washington. However, with the rain comes a few consequences here. First, the water often goes out. The more rain, the higher the river, and the greater chance that the pipe that brings the water to town will fall down. This is not a surprise because we can see that pipe as we walk to school and it is exposed, and held up but what look like twigs stuck in the river. So as a consequence, we were again without water this week for three days. We made due with buckets collecting rainwater and even boiled some water on the stove for a nice warm bucket shower.

The second consequence of so much rain is the mud and erosion. Our street is full of mud and we can't manage to go anywhere without getting our shoes all dirty. The roads all over Honduras are apparently horrible and the rain causes the cliffs to erode and bring boulders and dirt onto the highways. As a result the cars and buses and trucks are having a hard time going anywhere. The other day we were going home and were walking along the main highway and there were trucks lined up for a long ways. This morning we went to school and many of our students were not there. About a third of the students live in town called Santa Rita which is about 15 minutes from Copan. Since the highway is so bad the buses couldn't get here. So at 8am we get a note in our classes that school is getting out at 9:00. I don't know who was more excited, the teachers or the kids. So we had a nice surprise and get to extend our break. There is talk that if they don't fix the road that we will have tomorrow off too. We'll see

Yesterday David, Bekky and I went to the Mayan ruins. It is a short walk from our house and we invited a family to come with us. They are a family that we met from church and they have two kids who go to Mayatan. Jaquelin is the mom and her sons Isaac and Frank. Jaquelin's mom came too and two nieces. They packed quite the picnic so once we got there we ate cake and Coca Cola before entering the part of the park with the ruins. We spent the afternoon walking around the ruins and even got to go into some of the tunnels they have excavated. It is so amazing to walk around and see what is left of an ancient civilization. It is almost hard to believe that they are real. Here we are looking down on the main plaza. We are standing on more ruins.

This is the first set of ruins that you see when you enter. We climbed around on them and played with the frisbee until the guards told us to get down.

We've come into October with not much to report. The weather is shifting now and we are beginning to see more what the term "rainy" season means. Last weekend we spent most of our time relaxing at home, keeping dry as it rained hard all day. Classes are going very well and except for the occasional power outage or lack of water, we are doing great. This weekend we traveled to San Pedro Sula to pick up Bekky (David's sister) from the airport and to go to the Honduras vs. Canada soccer game. Our day started out with some dissapointing news that the bus we had planned to take did not leave at the time we expected and the next bus left too late. We had to give in and pay for the luxury busline to take us to San Pedro. We arrived at the station and took a taxi to the airport. We waited anxiously for Bekky to come off the plane, but then when the last passengers came off and she wasn't among them we were confused. There were a couple other families who too did not get to see their loved ones. We waited for the next plane to come in 4 hours later and she was there! We went directly from the airport to the soccer stadium and arrived at half time. It was pretty exciting to see all the fans, players and craziness of a soccer game here in Honduras. Since soccer is the most popular sport here, people get really into it. We were happy it was not two rival Honduran teams but rather all of Honduras united against another team. That made for a much safer game. Despite David's honduran jersey, people kept asking if we were Canadian or rooting for the Canadians. We won 3-1 and after the game Zach commented that he could have gone without the last goal. His reason for saying this was that with every goal most fans throw whatever they have in their hands or in their neighbor's hand. This means that beer, soda, popcorn etc. explodes over the fans below. We unfortunately were part of those fans and left the game covered in various liquids.

The local Copan adult soccer team organized a bus to take people to the game, the tickets and the ride back for a certain price. That is how we got our tickets and luckily is how we got home. If we hadn't decided to do this excursion, we would have had to stay the night somewhere in San Pedro Sula since the regular busses stop traveling to Copan at 6pm. So we got to ride the bus back that night, arriving back in Copan at 2am. Some of the passengers decided that it would be fun to blast music during the entire trips so our plans for sleeping were sadly not an option.

We have been having fun with Bekky showing her our favorite local sites. Yesterday after church we walked to the ruins and took a nice nature hike which ended up in a jungle adventure since we lost the path. Last night we spent time over at her host family's house which is just across the street from us. We played board games with her host brother who is in sixth grade at Mayatan. Today she started classes and we have plans to meet up and go to the bird park here in Copan.