January

We've now finished two full weeks of school since being back from break. It feels long but both david and I have had some exciting teaching moments this week. Nothing big but just lessons that were fun and that went well. Next week is finals week and then we are done with the second quarter. We are halfway through this adventure now. It seems crazy that it has already been that long but we are excited.

The weather here has been interesting. In the morning it is really cold. By really cold I mean it is in the 50s with a thick fog. It lasts all morning and we are freezing at school. In the states when it is that temperature you wear a jacket and then walk inside and the heat is nice and warm. Well here we wear jackets but the windows don't close, they are just screened. So we teach in our classrooms with our girls wearing skirts and everyone's fingers freezing. Then around 12 it burns off and the sun comes out and it is really warm. In the afternoon it is perfect...sunny with a nice breeze.

The internet is pretty fast right now so I'll take advantage of it and post some past pictures and maybe a video too..This is a video from our room in Montezuma, Costa Rica. We were pretty excited to enjoy monkey friends ouside our room.
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These are most of my 5th grade girls. We're only missing one in this picture.
These are some of my boys. This is the best picture I have of them so it looks like I need to take some more pictures.These are some of our fellow teachers. Megan (left) is our director and Michelle (middle) teaches 1st and Kathy teaches 2nd grade.
Here is a picture from the Christmas program. The set was pretty amazing and this picture does not do it justice. This is the combined 5th grade classes when they sang "Oh Come all Ye Faithful."

Costa Rica Pictures

Here are a few pictures of our trip to Costa Rica. We are now back in Honduras and started back to school on Wednesday. It was hard to go back to getting up at 5 and going to work. But now that we have returned to our normal schedule it feels nice to be back. Another benefit of a break is that now our students are fresh and are more willing to work. I guess we too have more patience and energy. Here is what we did over the last few weeks.

This is the beach in Manuel Antonio. We spent some time in the national park and then other time on the public beach here in town. The water was perfect for swimming here. Each night we enjoyed beautiful sunsets.
Here we are in the national park of Cabo Blanco after a 2 hour hike down to the beach. This is in Montezuma where we spent the second part of our trip.

We explored many beaches and tried to spend as much time as we could in the shade as to avoid getting fried. Right now the weather is beautiful and there is a nice breeze that keeps it the perfect temperature.
When we were in Montezuma we stayed in a hotel up in the trees that had a beautiful view overlooking the ocean. We had a little patio where we could sit and watch the monkeys play in the trees and pass by us. They were literally 5 ft away from us.
We visited with my host family while we were there and played a lot with the girls. We spent a lot of time on this couch with the girls watching kids TV. At times we both were there with four kids crawling all over us. Maria Emilia (Millie) is the 2 year old, Fabiana is on the right and Sofia on the left.
Our day at the "Parque de Diversiones" or Fun Park was indeed very fun. it is a big theme park with all sorts of rides for all sizes. The girls really enjoyed this ride where we got a little wet. We literally spent the entire day there and rode on as many rides as we could.
Here are my host parents Sandro and Yorlene and the newest addition to their family who is 9 months old. His name is Gabriel Alejandro but no one calls him that. In fact we didn't even hear his real name once. Everyone calls him "Gordo" which means "Chubby". It has become his name and we wonder how long it will follow him. However, in Spanish calling someone fat or chubby isn't necesarily mean, its maybe endearing or just stating the fact. Many comments about physical appearance are rather extreme.

Well that is all we have time for now.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New year to all! We are enjoying our 3 week Christmas break here in Costa Rica. We arrived on Dec. 18 by plane and headed directly to the beach. We took the bus from San Jose to Manuel Antonio where we spent the first 5 days of our trip. We spent our time relaxing on the beach and exploring the national park of Manuel Antonio. The water was beautiful and perfect for swimming. We were sitting there on the beach with the sun shinning bright trying to imagine what winter must be like back home. It is so amazing that weather can be so opposite in different parts of the world.

From Manuel Antonio we came back to San Jose area and came to visit my (cody) host family that I stayed with when I was here in Costa Rica 3 years ago. It is fun to see the family and how the girls have grown. They now have 2 more kids than they did when I was here the first time. We are having a lot of fun playing and spending time with them. We did some shopping or rather window shopping before Christmas. Seeing as where we live in Copan doesn´t even have a grocery store, we are just excited to walk around in a bigger city and are entertained by the local supermarket. For Christmas eve we went next door where all of Yorlene´s family was gathered and ate lots of good food and talked with her family. Christmas morning we woke up early and watched the little girls open presents. It was fun to spend time with this family seeing as it is as close as we can get to having traditional Christmas. We were sad not to be with our families but are happy to be having this experience.

The day after Christmas we set off again to the beach, this time to Montezuma. This entails a bus ride for 2 1/2 hours, a 1 1/2 hour ferry ride and another 2 hour bus ride. But the trip is beautiful and we enjoyed the travel. We stayed in a hotel that was great and our room was really like a little bungalow by itself. The window opened up to an ocean view and we watched the monkeys climb right outside our room on the little patio. In fact every morning around 7 the monkeys played around in the tree above our room and dropped leaves and twigs on the roof. It sounded like hail and was a bit frightening until we figured out what it was. We spent our time there doing many fun things. We went to Cabo Blanco national park and hiked around, we swam in the ocean, we walked along the beaches, we went to the waterfalls there, and went on a snorkeling trip. The snorkeling trip was very fun, we took a boat out to an island called Tortuga island and went snorkeling in the morning. We then had a great lunch that they prepared for us and then went snorkeling again in the afternoon. Overall our trip to Montezuma was very fun. The only difficult part was that we didn´t bring enough cash and there is no ATM in Montezuma. We took the bus to a nearby town and the machine wouldn´t give us money. So we spent a lot of our trip being creative and were sure glad on Tuesday after two trips to the bank in a nearby city and many hours of waiting when we finally got enough cash out to be able to pay for the bus back to San Jose.

We are now back at my host family´s house for the next few days before we head back to Honduras on Jan 5th. We had a quiet new years eve and watched some movies, trying to stay up until midnight. We couldn´t even find a countdown on the TV so around midnight we went outside to see the fireworks that everyone was setting off. Now here we are in 2009!

We will be sure to add pictures when we get back to Honduras.

Happy New Year!