Guatemala Weekend

At the last minute we decided we would pack up and go on a weekend getaway to Guatemala. We live about 20 minutes from the border so it is easier to go into Guatemala than to go to other Honduran cities. We went to a city called Esquipulas which is about 2 1/2 hours away by public bus. We had to take 3 different buses to get there but the timing worked out perfectly and we arrived around 5pm on Friday. Esquipulas is famous for the Basilica. This giant church turned 250 this year and is quite a stunning piece of architecture. As you can see from the picture it has a dominating presence in the valley. The thing we really liked about this town is that it has a lot of visitors but hardly any foreign tourists. This made things cheaper for us. We were surprised how it came alive with thousands of Guatemalans making a pilgrimage to see the famous black Christ statue. We spent the weekend touring the church, attending mass several times and going to a park/zoo. It was a perfect place to tour for the weekend, for Valentine's day, and it felt so good to get out of Copan.
Here is a view of the Basilica from a hill looking into Esquipulas. It looks enormous even from far away.
Here is David in front of the Basilica. This park was full during the weekend of people standing in line to see the black Christ statue. The line on Sunday zig zagged back and forth through the park walkways. It took us 45 minutes to get through the line when it was already at the church. We can only imagine how long people waited in the line when it started at the back of the park.
Here it is. This is the statue that brings people from all over to see it.
This is in another section of the church where people lit candles.
One of our favorite pictures from the zoo. We think they try to save money by doubling up on cages. Some of our favorite animals included alligators, lions, ocelots, deer, ostriches, crazy monkeys, anteaters and a variety of birds.
The zoo is in a park that has many picnic areas, hammocks everywhere and sports areas. It also advertises a cave which really is just a mine shaft. We really enjoyed our morning here and spent some time relaxing in the sunshine.

Cold weather

We've had some interesting weather lately. Everyone here is shocked that it is cold in February. Apparently this is the coldest winter they have had in a long time. But the funny thing about cold here is that it is only about 50 degrees. Everyone gets their gloves, scarves and hats out and walks around as if it were below freezing. With the cold this week came the rain. We woke up Monday morning to really hard rain at 4am. Rain is good but it makes everything muddy. The dust has collected over the the last month or so and now the streets have about a 1/2 inch of dust covering them. Then the rain came and turned that dust to slippery mud that we carefully walk through to get anywhere.

We found out yesterday morning that we were going to go home from school at 11am. There had been no water at the school for 2 days. You can imagine the problem this presents when you have about 300 students who use the bathrooms. It made me laugh to think of what parents would think in the states if their students were sent home because the school had no water. This is a common occurrence here in Honduras.

Weekends here are pretty relaxing. David's new Saturday routine is to wake up at 6am and go hiking in the hills surrounding Copan. Each week he has goals to find a way to get over certain peaks. I on the otherhand enjoy my extra few hours of sleep and David comes home from his hikes a few hours later to find that I haven't moved a muscle. Last week he saw an amazing rainbow. However he says that this picture does not do it justice.
Over our Christmas break we were lucky enough to have our house painted. Before it was a beige color that was very dirty and looked as if it hadn't been painted in years. We came home from Costa Rica to find our house painted green. We love it and were glad that we didn't have to be there to watch them paint our high ceilings. We'll get a better picture up soon.
Well that is a random update on us.

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.
.
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!

November!

I've been optimistic thinking I could get an internet connection fast enough to upload pictures to our blog again. I've been waiting to post until I got the pictures but it seems that it is taking too long. I noticed that the last time I posted was over a month ago. I is time for an update!
We had a nice November. We spent our weekends exploring parts of Copan. A couple of weekends ago we hiked up to a little village called La Pintada. It is known for the corn husk dolls and woven cloths that the women make. The women make them and then the children sell them in town. We were bombarded with children as we entered the village. Fresh gringo meat. It was so funny to see them stop playing and pick up their bags of dolls. They stayed with us the entire time, following us around even though we told them we didn't want any. I really enjoy the picture of the girl and the dog following David and Zach.

This past week we enjoyed many wonderful meals in celebration of Thanksgiving. The school hosted a traditional American meal complete with turkey, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce. We had the dinner at the director of the school Norma's house. She lives in a house up in the hills that is beautiful. It has a great view of the town of Copan and the surrounding mountains. The entire staff, American and Honduran alike were there. We had a great time and it felt very festive.

On Thanksgiving we started out our day by hiking up to a house up in the mountains. A lady who cleans at the school, Eva, invited us to come with her to visit her mother. Her mom lives up in the mountains about a 45 minute hike from any real road. Their house was made of mud and sticks and was very modest. We brought meat and beans and rice and the women made a delicious meal over the fire. We then walked down and went to see Eva's new house which is in the process of being built. She and her husband have saved for a long time to buy the land and get the materials to build a house. It is a cement house and all the walls are done. They have the forms ready to pour the cement roof. They have worked so hard together on the house and have basically done it all themselves. We admire their hard work and dedication as a couple. That is a rarity around here.

In the afternoon we went to a Thanksgiving potluck hosted by one of the teachers at Mayatan. We brought mashed potatoes that we made using our little pots and pans. It was quite an adventure. The meal and company were excellent and it was as close as it could be to a meal at home. We had the rest of the weekend off and our friends Daryl and Sarah from Bellingham came to visit us. We pretended like we were on vacation and wen to see all of the tourist sights around Copan. We went to the ruins on Saturday and also the bird park. On Monday we went to a place called Aguas Calientes which are hot springs where they have pools of water filled with naturally hot water. We spent the day there and had a picnic. It was the first time we had been there and we plan on going back sometime.Overall it has been great here. This weekend it was about 85 degrees each day. This week it has been a little colder but nothing like fall in the Northwest. We are looking forward to the 18th of December when we get to head to Costa Rica. We ended up getting cheap plane tickets that are only about $25 more than what it would have cost to take the bus but about 22hours less of a time commitment. We are thrilled!