Swinging through the trees

After the teacher’s meeting on Friday, I rushed back home to pack my backpack to go to Copan Ruinas for the weekend. A friend was going with her mom and her host family, so some of the other teachers and I got a ride with them in the back of the pickup truck. It was a scenic, albeit slightly nauseating, ride up the windy mountain road that begins after passing through La Entrada. We stopped along the way to get really ripe pineapple from a family selling it on the side of the road. Later....

“I can’t find my other flip-flop!” said the kinder/prepa teacher.
“Oh, I think I saw a flip-flop like that on the ground when we stopped to get pineapple. But I didn’t know it was yours...” said JE, the driver of the pick-up, with a shrug, totally straight-faced.

Five minutes later, the teacher finds his flip-flop. Nice joke, JE!

On Friday night we settled into our hostel, the Iguana Azul, and then had a drink at Twisted Tanya’s in tables perched at the edge of a second-floor balcony overlooking the mountains. We ate excellent non-tipico food at Via Via and had an early night.

Saturday morning we had a nice pancake breakfast out and then I had some decisions to make. My friends were going to tour the ruins with an illustrious tour guide of some repute as a comic and a charmer. (“The British stole the jade....those...bastards!”) I had already visited the ruins twice, so I wanted to do something else, but I wasn’t sure what. After talking with a woman at a coffeshop about a tour of a coffee finca, I decided I’d rather do the canopy tour—more time flexibility, plus I had just really wanted to do it the last time I was in Copan. So I signed up for the tour, after a trip to the ATM and a stopover at the library to buy the second two books of the “His Darkest Materials” series. (I had bought the first one, The Golden Compass, from there in February and polished it off in two happy days.) I befriended the nineteen-year-old Honduran girl working at the tour place while I waited for my ride. She wants to study tourism at university in San Pedro after working for a year. When I started humming along to one of the songs she was playing, we started talking about all the music she likes. She played me her favorite Switchfoot song and was super-jealous when I said a friend of mine had seen them in concert.

The canopy tour was awesome. An Israeli guy, a six-year-old and I did the course of more than a dozen cables, led by two Honduran guys my age. The six-year-old, Christian, was the most experienced of the customers—he seemed to be related to someone running the business, had his own harness, and spoke confidently about which cables were fast and slow. We started with a cable that Christian disparaged as very, very slow—although that didn’t stop him from calling back to us as he slid across that he was flying! The harness is like the ones used for rock climbing and it gets attached to your individual pulley at each cable platform—you grab onto the cable with your gloved hands and the guides give you a knee boost up to hook you on. Then they let go and let you slide away. You control your speed by keeping your dominant hand trailing on the cable behind the pulley. If you grip the cable tightly while arching your body towards it, that slows you down. My Israeli buddy kept breaking too much so the guides continually had to go several meters out onto the cable at the other end to reel him in. I loved the speed, though, which surprised me a bit since I am kind of scared of rock climbing and heights. I suppose it’s that it feels very secure and it’s a whole lot of fun to zip along with the trees below you, checking out the valley and the houses on the hilltops and even the ruins in the distance. Pretty soon I got down a great technique where I mostly didn’t break until about three-fourths of the way in and was able to control my entrance to the platform nearly perfectly, if I do say so myself. One of the guides was impressed enough to compliment me on it and ask if I was married.

The best cable trip was the one that is a meter long and goes over a river. Christian had to go paired with a guide on that one (usually one guide goes first and one goes last) because it gets really windy on the long cable, so if you don’t weigh too much and really control your speed you can end up just flipping around in circles. It was so exhilarating to race across the valley like that! The second-best run was a “slower” one where they showed me how to turn myself upside down, gripping the strap connecting me to the cable with my legs to sustain the position and letting my arms hang down. It was so awesome to look at all the trees from upside down! The stop at the end was a bit abrupt, though, since the guide basically has to catch you to stop you. They’re able to right themselves while moving if they do that, but they don’t try to make us beginners attempt that.

We took one brief walking interlude during our trip to see some rock formations carved by the Mayans called Los Sapos. I saw a very faded depiction of a woman giving birth, checked out the special stone configuration where Mayan women sat to give birth, and looked at a large frog carving. One of the guides told me that they say if you sit on the frog, you’ll have lots of kids, since the frog is the Mayan symbol of fertility. He figures he’s going to have a whole bunch since he sits on it all of the time! (I didn’t try it out.)

After my canopy tour, I was dropped off back in town, where I took a brief trip through the children’s museum, ate an excellent sandwich—a baguette with cream cheese, bacon and avocado—and went to my favorite Copan coffeshop, Cafe San Rafael, where I drank a wonderful moccachino. The place is picturesque beyond belief...you walk in there and feel an instant sense of calm. The smell of coffee roasting settles over you as you slide into a wooden chair, deliberating if you should buy a piece of the rolled pastry cake in the glass case. The two tables and long countertop on the right side overlook the owners’ enclosed front yard, full of green bushes and flowers. A great place for a descanso.

I met back up with my friends in the late afternoon for drinks before dinner, which proved much too much for me to handle on an empty stomach. I alternated between dizziness and extreme tiredness during dinner due to my happy hour overzealousness, but I managed to rally for the beer pong tournament we attended at a bar in Copan owned by a 23-year-old Californian guy. I was the goofball who spent the rest of the night sipping water from my nalgene—I very much enjoyed my role of professional beer pong spectator. It was all quite bewildering at first—there were debates about bouncing and blowing the ball out of the cup, leaning over the table, when the beers must be drunk, when re-racking takes place, etc. I never knew that there were such intricate—and evidently, partially regional—rules for the game! I did understand, though, that the random Honduran man who started sipping from the water cup used for rinsing the balls was definitely violating universal beer pong etiquette.

We ended up going to Papa Chango’s when the bar closed at 12, meeting a few other nice people over there, including a Yale medical resident who spent a good deal of time helping a friend understand the differing symptoms of dengue and malaria and alerting her to signs that someone is really, really ill. He advised us that the traditional Honduran medical treatment of a shot of antibiotics may not be great for future public health, but is actually pretty darn good at knocking out most bugs that might afflict you down here. I got to dance along in my chair to some favorite American and Honduran hits, such as my fav Estas de Miedo. Around 3 we headed back to the bar for a smaller-scale beer pong, round 2. As a result, we barely had time to grab some breakfast this morning before our ride back at 11 am. But it was a really fun night and well worth it—even if that curvy trip back down the mountains of Copan was relatively miserable in the midday heat after sleeping only a few hours and some solid hangovers on the part of my friends.

Unfortunately my welcome back home was a huge pile of laundry to be done so that I’d have clothes to wear to school on Monday. But all my stuff is currently drying and now I just have to pull together some stuff for school tomorrow. I might wake up at 5 to do it. I’m a bit exhausted, but I’m in a good mood. Here comes Bimester 5—the last one!

Ricas Baleadas!

Passing by the Bodega Mabel at 7 am on Sunday, a market regular would have noted a new addition to the retail landscape: a crowd of ninth grade bilingual school students selling baleadas.

We had intended to assemble at 5:30 am, but when I arrived at 5:31, the only other person there was a fellow teacher. Students trickled in for the next hour, with two of the students with the most important components—the beans and the portable gas stove—arriving last, and only after several cell phone calls. There was quite a bit of chaos in the assembly of the operation..... “Do we have a table?” (We took a laundry room picnic table that was in use as an ironing board.) “Sugar? Milk?” (Students sent out to buy.)

Then there was a minor issue with the actual tortilla making—when we tried to fold the first tortillas, they cracked. The boy of the duo who had made the masa immediately avowed responsibility—“I just brought all the ingredients”—and the girl involved just shrugged her shoulders and bought the first cup of coffee. But several mothers quickly swung into action to help out, and with the addition of some more flour, the consistency was greatly improved. My fellow teacher and I wanted to help make the baleadas, but we were only allowed to be in charge of supervision and the money. As one student said rather untactfully, “But miss, if you make them they will be deformed! People will not buy them!”

Our first potential sale turned out to be a non-sale, since the waiting couple who had approached requesting two baleadas became discouraged when they realized that the beans were not even on location yet. (They were being heated nearby at a students’ house.) When asked to wait by an excited student, they turned away in disgust. Ah well.

Fortunately, the students ran off to grab the beans, which were indeed hot, and the mothers began to turn out quite perfect circles, so we soon had a steady stream of baleadas being made—not necessarily in the most efficient way, but slowly and surely. (It went much better once we sent someone to buy plastic wrap instead of messing around with plates—and that was all the better for orders to go.) While the students were not aggressive about hawking the food, enough people approached us to keep the sales going, and we sent out groups of students with five at a time to sell them to folks along the main street and in the heart of the market. I don’t have any proof that they weren’t just taking money from their parents and pitching the baleadas in the gutter, but they did return every time with the correct amount of money!

The limeade, made fresh from limes growing at one of the students’ houses, was N.’s personal project and made for the most enthusiastic sales of the day. Three boys traipsed around the market with the huge blue cooler, yelling to everyone to buy their limonadas. In less than an hour, they had sold out. If we do it again, we will definitely have to include that as one of our main products. Coffee, however, was much less successful.

There were so many beans remaining around 8:30 when the tortilla masa was all used up that the mothers urged us to send students for more ingredients to make more tortillas. They whipped up some more and sales continued to be pretty brisk, despite our slowness at bulk orders. I did feel savvy when one man ordered five and we asked him to go about his shopping in the bodega and then swing by on the way back for his food. He did just that and I was happy to be prepared to give somebody their food without a scramble for once.

Around 9:30, we sold our last baleada and closed up shop for the day. All together, the students had earned about 1,000 lempiras, or about $50. The money the students are raising is going towards a pre-graduation trip to Roatan—the first ever, and possibly first-annual? While the students tired at times of the venture, they were really excited to have sold so many baleadas, in defiance of some parental doubts, and suggested that we do it again some other time. Okay, maybe not next Sunday, they amended, but perhaps the one after that.

It was great to see them working as a team, and so even though it was an early wake-up, I was glad to have been there for it. I think it was fun for me and for them to be a part of the Sunday morning market action. It also helped me put in perspective what a typical Honduran life is like. Our town feels so suffocatingly small to me that I forget sometimes that for many other people, from the mountains, for example, this is actually a big place. Tons of families make a big trip here on Sundays to buy the food they need for the week—stacks of corrugated cardboard filled with eggs, sacks of flour and rice, bunches of vegetables.

Exam week starts tomorrow, and then we enter into our fifth and final bimester. I’m feeling ready to be home in the States, but I’ve got at least 2 ½ more months of soaking up all the Honduras experience that I can. While I’m very worn out at this point by life here, I’ve also been feeling a bit more connected to some members of the community, which is really nice. (I do love having a cafecito after school.) After the school year ends, I will possibly be traveling around for a while...if anybody has any interest in some Latin American adventures in July, definitely let me know.

Live update from Antigua

Today started at 5:20 am when I woke up with a start in a grungy guesthouse in Antigua, unable to recall my alarm going off at 4:45 am, groggy, the drums that proceed Semana Santa processions beating nearby, the only thought in my head: I´m going to miss it all!
A friend and I pulled on some clothes and ran outside in the half-dark to join other sleepy procession devotees. We raced past five or six sawdust alfombras, or carpets (which we saw people just beginning to start making at 11 pm the night before) and quickly spotted the purple robes of the men who line the parade route in the hundreds, a honor guard of sorts for the Jesus and Mary statues that would pass by, the backup singers of the float-carrying band of Catholics. The float-bearers were dressed as Roman soldiers, complete with matching leather sandals and staffs with metal points, and they swayed from side to side as they struggled to heave the heavy float, with Jesus and his cross perched atop amid thorns and ferns. Women dressed in black with black mantillas on their heads followed, carrying an equally formidable float that held a statue of the Virgin Mary, beautifully dressed in a blue cloak and looking quite serene despite the hundreds of vueltas around the streets she was about to undergo. As the sun came up, the crowds dissapated, off to breakfast and to prep for the continued processions throughout the day.

At Bagel Barn I ate my first bagel since I´d been in the States in January and, enamored of the cream cheese, actually licked the last remaining bits out of the bowl in which it was served. Then my friends and I headed back to our room for a nap. When we woke we grabbed some lunch at a place that offered to let us screen a movie of our choice in a little back room. We watched ¨Chocolat.¨ It was an excellent break and we emerged rejuvenated and really in the mood for some good chocolate, which we later failed to find. However, the puffy fried balls of dough sold on the street--like munchkins but bigger and more deliciously glazed--sated our hunger for sweetness.

In the afternoon, I visited the ruins of the church on the main square, the destruction wrought by an earthquake in the 1700s. It was so peaceful--and free of people trying to sell me things, which is rare here. I´ve begun to think that all churches should have open ceilings. I suppose it´d be a bit inconvenient, but seeing the sky out of those large portholes in the desolate nave was really beautiful.

Walking back to the parque central to meet my friends, I cut through the present-day parish church, commonly referred to as a cathedral but evidently not actually one, and came upon crowds watching a statue of Jesus, formerly hung on a cross on the steps of the church, be incensed and blessed before being placed on an inclined bed on top of yet another huge float. A large group of men, dressed in black robes this time, hoisted it on their soldiers and left the church, beginning yet another procession through town. At that point, all of the alfombras had long been trampled, the colored mix of sawdust and pinebranches and fruits and flower petals shovled into dump trucks that follow the processions along their routes. But crowds still lined the sidewalks and street corners to see the statues go by.

Tonight the plan is for a relaxing dinner, drinks at the Irish pub here (we were there last night briefly but left shortly after the power went out), and then packing up for our bus ride back home, which begins at 3:30 am. I don´t think going to sleep is part of the plan. Blessed Good Friday, everybody.