Lauren's Peace Corps Experience in Honduras

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed and experiences described in this travelogue are mine personally. Nothing written here should be interpreted as official or unofficial Peace Corps literature or as sanctioned by the Peace Corps or the U.S. government. I have chosen to write about my experience online in order to update family and friends; I am earning no money whatsoever from this endeavor. Please do not copy or forward any of these contents without my permission.

Wednesday, July 06, 2005

Happy 4th of July!

Hi friends and family :)

Well I definitely missed the traditions of America this weekend - Uncle Burt's huge annual party, fireworks in DC, hamburgers, ribs, crabs, pies, beer, hotdogs, family, friends, potato salad, baked beans...etc, etc. I had a few of those though. My training group made the trip up to Trujillo on the coast from all of our different towns. The trip for us in the West was a 10 hour bus ride - it was awesome there in Trujillo but I doubt I will be making the trip again since I can get to another beautiful but closer beach in 4 hours. Anyway, it was awesome seeing all my PC friends again. We stayed in this place called Casa Kiwi, which is a large house turned into a hotel. We had most of the place to ourselves. There was a good restaurant there where I could get shrimp and a good cheeseburger and banana pancakes, and the beach was beautiful. We had a big bonfire the first night there and gave the guys at the little bar there a lot of business. It was great catching up with everyone though, you have no idea! We are all having very different experiences here in Honduras, but most all of them are positive ones. The only kind of festive explosive we had were firecrackers, so I missed out on sparklers and firewords, but at least we had a huge fire. The second night we went into downtown Trujillo to go out to a seafood restaurant on the beach. It reminded me a little bit of a sleepy Negril. We pigged out on some good seafood and chatted up with the local Garifuna people, who are more African than Hispanic. The culture up on the coast is completely different from the rest of Honduras. All in all I spent maybe 1 and a half days there before we had to start the trip back on Monday, but we packed a lot into those days. On the way back we stopped in San Pedro Sula and went to the huge modern mall to go to the food court. I got a delicious burger from Wendy's and some other people chose Burger Kind or another chain, but at least we got out 4th of July burger! I also bought a little boom box at Radio Shack to use with my aerobics classes. Then we got back on the bus to Santa Rosa.

By the time I got back to Dulce Nombre yesterday, Tuesday, I had actually started missing it. The people here have been so great this past week and a half. People are always stopping by to give me fruit or vegetables or to see if they can help with my moving in activities. My 2 friends at the local cable station are lending me a pretty nice television and giving me free cable -yay! So it's kinda nice once in a while to watch a movie on TNT or Cinemax as I cook myself a nice meal. It's so nice to be cooking for myself again. But the showing of affecion is great. I only ate alone one time last week...friends kept coming over to cook for me or with me. One friend went to a ton of trouble to change a lightbulb for me which is like 20 feet up, and another friend brought a kid over with him to hack away all the weeds in the backyard and to look for snakes. One lady my age came over and insisted on helping me weed the garden and plucking my eyebrows - so I put my head in her lap and closed my eyes and got a steller eyebrow cleanup :) So I definitely do not feel alone if you can tell!

Well time for my aerobics class. I am trying to get back in shape again these days. I woke up at 5 am this morning to go running with a friend and have been giving training classes to a friend who will be starting giving aerobics classes in Santa Rosa in the gym there, so she has been coming over to my house for help with her aerobics routine. Everyone said I had lost the weight I put on during the first 3 months of training. It's nice to get back in shape...hopefully I can keep it up!

Lots of love!

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