Baleadas are magic.

Top Three Things I hear People Saying About Me In Spanish:

1. "How cute! Where's she from?"

2. "She doesn't speak any spanish...no, none at all..."

3. "Does she like beans/rice/plantains?"

I'm slowly getting used to the region's spanish. My first impression of honduran spanish was that it sounds almost muffled; soft. I've come to notice that Hondurans don't like to pronounce consanants and have an irritating habit of skipping s's completely. They also don't like to pronounce more than one vowel in a row. "Quieres" is "queres" and "tienes" is "tenes". There is no "mas o menos" only "ma o meno" Also, there is no "tu", there is only "vos", which is like the spanish equivalent of "ya'all" so it feels really strange. Even if I speak with "perfect" grammar and pronunciation, often people gape at me as if I had just mumbled "HVJBEAWBBAKBKS" (or laugh hysterically) and somebody who's been around me long enough to understand my version of the spanish language has to translate it into the Honduran style of not using consonants. Sigh. Luckily I am incapable of embarrassment, or I would have stopped talking a long time ago.

ANYWAYS, it's monday and I spent most of the weekend hanging out with Nicol. She came over friday with the notion that she would help me with my studies, but we ended up just watching movies and hanging out. Sandra also made Baleadas for the first time, which changed my life.

Baleadas are a uniquely Honduran food consisting of a wheat tortilla, with beans, cheese, and mantequilla*, and often other ingredients as well. You're probably thinking, oh, like a burrito! But NO. Yes, Baleadas consist of similar ingredients as your average taco bar/enchilada/generic central-american dish, but what you don't know is that Hondurans not only put beans, cheese, and mantequilla in their Baleadas but they also put MAGIC. Or pixie dust. Or crack.

I would love to learn how to make Baleadas, but according to Rosa, I have about as much of a chance of creating a successful tortilla as I do of discovering the cure to cancer or building a rocketship with recycled cans and flying to the moon out of my backyard. I guess Sandra is the only one in our home we can do it because her hands are...magic. Or something.

On Saturday I went to school. Yes, really. There was a Tallier project there's not enough time in the week to do, so this week, I had school on Saturday. But it started at eight, so I got to sleep in. Ha! I never thought I would thing of eight as sleeping in, but school normally starts at six forty, so eight is practically like the middle of the day for me now. I was supposed to take apart a computer, clean all the parts, and put it back together, but all I really did was stand around and try to look like I knew what I was doing, and somehow I managed to not break anything.

After Tallier was over, Nicol and some classmates and I went to "La Princesita" to eat breakfast-- more baleadas! I was faced with another how-will-I-eat-this crisis because my 20-lempira baleada was twice the size of my face and overflowing with content, and hondurans don't believe in eating utensils, but it was SO WORTH IT because it tasted like heaven on a tortilla. Angels actually sang as I ate it.

If you're going to Honduras and you're worried about spicy food, don't. I have yet to meet a Honduran who even likes spicy food. My classmates all stared at me in awe as I piled the entire tables portions of rejected chiles (jalepenos?) on my Baleada, and the end result was still well below my spice-threshold. "Wowwww," they all whispered. "She likes chiles!"

After hanging out at school some more, Kevin, Nicol's boyfriend, and I went to her house because my host mom told Nicol to have me over. I'm not quite sure why that happened, but whatever, it was still fun. We all listened to music and talked and ate popcorn, and Kevin and I had mini-debates about drugs and alcohol and religion.

On sunday we just went to church (I understood 95% of the message this time! Yippee!) and then went home and chilled. We ate pizza hut and fried chicken for lunch, which is pretty popular here. I have eaten innumerable plates of fried chicken here, which is perfectly OK with me because fried chicken is amazing.

Another thing I eat a lot here is a plate of eggs, beans, mantequilla and toast, and sometimes avocado or platanos, which is all eaten together on the toast. I really like it; I just can not get enough of the beans here.

*Mantequilla, or crema, as pictured above, is what Hondurans think of as butter but it's more like a cross between butter and sour cream. It is eaten with essentially every meal.

Tortillas are also eaten with pretty much every meal, and I'm never really sure what to do with them. If I'm eating beans or something I use them as eating utensils, but if it's spaghetti or fried chicken or rice, I just get confused. I try to observe what other people or doing, but the piles of tortillas just seem to mystically disappear when my back is turned, so I still don't really know what Hondurans are doing with them. They're good, though, so I'm not complaining.

I've been here almost a month, and I still don't have a tan, which is disappointing to me. I do have a sunburn-- ick! but people keep walking up to me and going, "You're gotten pink! Que linda!" so I guess Hondurans think sunburns are cute? Weirdos.