Copan Take Two

    I was sick most of the week last week, and to my delight when I got to school we didn't have classes. On thursday we had some sort of catholic ceremony called a "Rosario" or something, and there was a lot of praying and singing and catholic stuff. A bunch of the younger students dressed up to represent all of the continents, and had a sort of parade in the gym walking around holding a giant statue of Mary. It lasted a few hours and then we watched a random movie in the gym. I played Screaming Ninjas with classmates the whole time. And then we got out early so we stayed at school and played hopscotch and jumprope and whatnot. Afterwards Kevin and Nicole and I went to La Princesita to eat baleadas...yum!

    On friday it was "students day". Of course, we spent the first few hours in the gym doing more catholic stuff, as is inevitable at any school event. Then the rest of our day was all craziness-- all of our teachers dressed up like pop stars and danced and lip synced and put on "concerts". My friend Cesia and I were incredibly hyper so I spent most of the time dancing and being ridiculous with her. Her friends were embarrassed by us and Kevin later told me that he had been laughing at me because I had no rhythm and I looked stupid, but whatever. At least I had fun, right? 

    That night we had a Tardeada, or a school dance. I was a bit hesitant to go since I didn't have the best experience at the last Tardeada, but my friends persuaded me. At first I hung out with friends and they attempted to give me Vachata dance lessons, but then my friends disappeared and I didn't know what to do with myself. Luckily I met a guy-- I think his name was Renen-- who saved the day. He danced with me for most of the night, which admittedly was pretty awkward since I fail at vachata dancing, but he was really nice about it and made the awkward dancing kind of fun. Unfortunately he's a IMLI alumni, so I probably won't see him again.
    So the next morning I was expected to be ready to go at 2:30am for our school trip to Copan! It was hardly even worth the effort going to sleep, but I slept about two hours and then took a taxi with Cesia and a few other girls to Wendy's, where we were to get on our bus.
    I managed to sleep for some of our 5 hour bus trip, and when we got to Copan we immediately went to the ruins. Of course I had already seen everything before, but it was still cool. As a bonus, I got to get in for the Catracho price of 20lemp ($1) as apposed to the foreigner price of $15.
    After that we were done we went to our hotel for lunch. I ate lunch at a chicken place with Kevin and Nicole, and the we wandered around and bought ice cream and I got ripped off buying earrings from some vendors. Then we all had to get back on our bus and go back to the ruins to go to the Museum, which is a very boring place, but I spent most of the time having random dance parties and taking silly pictures with Cesia and Kenia and Stefany and everyone, so it was fun.

Sr. Carlos PG-ifying MTV for us hahaha

Sonia, Stefany, Kenia, Cesia, and I

Kenia, Sonia, Stefany and Cesia being cool

Cesia at Cafe Americano

    When we got back to our hotel, Nicole and Kevin were going to dinner, but I wasn't hungry so I wandered around the park a little bit until I bumped into Kevin-- the other Kevin, Kevin M, and we had coffee and chatted. Not for the first time, I missed the memo on the dress code for the evening. All of my classmates were painted and primped to the max in heels and dresses, and I had only brought jeans and sneakers. School dance? Jeans and sneakers. Going to Cafe Americano? Bring out the heels. Hondurans confuse me.
    Then I bumped into Cesia and her friends, and we all decided to take a ride in one of the taxi cabs, which is like an event in Copan. Cesia talked him into charging us only 15 lempiras, but I would have paid 100. It was far more thrilling than any roller coaster, because there were a few times when it actually seemed plausible that I might die.
    And then we all hung out and walked around and chatted some more, and then I bumped into Kevin and Nicole again and hung out with them. While we were talking, I was approached by a news lady with a big microphone who wanted to interview me for TV. The one day I didn't do my hair! I wasn't sure why she wanted to interview me exactly, she just asked me where I was from and if I was enjoying Honduras, etc.  This is the second time I've been on the news in Honduras. I guess not much goes on here. So yeah, I spent the rest of the night just hanging out with classmates some more, and it was really fun!
    The next day we immediately got on our buses and headed home. Nicole invited me over to her house and she and Kevin and I hung out and made some of the coffee she had bought for me in Copan as an "early birthday gift" because she knows I love coffee. It was really good!
   Afterwards Kevin and Nicole were going to our classmate Javier's 19th birthday party, and somehow I ended up going too although I hadn't actually been invited. It was fun, we sat on the roof and ate cake and joked around.
    Gabi asked me what I had planned for my vacation week, and everybody laughed at me because up until that point I had had no clue that I had a vacation week. So I have this whole week off! This will have made for, what, five whole days of school I've attended in the last four weeks? I love my life. I spent monday and tuesday just lazing around, reading and eating and sleeping and trying not to get fat. On wednesday Cesia invited me to watch movies at Kenia's house. Cesia came and picked me up in her taxi cab-- she has, like, her own personal taxi driver buddy, and for some reason he let me go free. Sweet! We watched Paranormal Activity 1 and 2, which I do not think are the slightest bit scary but it was hilarious to watch how the girls reacted. Then Cesia and I left early and walked to her house. When we were walking Cesia got self conscious and whispered "Kaiti! Why is everybody staring?" I laughed and said, "Because I'm a gringa!" Yeah, everybody stares at me all the time, pretty much. It's pretty nerve-racking.
    Cesia lives in a Pulperia! How cool. So we just sat in the shop and talked to her sisters and mom and adorable little cousin. Her mom gave me an avocado! I don't know why, but I was happy. I love avocados. Then Cesia and her sister walked me home (our houses are super close!) and Cesia kept asking me when I wanted to come over again so I said "what about tomorrow?" Wow, I am so annoying. But she said they were making pancakes and she seemed excited about the idea of it, so yay! I'm going to go over in a few hours.

These are my "Dos Hombres" Oscar and Kevin. They walk up to me a few times a day and say "Kaiti! I Love you!" hahaha aww <3

Conviviencia

Here's what I ate for lunch today. This trip has been a lot of firsts for me. Today was my first time making eye contact with my food whilst eating it! Haha! It was really good though.
The convivencia was really fun. When I got to school, I went to my classroom and then my class and a few other classes met up and started walking down the street towards the building where we were going to have the convivencia. I was wrong earlier about it being the whole school, it was just my grade, about 60 people or so. We walked for 15 minutes or so until we got to a large building where we all got out fold-up chairs and sat to pray and watch a bunch of random christian videos, including one about a guy with no arms who learned to play worship songs on the guitar with his feet. Impressive. And then the principal said something and then everybody started hugging each other-- this has happened a few times this week, actually, they really like hugs here. So after I hugged pretty much my entire grade, we headed outside and divided into groups where we prepared presentations and posters about God and Catholicism and stuff. Actually, I shouldn't say we, because all I did was sit and look clueless. Then all the groups gave presentations with their posters and I'm not really sure what they said. And then we had break, and a few girls I had been talking to asked me if I wanted to eat with them, and I said yes, excited at the prospect of making new friends. Unfortunately, I believe I also unwittingly caused some drama, because people kept telling me that Nicol was upset that I told her I wasn't going to eat with her and her friends. Oops! Later I told her that I was sorry if I had been rude, though, so I think we're cool now. I like Nicol and I hadn't been trying to ditch her, I just want to get to know as many people as I possibly can! Note to self: figure out how to navigate these scenarios.

After break we played a bunch of really entertaining games and then we walked back to the school. My new friends invited me to come hang out with them at one of their houses, and of course I wanted to, but I told them no because I didn't know how I was going to get home if I missed my schoolbus. Hopefully I'll figure something out for getting around in the future, because I want to be able to hang out with people! One of the girls I met said she lives really close to me, so maybe I'll be able to hang out with her if she lives within walking distance. She wants me to come over because she is dead set on helping me understand programming because it's her favorite class...well I don't know how much hope there is for me, but I'll take all the help I can get!

First day of school!

Today was my first day of school! When I got there I was super nervous. My host mom introduced me to Nicol, a friend of the Ortega's, and she was really nice and she's in my grade so she showed me the way to my first class. I was cheerfully informed that she speaks english, and my only thought was noooooooo! At first Nicol only spoke english to me, but I told her I wanted to speak spanish, so thankfully, she started speaking some spanish. I almost feel weird about asking people who already speak english to speak spanish with me, because their english is usually much better than my spanish, so it takes a lot of patience on their part to try to communicate to me in spanish, but she was pretty cool about it.

Nicol showed me what my schedule would look like and I almost passed out from shock and horror. Everyone told me that school here would be really easy, but I'm thinking they were all wrong. My first class was diseno, or design. It was all a bunch of stuff about "data sources" and "dialog" and "input". The professor dictated the lesson and we all copied it down in our notebooks. Here this is a very typical classroom style because schools don't want to spend a lot of money on textbooks and materials. This is a nightmare for me because auditorily comprehending spanish is twice as difficult as reading it, but I was able to copy everything down with 95 percent accuracy, and then Nicol let me borrow her notes so I could copy the other 5 percent. However, I'll probably be spending a great deal of the afternoon trying to figure out what the heck any of it meant.

Next was Honduran History, but I just doodled because they were doing an exam that I wasn't required to take and then we had programming class. Programming class. I copied down everything on the board, but obviously, I don't have one iota of background knowledge about programming, let alone programming in spanish. The professor walked up to me and asked if I knew anything about programming. Nothing? Really? And then he stood there for a minute thinking, and then he gave me a look that basically said "you're screwed", turned to Nicol, and said, "You teach her". Nicol laughed and did a faceplant on her desk, and then turned around.
"You don't know anything about programming?"
"Uh, no."
"Nothing? Really? Uhh..."
"Uhhh"
"Uhhhh....well, first you...you have to...I don't know where to start."

But then, thankfully, our next class started. Our next class was Computer Repair, which I also know nothing about. Nothing. Really. I just sort of stood around until the professor handed me a metal clippy thingy and a wire, and showed me how to twist them together and then I stood around some more until some girls grabbed this burning stick thing and showed me how to weld something onto the clippy thingy and then they told me I was supposed to wrap the wire thingy around the pencil, and I have no idea what I was doing or why, but apparantly I did it well because somehow I ended up with a wire thingy that everybody was really impressed with. Uh, okay.

After Computer Repair, we had break. I was starving but had left my money in my bag in the classroom, which apparently they lock during break, so Nicol bought me a bag of chips and a juice and introduced me to some of her friends. We did cheek kisses (that's the thing here, no hand-shaking) and sat down in a circle and at first, everyone was really quiet and sullen-looking. I was thinking, is something wrong? Do I smell funny? Do they hate me? But then Nicol said "They don't want to talk to you because they are shy and they don't want to practice their English...even though they should!"

"Oh!" I exclaimed. "No, no, no! Speak spanish, I need to learn!" and then I started talking to them in spanish and they all smiled and started to talk and were surprised that I spoke so much. Apparantly they were shy because they thought they had to talk to me in English! Haha!
After that, Nicol spoke to me mostly in Spanish and told people we met that I understood spanish, thank the Lord.

After break, we had the class Tutoria. To be honest, I'm still not really sure what Tutoria is, but I think it's some sort of economy class. I almost gave myself an aneurism trying to figure out what was going on. Attending class in spanish is really frustrating: I would say that I speak spanish, but when I am sitting in a chair and listening to someone talk sixty miles an hour about a subject I know nothing about, I really have no idea what's happening. Even if I know most of the vocabulary and I would be able to copy the lesson onto a piece of paper, sometimes I just can't put the words together, I don't know the rhythm; the phrases. It's hard to explain-- it's like trying to watch a movie when you're starting it towards the end and the volume is turned way down low. So I want to learn as fast as possible because I hate being that person who walks in on a movie and goes "so what's happening again?"

Our last class was Philosophy. Philosophy! Oh, thank you, sweet Lord! Rousseau, Thoreau, Locke, Aristotle...reading! Speculating! This is something I understand. And we even had a worksheet! Visual aid, yesss. Everybody I've met here in Honduras loves Math, Science, and Computers, but me? I'm from America! We don't have practical classes in High School! I'm used to living in a place where it's completely acceptable-- if not, normal-- to blow off math and to love choir and art and literature, and to have some fluffy plan for the future like studying Literature and writing novels or becoming an actress. (Apparantly they don't even have literature majors in Honduras!) Obviously, Philosophy is going to be my favorite class.

I was informed that they have fewer computer-related classes in the tenth grade, and I thought about asking to switch, but then I found out that seniors (11th graders are seniors here) don't have to take PE. Woohoo! So yeah, I'm staying in the 11th grade.

After school Nicol took me to a "Pulperia" accross the street with some of her friends, and one of the guys bought a 2 liter pepsi bottle to share, but we didn't have cups so we poured it into plastic bags and drank out of them with straws. Haha! I was also given "Churros", which are not, in fact, dough sticks covered in cinnamon and sugar, but a sort of savory chip. Nicol's friends made a few hilarious attempts at English conversation (what's uuuuuuuup?) and I was relieved to find that they are shy about speaking and/or don't speak very much English. Maybe I will learn spanish after all!