This week has been loads of fun. On Monday Rosa and I chilled and went to the mall. I saw a lot of amusing things, like misspelled English phrases and knock-off forever 21 dresses (Forever 21 is a knock-off brand). I couldn’t have bought much even if I had wanted to because there are only three sizes at the mall in Comayagua: Small, Small, Smaller. Ok, so they call them small, medium and large, but what lies! Now I understand why everyone in Comayagua wears such tight clothes! However, I did manage to squeeze into a XL cookie monster t-shirt-- please, no comments about the irony-- and I bought some ridiculous blue suede strappy heels because they were really cheap. I tried them on in the store and I could see clear over the heads of everyone throughout the mall. Hmm, maybe I’ll wait til I get back to America to wear the ridiculous strappy heels.
On Tuesday Rosa and I were off to camp with the youth group. We got up early to go to the church and piled into the pack of a truck with 30-something other kids to head off to our camping grounds, which actually turned out to be Giovanni’s huge backyard-- haha! The trip was really fun. There were a lot of sermons and there was a lot of singing, and the youth group split into three groups that competed against each other in a bunch of silly games. I got the opportunity to get to know some of the girls from our church, which made me really happy.
The only part of the camping trip that wasn’t any fun was the actual camping part. The night of our trip it rained for, like, the first time in Honduran history, getting our tents and beds soaking wet, and it was actually cold, the one time I didn’t have access to the sweater I felt stupid for packing. Although we did our best to dry our blankets by the fire, that night was not very comfortable.
On Thursday, our family headed to Tegus to stay at the grandparent’s house with Gracia and her family. For two days we all watched soccer, slept, and ate and ate and ate. Rosa’s Abuelita can really cook! We ate tamales, pancitos, soup, and best of all, fijoles, guajada, and tortillas all day long. I think her tortillas were the best I’ve tried yet. She made two kinds: “new corn” tortillas and regular “maza” tortillas. I am officially obsessed with tortillas (which is funny, because my attitude upon arrival approached apathy) and I know that I will never again be satisfied with those rubbery store-bought things I called tortillas in my former life, so I’ve been bugging everybody about my desire to learn the ways of the tortilla. To my delight, la abuelita endeavored to teach me how they are crafted. She was making regular maza tortillas, which simply contain maza and water, unlike baleada tortillas which contain flour, egg, and salt. First, she took a small lump of the dough on her hand. Then, she rolled it into a small, smooth ball. Then she took it between the tips of her fingers and the flat part of her left and and used her right hand and fingers to spin it, applying the slightest amount of pressure with her fingers and the surface below her thumb until the ball was slightly flatter. Then, she placed the dough on a circle of plastic wrap and the tortilla disappeared between a whirlwind of hand and emerged a beautiful, perfectly even white circle. She pealed the plastic wrap off and stuck it on the tortilla-cooker-pan-thingy. Then I was supposed to do the same. Well, I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I followed the motions and although I heard no words from the tortilla master, Gracia was satisfied with my work. “Perfect!” she exclaimed with wide eyes. “You should be proud, most Americans can’t make tortillas.” Maybe the tortillas can feel my love.
Besides cooking, we also took a walk around the beautiful “rio”, which is more like a creek, and took a little trip to the nearby town to buy toilet-unclogging-supplies, where I got a glimpse at what the rest of Honduras was doing during Semana Santa week. I saw tons of beautiful alfombras, ornate carpets decorating the street formed from dyed sawdust that picture bible scenes, and people walking around with statues and crosses and things, and even a casket containing an intensely creepy mannequin Jesus. Fascinating. I know they do reenactments of Jesus’s crucifixion, too, because a classmate showed me a video during lab class (she was Mary, she proudly announced). It was so realistic it was a little hard to watch. That’s pretty much all I got to see of the Semana Santa traditions because my family is evangelical, so they consider many of the catholic traditions to be pagan.
On Saturday we were off to the city to do some shopping, but first we went to Valle de Angeles, a pretty little tourist town bordering the city where I first stayed at orientation. We walked around a bit and looked at some interesting knick-knack stores, then headed off to eat a lunch of pupusas at a “pupuseria” and to do some shopping at the mall in Tegus. When I stepped into the shopping mall, I could hardly believe I was still in Honduras. The mall was huge and filled with American and European stores like Zara and Aldo and even designer brands. We shopped around a bit and then went to “Café Americano”, which is like the Honduran Starbucks, where I was ecstatic to see real actual espresso. After that, we headed back to the quaint town of Comayagua. I have another three days of vacation until school starts!
I took a ton of pictures this week, so I put them on facebook and for those of you creepers who aren't friends with me on facebook (hi, creepers!), I made a photobucket for you guys right here:
Or add me on facebook right here:
