My Birthday :)

    Sorry this blogpost is a week late! I was having technical difficulties. I'm having a great last few days here, but I'll have to catch up on those later. 

    I had an awesome birthday week. On wednesday I got to skip school and go to Tegus to buy dresses for me and Rosa. She needed a second dress for her graduation dinner, and I needed one for her prom night. It was hard for me to find a dress, even in Tegus's big malls. The Honduran brands didn't fit right and the American brands were incredibly overpriced! But I found a grey strapless one that worked okay. Rosa found a pretty cream-colored chiffon dress.

    I was glad we went to Tegus because it also gave me an opportunity to get a small present for nicole-- her 18th birthday was on Thursday! I went over to her house after school with my backpack stuffed with beauty supplies: she had designated me as her stylist for the occasion, and I was happy to take the job. I straightened her normally curly hair, shaped her eyebrows, did her makeup, and instructed her to wear a dress. She looked fabuous.

    I had such a fun time at her party! I'm finally comfortable around all my classmates and I didnt deel awkward for a second. 

    Friday I had a party as well. Since my birthday was on saturday, Nicoles family and mine (who are good friends) decided to have a dinner at the fanciest restaurant in town. I think it was called El Todito. We had salads and trays stacked so high with chicken, steak, pork, and sausage that I was surprised our table managed to eat them. Everything was delicious, and then we had cake! Afterwards Nicole slept over at my house. We painted each others nails and listened to music and watched movies and ate cake for breakfast and it was great! But she had to leave for her cousins house the next morning, so she couldn't stay for my (second) birthday party that Cesia arranged. 

    Cesia showed up at my house around two and pretended she had an egg. She had been telling me all week she was going to crack eggs on my head on my birthday, because thats a tradition here in Honduras. I screamed and locked myself in the bathroom but she told me she was joking so I cautiously came out. She presented me with a giant, beautiful birthday card. "Read it!" She demanded happily. "Read it all! I wrote easy spanish so you would understand!" And I did! It was laced with sentiments such as "I love you Gringa!" And "I'll never forget you!" I gave her a big hug and then she offered to do my hair. After I was all ready, we called her taxi driver and went to Kenia's house. 

    Cesia had invited 10 or so people to go to La Princesita with us, but only Nidia and Kenia could make it. I didn't really mind, small groups are fun too. They treated me to a giant Baleada-- the ones at the Princesita are three times the normal size-- and a piece of cake, which we promptly stuck 17 candles into. They told me they had been practicing Happy Birthday in English so they could sing to me. I had mentioned I knew the song in Chinese, and they wanted me to teach them. After they had sung happy birthday to me in both chinese and english, I blew out my candles. There wasn't enough cake to push my face into (another honduran tradition), but they flung frosting at my face. This turned into a bit of a food fight, and needless to say, we were getting some pretty strange looks at this point. What would I do without these girls? 

     Cesia presented me with another beautiful card from all of them, and then we left. I thought I was going to go home, but Kenia and Nidia were going to a concert, and they invited me to go with them. It was a "Battle of the Bands" concert with a bunch of bands from Honduras. I was surprised by how good they were! I only got to see a little of the concert because it started late and I left at 9, so I spent most of the times hanging out with classmates and friends of Kenia's, and it was really fun.

    I sort of feel like I had a party that lasted all week. People kept asking me if I was sad that I wasn't home for my birthday, but I honestly wasn't. I feel so blessed to have such great friends here, they made me feel so loved and special and I had an amazing birthday. 

    On sunday instead of having church, our church had a Garage Sale, and I got to go help out. I love garage sales! And this was the garage sale of my dreams: all of the clothing and everything was under a dollar and oh-so-very-vintage. But of course I couldn't shop, because I don't have room in my suitcase. So I stayed far away from the 1 lempira bin (the DIY possibilities!) and focused on helping out. I'm good at these things, and I think I was a lot of help. One of these days, I'm going to go vintage shopping in a third world country. That would be rad. 

Here's a picture of my friends with a hobo.

Camping

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:

http://s1154.photobucket.com/albums/p521/blogginghonduras/

Or add me on facebook right here:

http://www.facebook.com/kaiti.pritchett