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

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.