Merry Christmas!

This is our first, weekly on Sunday post.

We arrived on Tuesday 12/20/2011. Our house wasn’t furnished enough (no beds, no stove-oven, no fridge) when we arrived to actually stay there. We stayed at a small hotel on campus for 2 nights. It was very nice and had cable TV with movies in English with Spanish subtitles (Tangled, Toy Story)!

We moved into our “new” house on Thursday. We had a LOT of help from Arie, Namiq, and Oliver to get all the stuff into the house. Stuart made two trips into Tegucigalpa to buy stuff and spent a lot of money getting bare essentials…(still no fridge, washer & dryer until Wed) Ranae kept the troops happy on those days and then moved our massive stuff into the house.

We have had a few observations on Honduras since we arrived:

Henry: Very nice people, a lot of stray animals, like dogs, horses, cows (apparently), and donkeys. Mucho coconuts—we even have a tree in our front yard. I ate a coconut. We saw a giant moving billboard. A famous guitar player was “playing” the guitar on a huge billboard promoting cell phones. We went swimming on Christmas Eve eve at the pool behind the house. There are lots of fires.

Jack: VERY loud trucks pass by our house regularly. People seem more prone to kiss you than in California. We saw a sign for a cockfight, lots of guys riding in the back of pickups. We have a lot fewer raw materials like paper, etc. It is not very Honduran, but very American. “I think I am in culture shock about how much not culture shock I am in. I thought there would be a lot more stuff in Spanish.” There are a lot of people riding motorcycles.

Aspen: I like it. What surprised Aspen was that Honduras was so nice. It looks really nice…I didn’t think it would look that nice.

Ranae: There are a lot of pine trees in the area where we are. I was surprised that I could have conversations (simple) in Spanish. I love the white-stone buildings from the local quarry with the dark mahogany wood it has a classic Spanish look.

Abe: I don’t know.

Stuart: We’re in a dry tropical forest, so we are surrounded by pine forest mixed with broad-leaved trees. Lots of bananas growing around, plus airplant growing on the myriad power lines. We took our annual family Christmas day hike in the back of our house into the mango/avocado orchard. April will be mango time and I am very excited for that. My Spanish is coming back nicely. Traffic in Teguc is unbelievable. I'll try to post something about that later. Our neighbors, Fernando and Evelyn are great and are letting us use their internet and fridge until we get ours next week.