Here we are

So I bet you’re wondering why two totally non-dorky people would title their blog “Four Eyes on the Mountain”. Although Melanie does need glasses rarely when its too dirty for her to put her contacts in you can mark off the association with horn-rimmed glasses. So here are the reasons:

1. Most blogs seem to be one person’s take on things and just by reading ours you’ll be able to get some insight from both of us. We’re hoping to post at least once a week, alternating who gets to be the author.
2. The thing we’ll be looking at the most here is The Mountain (Celaque). Our house is right at the base of the tallest mountain in Honduras. Its looks majestic and wild and I think it will always be a reference for us as we write about what goes on in rural Honduras.
3. Its really hard to come up with a name for a blog, especially with two people deciding.

Well, here we are…entry number one (with a little info from both of us interspersed). We made it down here after a long journey from Chicago, leaving my parents’ house there at 3 am (thank you to my mom for sacrificing a night of sleep) and after 2 flights and a bus ride, arriving at 7 pm here. The trip was pretty smooth over all, with no lost bags or missed connections, but I can’t say it wasn’t without note. When we were checking bags in Chicago we made sure to have our two checked bags under 50 pounds so we wouldn’t have to pay the surcharge. Our strategy for making this happen was to put all of our really heavy stuff into our carry on bags that never seem to get weighed. Whenever we walked around we acted like “Wow, these are so light!” when in reality they weighed 50-60 pounds. The airline person snagged Melanie’s carry on though and it weighed 47 pounds. He told us we needed to take some weight out, so we went to a lot of trouble finding heavy little things to take out, and reweighed it until it was 40 lbs. Then when were out of his sight, we put it all back in. A very ineffective system, and it doesn’t seem like it would matter whether the bag or you is 8 pounds heavier. It is also a very good thing that we didn’t lose any bags, as the baggage office at the airport in Honduras is only open on Tuesdays and we arrived on a Thursday.

Somebody involved with the school picked us up from the airport, brought us to the bus station, and sort of set us up with the right bus, but we had to spend about three hours waiting in the bus station for the direct bus to Gracias. It was really hot in San Pedro so we passed the time by watching our pile of bags to make sure they didn’t get stolen and drinking water out of bags (just like the milk we used to have in school for anyone who remembers). When we got on the bus they were pretty angry that we had eight bags for two people, which all had to be stored on the racks above everyone’s heads. Although it was called the “Express” bus, it wasn’t exactly nonstop. We were the only people who rode the entire way and most people were only on for a few of the cow dodgings and death-defying passes on blind hills and curves. The bus driver was a very impressive driver though and somehow got the bus full of people and stuff going about 80mph. We never got passed by anyone. The scenery was beautiful as well. The entire trip (somewhere around 150 miles) was entirely through hills and farms and rivers, which is not really what I pictured Honduras to be like. Lots of farms were on what looked to be a 60 degree incline with either corn growing (I have no idea how long it must take to harvest) or cow terraces everywhere.

Like I said before most of the trip was pretty smooth, but the only tough part came when we got to Gracias. It was dark, we just finished getting all of our bags off the bus and it started to pour. We thought someone was going to meet us at the bus station but that apparently was a miscommunication and eventually we figured out that we needed to take a tuk-tuk (motortaxi in Honduras) to the hotel that the former owner of the school runs. It’s a really nice hotel and we’ve been staying here while our house is being prepared, and while we wish we were in our house it is a good place to spend some time.

Right now, we are on Mountain time, so we’re 2 hours behind Eastern and 1 behind Central. When daylight savings time begins there, we’ll be on Central time because Honduras doesn’t do daylight savings. One of the most surprising things that we noticed right away is that it gets dark early here…around 6:30. They say that the length of the days doesn’t vary much throughout the year, though, so even in winter it will get dark around the same time—maybe half an hour earlier. I guess that’s because it’s closer to the equator than home. So there isn’t much difference in weather or daylight here throughout the year, and I wonder if that will make time pass faster or slower? We’ll see…that seems to be the answer to everything around here. I don’t think it’s possible to live here happily and not be flexible.

Speaking of being flexible, we still don’t really know what we’ll be doing at the school. The people in charge are supposedly arriving tomorrow (although they were supposed to arrive today), so I expect they have some information about what we’ll teach and what kinds of expectations they have for us, but for now, we’re just relaxing, exploring the area, and meeting people. Right now, we’re still staying at the hotel in town (a very nice place, actually, and owned by someone associated with the school), but we’ll be moving out to our own house tomorrow (so we hear). The town is called Gracias, and the school is about 4 miles away in Villa Verde. The dirt road there is uphill the whole way, but the views are beautiful. Our house is another 2/3 of a mile or so past the school on the same road, right at the entrance to a national park and a mountain called Celaque. It looks like we’ll be getting plenty of exercise when we want to go into town! We’re thinking of getting some bikes, though, in hopes of making travel a little faster (on the downhill trip into town, anyway). We’ve walked up and back a couple of times now, and it’s do-able, especially with a stop at this little pulperia along the way, which is a tiny convenience store run by this moustached guy named Jesus. He has a stuffed snake on his wall that, according to him, he killed after it bit him while he was walking through the forest on a 6-day trek. Most everyone we’ve met is really pretty friendly and patient with our broken Spanish.

As for our house, we’ll post some pictures of our house when we get settled in and find some furniture, but to give you a rough idea, it’s a small blue house made of stone or adobe/concrete, and inside the floors are all tile and the windows have screens (a big relief for us!) and wooden shutters that close from the inside. We have a front room—future living room—a kitchen with a fridge and hopefully a stove/oven soon, a bathroom, and two bedrooms. There isn’t much furniture in any of the rooms yet, but we do have a bed and some shelves. We’ll see what else we can scrounge up at the school and around town. We have a yard, too, so we’ll try to plant a garden with some veggies, make a compost area, and maybe a fire pit. The river runs right by our house down below the yard, so it’ll be nice to hear that all the time.

Today we bought a cell phone, which was actually a lot easier than I was anticipating, and we bought a bunch of food at the supermercado. This store has about as much as a 7-11 or gas station would have in the States, but the owner is named Melanie, and since pretty much everyone in the town knows her, most people can pronounce some version of my name, which here sounds like May-lah-nee-ah. Aaron, like in Japan, is Ah-ron. Anyway, we should be able to use our phone to call home, so we’ll give that a try sometime soon. Hopefully, this combined entry hasn’t been too convoluted, but if you’ve read all the way to the end, maybe you have as much free time as we do right now, and life is good! We’ll try to be regular about adding to this, but we’ll check our email as often as we can as well, so feel free to write! We miss you all and want to do our best to stay in touch! Hasta Luego!