After just over a month of training and preparation, it was time to take a quick vacation to the beach. I promise that sometime early this week I will include a "reflections" post, but since I just returned from the beach, I figured I would write about that first.
The vacation was partly sponsored by BECA as part of a team bonding and final preparations before the school year starts in JUST ONE WEEK. We elected to go to a Garifuna town outside of the more populous Tela, a beach city on the northern coast. This was a good idea as far as transportation and accommodations were concerned, but a bad choice when talking about food and what to do.
The first day was nice. We hung around the beach all day, had a pretty decent dinner and just relaxed away from Cofradía. I was also able to get some good spanish practice in by talking to some of the locals. I know I have not mentioned this aspect of my year so far (and there is much more to come in this blog post), but we have not had the opportunity yet to really speak spanish. We spend most of our time at school, speaking english, or with each other, speaking English. We have tried to institute Spanish-only time, but the truth is it is much more inconvenient and people end up not talking. So the new rule is that whenever we are with a non-English speaker, we have to speak in Spanish. This has worked out well as we often times have just one Honduran with us, but if forces everyone to speak in Spanish. Any way, back to the vacation.
After a pretty lazy day and limited, expensive food options, we decided to go into Tela the next day and see what that city had to offer. We ended up separating a lot that day which was a nice change of pace. We also had a local tour agency approach us about a snorkeling trip that we ended up taking. I spent most of the day in Tela with Matt. We enjoyed the beach, walked around, contemplated buying soccer jerseys and bought some fresh fruit and such to bring back as an alternative to fried fish (and I mean the WHOLE fish). We came back to Triunfo and ended up showering and turning right back around and going into town for dinner and drinks.
But day 3 was really the kicker. Up until this point, the vacation had been a bit of a let down. It was not that I didn't enjoy the beach, rather the food was expensive and fried and i was hoping for a bit more luxury that we have had in Cofradía. None of these things were true and I was a little irked by that. But deciding to take the snorkeling trip was the saving grace. We basically spent the entire day traveling around by boat, stopping occasionally to swim on clear beaches and eat. What made this day awesome was that we ran into a group of Spanish dentists who were doing the same tour through a different company. You may be thinking, "dentists? really? that is what made you day awesome?" Let me explain.
This group of dentists were all between the age of 23-26 and they were all women, very attractive women, except for the one man, Jose, who they, and I liked to call "El Suerte/The Lucky One". They were in Honduras finishing up a month of volunteer work in the area. They had finished their stay and were doing some final traveling before heading back to Spain. We chatted with them where we stopped for lunch, and it was the best spanish practice I have had yet. Hondurans do not speak very clearly and their Spanish is not very grammatically proper or fluid. The Spaniards had very clear diction, a nice change of pace, and used the grammar I learned while taking Spanish classes. Needless to say this was a positive experience. Beautiful, spanish-speaking women on the beach. We invited them to grab a beer when we all got back to Tela and they actually showed up. They had to leave that night for their next destination, so we couldn't keep the conversation going too long, but all in all it was great practice. The only thing is now I have to go to Spain to verify if all Spanish dentists look like this.
But alas, I am back in Cofradía, sunburnt, sweaty, and it's raining outside. I posted pictures from the vacation, so click the link at the top of the page or go here to see the latest.
¡Viva España!
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