Lesson 7: There's No Place Like Home, Part 1

For the past two weekends, I have had extended trips to far-off places. During these trips I've had lots of events, adventures, and memories. I've also done a bit of thinking about where "home" is and where I am in relation to the places with which I am familiar. This is Part 1, chronicling a vacation trip to the beach town of Tela.  Stay tuned for Part 2 about going back to PA for my brother's wedding!


Thursday, September 15th was Independence Day here in Honduras.  This means we had no school on Thursday and Friday.  A few friends had an idea to go on a little trip over the weekend. Well, by the time Wednesday rolled around, "a few friends" had turned into 12 people, and "a little trip" had become a large-scale full-tilt all-out hyphenated-word-laden vacation-and-a-half.

Sandcastles in the Sand!

We left at 2:50 on Wednesday right after school (as in, school is over at, ummm... 2:50 on the dot...). We all piled into one of the school's vans to go to the bus station.  We got there at 3:35 and our 3:30 bus had already left for Tela, the beach town where we were headed. Well by the power of the Holy Spirit and high demand for buses to the beach on a holiday weekend, there was another bus leaving at 4:00 that would be stopping at the same rest stop as our other bus, so we could switch at the stop.  This sounded like a risky move, but we thought it was a good idea.  Little did we know what we were getting ourselves into... (dun dun duuuuuun!)
We met the other bus at the rest stop and switched successfully (how suspenseful, right??).  We continued to Tela and arrived with enough time to settle into our "hotel" (we were in the "annex" portion of a big hotel, meaning motel-quality rooms at a hotel price! yippeee!) It actually ended up being a pretty nice place to stay and  it was cheaper than most places in the states, so I guess I shouldn't complain...

Playing in the pool with random children

On the boat with Guatemalan Guy,
Susie, Josh, and Will (and more
teacher friends behind us...)

Anyway on to the adventurous stuff - on our first full day in Tela we hung out on the beach of the Caribbean and relaxed I of course couldn't resist making sand castles. I did what I could, but it's just not the same without Amy Stoddard... there was also a pool at the hotel, which we enjoyed, or more specifically we enjoyed playing "Mono en el Medio" with some kids from Colombia who were swimming there too.
The next day we got a paid boat tour to a peninsula called Punta Sal.  We had a 30 minute boat ride, and there was a Guatemalan family on the same boat, so I took the opportunity to practice some Spanish.  As I spoke to him en espanol, I discovered that his wife lived in Germany and they both are fluent in German.  I turned to my friend Susie, who also happens to be fluent in German, and informed her of this. She proceeded to talk to the Guatemalan guy, in German, about speaking Spanish and English.  When they were done, the guy leaned over to my other friend Josh who only knows English and updated him in fluent English about what he had been saying in Spanish and German.  It was a whirlwind of language learning!

Rainforests in the Rain (Reprise)!

When we got to the peninsula, we got a guided tour through the rainforest - featuring enormous spider webs, rainforests in the rain (again!), plants with really sharp spikes, a much-too-detailed discussion of crabs mating, and the ever-elusive howler monkey (we heard them but they didn't want to show up for a photo op...)
Another  cool thing we did was get out of the boat and swim through a natural rock tunnel that goes under/through the point of the peninsula.  It was all groovy until my heel hit a rock, resulting in me spending several hours with a pair of tweezers extracting shards and slivers of sea junk out of my foot.

Fish. Shrimp. Rice. Smiles. Typical Honduran beach meal!

After the tunnel we went snorkeling, which was awesome! We mostly saw coral and sea urchins, with some giant waving leafy purple things and an occasional brightly colored fish.  We did see a lionfish, but for obvious reasons didn't get too close... it still looked quite impressive!
Later we were fed a very beachy/Honduran meal of rice and fresh fish and shrimp, with a freshly cut coconut and a straw to enjoy.  The stuff's called coconut milk, and although it comes from the inside of a coconut, it doesn't taste like one at all.  It's also not milky- more like lukewarm flat Sprite that happens to be inside a coconut.  Still, quite the experience!

The coconut experience

Among our other adventures during our days in Tela were several pizzerias, exploring the town's "nightlife" (or lack thereof) and a substantially epic trek through another rainforest led by a rubber-boot clad gardener with a machete (an adventure that also included some memorable vine-swinging. Oh, and did I mention that that wasn't the place we thought we were going? We were aiming to end up at a nature park place with hiking and waterfalls.  The place where we did end up was some orchard that's on the same property as a community swimming pool, and a rainforest.  No waterfalls that time, but still epic)


Going on a four-day trip was insightful to my concept of location and "home" because I was thinking of the way things are at the house at the school in El Hatillo, and missing the comforts of that home while we were away. Coming back felt a little like going home, but I think my definition of home is still in the US and Pennsylvania.  Also, in the several days after the Tela trip, I was starting to prepare to go back to PA for my brother's wedding the next weekend.  Some of the older teachers referred to my destination as my "parents' house" which it is, but I hadn't thought of there being a distinction between their home and mine.
There's a perception switch in which I stop thinking of myself as being in Honduras for now as a traveler and start to think of it as living here and making this my home for the time that I'm here.  It's a feeling that initially feels like a betrayal of everything familiar, or a disloyalty to the Pennsylvanian that I've been all these years, but at the same time I've moved on from college and going home to my parents' house every few weeks and I've moved out to a new place.  That's not to say I'll be here forever, I'm still not sure if I'll be here more than one year, but I'm becoming independent and self-sufficient not only by physically providing for myself and living away from my family but also by starting to think of myself as a big kid, a grown-up. Maybe someday I'll get to the level of "adult". But hey, I'm still enjoying being young and frivolous and adventurous.
Speaking of all that, stay tuned for Part 2 where I talk about the aforementioned wedding and the surrounding festivities, with more thoughts on going home and figuring out where exactly "home" is.


Check out more pictures from my entire Honduras experience so far on my Picasa page: https://picasaweb.google.com/108864169548752234306/Honduras