¡Bienvenidos a Honduras!

Hola todoas de mis amigas. Ahora yo estoy en Honduras en un cafe de Internet. * Hello to all my friends. Right now I am in Honduras in an Internet Cafe.

I still can´t belive I am in Honduras. Just this morning I woke up in my host family´s house and was expecting to be in my bed at my parent´s house with my cat sleeping at my feet. Not exactly. Honduras is great. I am in a city called Copan Ruinas and am taking classes at a Spanish school here. The town is small (about 7,000) and is more of a tourist town, but very safe and calm at night. I am here with one of my roommates from college and we are both staying with the same host family about a 15 min. walk from the school, up a huge hill. I really like my teacher at the school and feel like I am learning a lot. There are a lot of students at the school from the States and so we do speak some English outside of class, but do try and use Spanish as much as possible, after all that´s why we are here.

I love the host family that I am staying with while I am here. The family consits of the mom and dad, their 14 yr. old daughter named Cari, 12 yr. old son Franklin, and 2 yr. 8 month old daughter named Lizzie. The dad´s mother lives above them and is down in thier house a lof helping out with meals and taking care of Lizzie when the parents are at work. My roommate from college and I both have our own bedrooms and share a bathroom. Bathing here is interesting. We haven´t had running water in the house since we have been here, so we bathe with a bucket and a cup. It´s really not too terrible and I did the same thing when I was in India and Mexico, but it will be nice to have a real shower when/if the water comes back on. If it doesn´t, Mom, be prepared for me to be in the shower at home for at least 30 min. when I return.

Each week the school hosts a trip to a different "tourist attraction" in the area, and this week it was to the Hot Springs that are about 40 min. outside of the town. There were 9 students total that went, and we had so much fun! There was a main pool that we didn´t have to pay for, but up all chose to pay a little more and go up the mountian to the spa area of the Hot Springs. Up the mountain there was a pool for a foot massage where one side of the small pool had hot water and the other had cold water. You were supposed to walk around the pool with hot water and then switch to the one with cold water. It was comical to see the nine of us walking around these pools in circles over and over again. The was also another pool that was for mud bath. It wasn´t one where you sit submerged in a pool of mud, but rather one where you could slather yourself with clay from the river below and sit there for several mintues waiting for it to dry before washing it off. All of the girls did this of course and to our surprise, the two guys that came with us joined in later and slathered themselves with mud as well. The Hot Springs were great and it was nice to get away from the town for a couple of hours and relax.

This Sunday myself, my roommate, and a couple of other people from the school are going to the Myan ruins that are about one mile from the town. On Tuesday a couple of us went to the Museum that is at the ruins and I am really excited to see the real thing. The park that the ruins are in is huge, so we are getting there when it opens and staying until we´ve seen all that we wanted to. I will, of course, be taking a lot of pictures while I am there and will post some of them later on when I return to the States.

¡Adios y vaya con Dios!
Julia J.