Hitchiking in Tegus

So I was back in Tegus for the weekend! We have the day off today (Monday) -- it's the "Day of the Soldier" or something like that. Anyway, so I left right after school on Friday (got a ride with some other teachers) and am leaving to go back to Catacamas later today. When I got here on Friday I went to a play at Justin's school with him and got to meet some of his students and some of the other teachers -- the play was really good and I concluded that the Tegus school has a bit more money than the school in Catacamas. For instance, the auditorium was huge and there were probably hundreds of people there. (We don't even have an auditorium.)

Had a great weekend in Tegus...best call of the weekend was hitchiking a ride to Tegus from a city called Santa Lucia that Justin and I visited yesterday. So to get to this little town we took a bus -- a bus that was actually headed to another city called Valle de Angeles. The bus driver claimed that a bus to Santa Lucia wasn't going to come for like three more hours, so we had better hop on his bus to Valle de Angeles and we could get off early at Santa Lucia. Well that was more or less a mistake. Okay so it costed us like 25 cents instead of 10, but I guess I can handle that part...The issue is that Santa Lucia is only more or less on the way to Valle de Angeles. He dropped us off and then we had to walk up a steep and windy hill for like a half hour. The worst part of this story, though, is that while we were walking TWO buses passed us that were going to Santa Lucia from Tegucigalpa. Dangit.

But we made up for our bad decision in the morning by deciding to hitchike our way back -- the bus for Tegus was going to leave at 4, and we got to where the bus was at 3:30. So instead of waiting we decided to just start walking and try to get a ride (if we couldn't get a ride we figured the bus would catch up to us eventually and then we could just hop on). So a younger couple picked us up (well, kind of a couple -- when we asked them if they were dating he said that they were just getting to know each other still and she responded, "Ya we've been getting to know each other for three years..." Ha). Anyway so they ended up taking us out to eat and then we went with them to Valle de Angeles (another small town up in the mountains) before they dropped us right off at Justin's house in Tegus! And get this...the girl is from Catacamas! What are the chances?! She's studying in Tegus right now at the University but she said she will probably be back in Catacamas this week because they have some time off from school...and she said she'd take me to go see the caves in Catacamas! So I'm feeling great about that.

The two cities were both really nice -- Santa Lucia had some really nice views of all of Tegucigalpa and some nice parks. We just walked around the city for the whole morning, on a hunt for licuados (smoothies). The guidebook had said that "the park is a great place to sit down and nurse a licuado," so we were determined to do exactly what the guidebook said for some reason. Then we asked some kids where the best licuados were, and they said there weren't any! Of course that made us even more determined to find the licuados...at this point we didn't really even want any; it was just the principle of the thing. So we actually finally found two random girls with a roadside stand and a blender who were selling some...turns out they had forgotten they needed an outlet so we had to wait a while while she found a power outlet. It's a miracle I didn't get sick from that milk or the strawberries...

Valle de Angeles was also really nice but a little more commercialized/touristy. We didn't have much time there because it started to rain, so we just stopped to eat some pupusas at a little restaurant and talk to our new friends. Other than our trip to Santa Lucia/Valle de Angeles yesterday, Justin and I mainly just chilled around his house and played with the grandkids all day Saturday. We got some ice cream from the ice cream truck, ate these little popsicles called paletas, played the Spanish Bananagrams I brought (they loved it!), played hide-and-seek, and played a weird version of American football with an old 2 liter pop bottle we found. Overall, I'd say the weekend was a success (besides the fact that I didn't get any of my grading or lesson planning done...but, let's be real, I wasn't really expecting to).