It´s a fried, fried world

We are back in Santa Rosa after a little jaunt to the town of Gracias, Honduras. We were planning to stay a while but all of the hotels in the town were full because the town was having its annual festival to celebrate Honduran culture and independence. We did manage to see a bit of a parade and browse through the street fair. It was actually quite similar to what we would call a carnival, minus the rides, in the states.

A highlight was going to Celaque National Park, a beautiful cloud forest that contains the highest peak in Honduras. We did a day hike and had the whole park to ourselves; we hiked to a lookout spot and saw some primo waterfalls. And also the weirdest-looking creature we´ve ever laid eyes on. It was a cross between a bug and a mouse and a bird. It had white, fuzzy, feathery-looking wings (the fur looked like a mouse´s), and a blue body, about the size of a mouse. The white, furry "wings" tapered at the bottom, much like those of some butterflies, and formed a white, fuzzy string that hung down a couple inches. Totally bizarro. We were in awe yet somewhat afraid of it because it was so unlike anything we´d ever seen. It´s called an "alma del perro" ("soul of the dog"). The hike was quite strenuous, and being sweaty and exhausted, it took everything we had to refrain from breaking the Honduran law and swimming in the adjacent river that supplies much the country´s and some of El Salvador´s drinking water.

After the hike Chris proceeded to grow quite ill and the next day I joined him with a bad cold. So now we are back in Santa Rosa. So we´re resting for a few days. Last night we saw "Shrek 3" at the 2nd-run theatre (the price still didn´t beat the $1.50 showings in Eugene) in Spanish, of course. We both did very well with our comprehension, I´m proud to say. Theatres in Honduras are pretty much the same as ones in the States except for the fact that people don´t turn their cell phones off and engage in loud conversation throughout the movie. Which doesn´t surprise me, because people are just generally louder here. They blare their music from both their homes and their cars, they have no muffler laws so cars create quite a racket, and standard practice for all vehicles is to honk their horns at every other car they pass, and sometimes nearly every pedestrian they pass as well. Another popular, noisy custom is for vans to drive up and down the streets, blaring political propoganda or retail advertisements. Here in Honduras the adverisements vary greatly, in Guatemala they all tended to be for cooking oil.

Last night was our first experience with cucarachas in our hotel room. Which I must say is strange for two reasons:

1) This was only the third time in all of trip when we´d seen cockroaches and we expected to see lots more in this area.

2) This was a very clean hotel, much cleaner than some in which we´ve stayed. In fact, we´ve ranked it as one of our faves.

But now we´ve changed into a newer room and are much happier about the prospect of going to bed without the lovely sound of scurrying cockroaches.

Nevertheless, things are good and we´re getting excited about getting into El Salvador. Chris is eagerly awaiting some new cuisine than involves something other than tortillas and fried chicken and french fries. I was of course expecting a multitude of tortillas (actually where here in Honduras, flour tortillas are just as common as the abundant corn tortillas of Guatemala), but I never thought that fried chicken and french fries would be a part of the daily fare. Chris and I are a little tired of fried food and have resorted to occassionally buying crackers, processed cheese and meat for lunch when we´re just too burnt out on the deep fried variety. Chris read in his guidebook that there´s a restaurant in San Salvador that specializes in large, green salads. I thought he was going to cry when he read it to me...