1st of july

la ceiba wakes up insanely early, or well it looks like the whole honduras wakes up early because your hours of activity are limited to those during the daytime and that means that the classes at the central america spanish school start at 7.30, which is painfully early. the first day which was monday was marked by hot sunny weather and new faces which mostly are american or canadian. classes are all individual and my maestra (teacher) leslie only has to put up with me :) must admit that right from the beginning most of the time is spent discussing every-day life in honduras and what not which is exactly what i need. so this was a positive start. not such a positive start was the fact that my fifth day out of 2 moths to come in honduras had to also include a visit to a doctor. sun+vichy sun screen combination resultated in a strong allergic reaction and so marianne and i had to explore the local medical centre. to my greatest surprise things went really smoothly there and within an hour i was out with a prescription for some antihistamins and such things (my nordea visa electron didn´t let me down btw) and a recommendation to stay out of the sun. sounds difficult right in a country which is so close to equator?well not really, i just had to adopt the local style and move about the city with a big dark umbrella for a few days. the ironical bit is that i came all the way from finland to get some sun in central america and as soon as its first rays hit me i got an allergic reaction. well, anyway the allergy is gone now and the umbrella mainly serves as a weapon against tropical showers.

tuesday was a good day to explore the nearby villages (back to the chickens and the pigs in the backyards) and so marianne, her flatmate dan from US and this guy scott from canada and i decided to catch a ride to a garrifuna village some 30km away from la ceiba. the village is known for its population which is mostly descendents of african and further ethnic mixtures that have been occuring in the region since the first black slaves were brought here. they tecnically speak spanish but no one understands them anyways because of the particular dialect they have. the village is called sambo creek and what makes it great is the fact that there are clean beaches there unlike in la ceiba where the beach is contaminated due to some reason which i don´t know. the amount of garbage on the streets is though precisely the same as everywhere else. plastic bottles being the most common view, i guess outnumbering the coconut trees nowadays. right, so tuesday was then spent in a hamac in the shade drinking soda and swimming in the carribean sea. naturally we couldn´t leave sambo creek without tasting its typical coconut bread. had to engage in a lot of conversations with the locals in order to locate finally this house where fresh coconut bred loaves were being taken out of the oven. an extremely chatty local chap told us aaaalll about the village and his life and his daughter and i can´t even remember what else while taking us to his aunt´s place where the actual loaves were baked. the day seemed perfect until the moment we got on this public bus that no longer scares me though. first it was just cloudy then it started dripping and the moment we got off that bus it was a full-scale hurricane mitch going on. or that´s how we perceived it after getting soaking wet in no more than 20sec and seeing some palmtrees falling down because of the wind. the minihurricane was though over in some 20 min and one would think that that´s it, the problem is solved. not really. la ceiba is built on swamps so what happens every day when it rains between 4 and 6pm is that the water accumulates on the streets, gets mixed with the dirt and the grass (pavements are virtually non-existent here) and this mud is what one´s feet and shoes have to put up with on the way home. some places get so flooded the normal taxi can´t drive there and the only car that can drive is this jeep 4x4 or a pick-up track, which most of the population drive here. quite crazy one must admit. the only good thing that results from this is that the air is always wonderfully cool and clean after the rain.