Our first proper day in Honduras!

Anna and I both woke up around 5am, sounds crazy early but for us it felt like midday. We needed to be at school to meet Vanessa at 12, but by 9 o'clock we were getting so bored we decided to go for a walk. The first thing we realised….we most definitely stand out!! We carried on, ignoring the stares and saying the odd good morning (everyone knew we were English, even people coming from behind us who said "excuse me", hopefully we will be blending in by the end of the year) in search of the beach, but to no avail. Eventually we admitted defeat, we had no idea if we were even heading in the right direction for the beach and the clouds were looking ominous, so we headed back home.

The school is beautiful, it's painted blue and orange and is on two levels with all the classrooms looking out over the courtyard. Anna and I were very pleased to discover that all the classrooms have fans, we would never have coped otherwise. All the other teachers were really friendly and welcoming, but many of them don't speak English so we began practicing our Spanish straight away. Vanessa told us that we will be teaching Grade 3 (age 8) or below for English, Maths and Science and we both got very excited. We are looking forward to getting our schedules on Monday to see which one of us got Kindergarden (the youngest) :P

After school Vanessa took us into Tela so that we could exchange our money, sort out our phones, and most importantly have lunch!! On the way in we caught our first glimpse of the Caribbean sea and got to have lunch at Vanessa's brothers hotel/restaurant overlooking the sea, for lunch we both had fresh juice and a typical Honduran meal called trajedas which is shredded chicken and cabbage (in some lovely sauce) over plantain chips, I'm still undecided on the plantain (although it is a staple here so I will probably get used to it) but the chicken was delicious.

Today we also moved in with our host family, Karina and her daughter Ariana who is 7, Ariana is very excited about having us in the house and is acting as the perfect little hostess, she is going into Grade 2 and is hoping that one of us will teach her J Ariana and her neighbour Sofia who is 14 then took us for a walk to the "gas station", unfortunately the sea is too far to walk so we are waiting for our bikes to make that trip, then Sofia let us use the shower at her house as our house had no water. Showers over here are heavenly, they are a freezing cold , uncontrollable spurt, but the second you get out the heat hits you and you wish you could stay in the shower all day!! We then settled down for the night as we were on CODE RED for a hurricane that was expected to hit during the night.

Sometime in the middle of the night Anna and I were both woken up by the LOUDEST thunder I have ever heard, ordinarily I would say that I enjoy thunder storms…that was until last night, it sounded like the sky was falling down, scary :/ Hopefully we won't be having another one of those for a while, although it is hurricane season so we need to be prepared. The thunder must have stopped because we both fell back to sleep and woke up to a drowned Tela this morning.

Finally I must tell you what I had for breakfast, Mum will be especially jealous, we had a plate of fresh watermelon, papaya, bananas and apples, I could definitely get used to that.

I hope this is as interesting to you as it is too me, I just feel as though I need to write everything down so that it doesn't get forgotten. We have a day off today, but then we have a few days at school to learn the ropes before the children return on the 15th. I'm starting to get very excited.

Lots of Love

Also a last note, these posts and the ones to follow may have been written a few days before they are actually posted as I do not always have access to the internet, I will try to remember to write the date they were written on the bottom J

7th August

Live Update: A PIG IS TRYING TO GET INTO THE HOUSE!!