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It took a whole day to get here but so far its been worth all the trouble.  Both Ezra and Itzel were charming travelers – Itzel managed to hold all spitting up for the entirety of the trip and Ezra made friends with almost everyone. 

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I was thrilled to pass an Ikea out by the airport and while I probably won’t visit for the lack of storage space in our luggage, I am just glad to know its there, its blue-lit sign a retail beacon..

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We drove our bizarrely deep-trucked and cramped interior rental car downtown.  After checking in, and picking up our package at the front desk (our stroller was delivered to the hotel- we are that fancy,) we found our 9^th floor room to be well-appointed with Aveda products in the bathroom and down comforters and a stuffed bear on the bed. 

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I think I meant to open the window and let in a breeze but was asleep before I could move my body. 

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We awoke very early to Starbucks coffee in the hotel, doormen, and a cool and pleasantly gray morning,   Breakfast at Mother’s Café was delicious and nearly forty dollars so we are planning to think about how nice it was all this week while we eat whatever from wherever has a dollar menu.

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The 4 square blocks of downtown ....Portland.... we’ve seen are very posh.  But where do they put their garbage cans and recycling cans you might be wondering?  Hidden underground!   

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We are planning to spend the morning taking trains and buying a  ..Portland.. family attractions pass or some such thing, which allows us entry into all the major sites for a fraction of the cost – so says the guidebook we love called “Out and About with ids in ....Portland..... 

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Later today, we meet the Rothchilds – cousins on Josh’s side and our hosts for the next two nights.

Jock and I took Ezra out this morning while Josh stayed in bed due to a minor intestinal ailment that I can no longer conceal, due to his absence from important activiteis.  We met our taxi driver Jesus at 8:30 outside the hotel and rode with him the 1 and 1/2 blocks to our little breakfast and coffee place, Cafe Welchez where everything is perfect until you start ordering cheese.  That's when they walk the goat through the back door and everything takes an extra hour.

We had breakfast with our taxista.  Did I mention arleady that the taxis in Copan are little red 3-wheeled golf cartish contraptions where its perfectly ok to sit in the front whith your 4-year-old bouncing on your knee and hanging out the side while driving over cobblestones?  Anyway, we had decided already that since we were packing so much into one day, we would keep Jesus on retainer- besides whcih I just like the idea of having Jesus on retainer- cuz you just never know. 

I ran three doors over to the Banco Altantico to get our last withdrawal of a cool 4000.00 Lemiras.  All my Spanish left me when I has to explain to the guy with the big rifle that I wanted to go into the regular bank after using the ATM to get some small change.  i don't know why those guys make me so nervous!

After eating we rode out of the town center about 5 minutes away to the Copan Ruinas.  As this was my first Mayan Ruins experience, I may not be a good judge but I think it was amazing.  I expected a few pyramids and some carvings of giant square heads, but was greeted by so much more.  The giant parrots flying and squawking back and forth overhead were a bonus and it was really so cool- a whole little town made of stone.   We skipped the big tour only because of time constraints and met Jesus at 11 sharp Copan time (11:25ish) and rode over to the hotel to check on Josh who was still pale-faced and in bed. 

 

With the clock ticking and checkout time looming, we zoomed over to the Canopy tours and decided it was worth the $100.00 to zipline through the jungle.  I was skeptical at first but after the first of 20 zips, I was hooked.  Ezra and I rode with a guide as we were both a little nervous.  Had you really great eyesight, you might have looked up  an seen three figures hooked together and zipping through the jungle.  Jock rode solo and it was fun to see his skinny legs come swinging onto the platform over and over.  Era was awesome and really loved it.  I am still in disbelief; our longest run was over a kilometer and at least 100 meters above the ground.   The whole trip was about 2 hours with an hour in the air.   

 

So forget the horseback riding.  Ezra now says the Canopy Tour is the coolest thing he has ever done.  Maybe me too. 

 

We got back into the center and dropped Jock and Ezra off to buy some lunch to go (French fries, refried black beans, fried plantains, and some weird cross between cheese sauce and butter) and met Josh at the hotel where he had us packed and ready for out cushy bus ride back to San Pedro Sula.  We are all ready to come home and will be starting that journey at 4am, bound for Asheville for a family visit and then home next week. 

 

We have jointly decided that we love Honduras and that the guide books make a little too much about the threat of mosquitoes.   I might just be a little bitter that I never got to use my mosquito tent.  Or my Neem oil.  Or my Deep Woods Off  Or my citronella candles.  For that matter, it is the middle of the rainy season but we didn't get to use our damned rain coats either.  Oh well.  C'est la vie. 

 

And hasta la vista.

      

I am tired and so overwhelmed that I might not be able to say anything worth reading until hopefully sometime tomorrow, or maybe never again. 

Our ride from Yoro was a funhouse mirror image of our ride in.  Same truck, different driver; Cristobal was paid by Titus to take us on the five hour amusement park ride on dirt through the mountains passes to the capital city of Tegucigalpa..  This time we also had Frank, the big bear of a Cameroonian master's graduate in Yoro working for the funding arm of the Jatropha project, sandwiched between Josh and me with Ezra splayed across all three of us, broken air conditioning and one door that didn't open.  While we had a fine multicultural experience, listening to African music while bumping through Honduras, it all felt slightly disjointed.  

On our driver's advice, we stopped halfway to tie down our bags in the back of the truck.  This kept them safe from any lurking opportunists who might pick them out of the back, but did nothing to protect them from the rainy season downpour that pounded them for forty minutes. Our purchase of the rope led to the opportunity to pee behind a convenience store/ restaurant in an outdoor cement shack while on one side of the shim-sham yard a group of men made more cement blocks and on the other was what looked a birthday party at a group of decorated picnic tables.  In the middle of it all sat a large man smoking a cigarette on a plastic chair with a shotgun propped by his side and a bunch of chicken skulking around, likely horrified to see that pollo was the main dish again.

As we neared the city of Tegucigalpa, the roads inexplicably became worse.  The city situated in hilly valley surrounded by mountains.  The original city itself is full, and over the years fast-expanding, poorer communities have eeked out space on steep hillsides with whatever materials they could obtain, mostly tin and some cardboard.  Any of us who have ever complained about the view that tourists get when they drive into Wilmington via Dawson should just shut the hell up.  As we got down into the city, traffic became a giant game of chicken, the mishmash buildings so crowding the streets they threaten to obscure the roads completely.  Exhaust fumes, honking horns and drivers jabbering .. phones while swerving around each other make Boston driving look like a cakewalk. 

And then up one hill and around another, we are out of the mayhem as quickly as we dropped into it.  The truck sputtered to a stop in front of the most ridiculously upscale hotel where we would spend the night.  A place suggested by our host, the former mayor of Tegucigalpa who will for the next few days oblige us to put on airs, wish we'd brought some nicer clothes and read more Emily Post, and be chauffeured around by his personal driver.         

We met our hosts outside of the small airport and in the 95 degree heat we negotiated how to fit 5 adults, one nin~o, our luggage, two sets of peanut machine molds, 2 boxes of metal parts and the contents of an entire shopping trip Titus had made including some rosemary plants, big plastic tubing and several boxes of I don't know what into one pickup truck.  I was laughing about how it looked like the clown car when 3 cute girls (I learned later they are the local girlfriends of Titus and Joseph who were in San Pedro Sula to be trained for new jobs) were introduced to us as fellow passengers in Titus's pickup on the 2 and ½ hour harrowing ride up into the mountains to Yoro.  In the end the girls took the bus and we got to feel like we had this spacious ride even though in reality we were packed in like sweaty sardines. 

 

The ride was long, bumpy and winding and full of culture shocking sights.  We passed skinny cows and horses and dogs and families on the side of the roads in droves.  Shacks were scattered around and built in every kind of material from corrugated cardboard to cement.   The road to Yoro is considered very good as it is mostly paved but in spots has fallen away completely.  There are no barriers or cones indicating that if you don't swerve into the other lane you might actually fall of a cliff- you just have to know.  As Yoro is literally at the end of the highway, it is a big deal that such a decent road exists in the first place. 

We've been here two days now and are becoming accustomed to the sights and smells of Yoro.  The weather is cooler than in San Pedro Sula as we are in the mountains but the smell of burning wood and sometimes plastic is ever present, and the air is sometimes dusty from the dirt roads that run all throughout the downtown.  Maybe half the roads in the city center are paved and the rest are gravely, potholed and crumbled.  Shops range from those with proper doors to lean-tos that are stuck into the cracks between cement buildings.  Our favorite place to eat is a shack once painted a Caribbean sort of blue.  It is run by a beautiful lady named Margarita and her two daughters.  The wall are made from planks with the warm morning sun shining through, throwing slices of light into an otherwise dank hole in the wall. With four plastic tables, triple the chairs and a kitchen the size of a typical half-bath in the US, they are open only for breakfast when they serve coffee, panqueques and baleados- tortillas with eggs, beans cheese and avocado.  People lean into the open doorway and kids prop up on the window ledge waiting for a seat.  The best part is that it's all served on proper chipped and cracked dishes.  We learned from Margarita that an avocado here costs the equivalent of 20 cents US.  

 

On Monday was the Independence Day parade.  This was a grand affair which drew thousands of people to fill the sidewalks around the center of town.  The parade route snaked all around the dirt and paved areas of downtown and shopkeepers sat in plastic chairs outside, families waved to soldiers and dancers, drummers and young girls dressed in traditional Honduran dress.  Yoro is so far off the tourist path that the four of us made an odd sight as we walked behind the end of the parade.  Some of the local people seemed to think we were part of the procession.  Jock had his video camera filming which made everyone titter and smile and wave.  Sometimes while walking we were followed by some kids watching Ezra's every move who, in contrast to the barefoot shoeshine boys, seemed insufferably privileged in his crocs, sunglasses and backpack occasionally complaining about how he was too tired to walk. 

 

Ezra would like everyone to know that we've taken several rides into, around and out of the downtown area in the back of Titus's pickup.  Bumping around on dirt roads in the back of a pickup has got to be one of the most exciting things about Honduras for him, maybe superseded only by the bag of water, which is very popular here.  It's a 4x5 inch sealed plastic baggie that you bite a hole into and suck the water out, which doubles as a nice cool pack for tired eyes and like the avacodo, costs roughly 20 cents US.    

 

I wish I could better describe Yoro.  I am told its alot cleaner than the cities in Guatelmala.  It is small with about 10,000 people, and just a handful of them are guards that stand with guns outside hotels, banks, and the wierd combination appliance/ bicycle shops.  While the guns seem somehow menacing, the gaurds holdiong them are actaully very friendly.  The are the closest I've seen to a police presence in Yoro.  The town lies in a valley surrounded by partially deforested mountains, and it is poor, poor.  The jatropha workshop part of an open-air tech school complex across from a collection of mishmash shacks behind a wire fence.  Ezra and I watched a family's goings-on from acroos the road for a while before three seriously undernourished, barefoot kids, dirty and adorable, came across the road to play with us.  I was shocked to learn that the sweet little girl who was smaller than Ezra was 8 years old.  The kids were 10, 8 and 2 and spent the whole day unsupervised in the schoolyard shyly watching and fooling around with Ezra while local farmers came to learn how to make the Full Belly Sheller. 

 

Our hotel has windows that shut and air conditioning which is hard to believe really.  We are staying in the nicest place in Yoro, Yoro which costs $30.00 a night and is well-equipped with a restaurant downstairs and tile floors, shoddy staircases.  We checked in and had forty-five minutes before we had to catch up with our hosts in Yoro for dinner.  Titus is a young Dutch fellow working for the past year here with an organization growing jatropha and his colleague Joseph, is a 23-year-old fresh faced Oregonian with a BS in philosophy and a grant to spend a year working for socially and environmentally conscious organizations doing work that matters.

 

We've come to Honduras to do what we are calling a feasibility study for the mobile jatropha processing factory that we are working on.  We is mostly Josh and Jock and some me and not very much Ezra.  But we are here all together after a big journey including a 12-hour drive to get to Camp Chippawa where we spent a lovely night catching up with our dear friends Fonda and James at their soon to be former house in Sarasota, followed by a surreal evening in a hip hostel in South Beach, Miami.

We flew into San Pedro Sula where I got to have my very first Central American shakedown, and it only cost 5 dollars!   We made it through the short, easy and pleasant flight without any trouble at all, except Josh lost the little baggage claim stickers that are stuck on the ticket sleeve.  We stood in the customs line and had our pictures taken, our passports stamped and once we found that all of our luggage had followed us (even that boxes of metal parts for Shellers that look suspiciously like bomb-making material) we breathed a sigh of relief. 

But upon exiting the baggage claim area, I bumped into a young Honduran man in a uniform collecting the stickers and matching them to bags.  Josh, Jock and Ezra had pushed their way past him while he was busy scrutinizing someone else, but as I was pushing a Smart Cart with our oversized backpacks and Jock's suitcase, I got stopped.  He wouldn't let me pass even after I explained in my tiny Spanish that it was that big gringo up there that lost the tags and I was helpless.  He finally settled for looking at our passports and matching them to our luggage.  It was only for the hassle that he suggested we give him money. Josh, who had been called back to show the passports was confused about what was being said and when I told him the guy wanted money he asked out of the side of his mouth incredulously if I was sure.   I was.  "Well, how much?"  I relayed this question to the young man and he only shrugged.  We settled on $5 US which was, in retrospect way too much but seemed pretty reasonable at the time.

We rode the train out of the city and to Alexandria, which until I found out about Old Town seemed like just a gaint mass of townhomes .  David's place is  very close to the metro and he met us there and showed us the way to our home for the night.  After a little lunch and some catching up and one dramatic thunderstorm, we headed back into town.  We got off downtown somewhere near Dupont Circle with a plan to walk to the Adams-Morganton neighborhood, which is supposed to be all those things you hope and urban neighborhood would be.  About 30 seconds out of the Metro Ezra fell asleep and we came upon a gallery with an Oliphant exhibit.  In case you're like me, you might not have known that he's one of the world's most influential political cartoonists.  The gallery had tons of his sketches and sculpture and it was totally cool. 

We continued on for a minute and a thunderclap sent us into the shelter of the covered canopy of an Italian bistro where we had an improptu dinner of really good pasta and wine and later mediocre cappuchinos.  The driving rain drove most people inside but we stayed out enjoying the mistiness of it all.  Ezra slept through most of it and woke up just in time to finish off my pasta and watch some buses and firetrucks hurdle by. 

We slept on bunk beds which would have been more fun if Ezra didn't keep almost falling off the top bunk where he insisted he sleep, and woke up in the morning for a quick tour of Old Town with David before catching the train (did I already say that Ezra is totally old pro with the Metro?) back to Union Station and onto Amtrak.  I could probably happily spend my life at Union Station, if only they were selling houses there.

We passed one more night in Richmond with our friends Helen and Mike and brood before taking the train back to Rocky Mount and then driving three hours home to Wilmington with 15 minutes to spare before I had to be at yoga school!

Last night I heard on the radio that they are working diligently to get a passenger rail line to Wilmington.  THAT would be so great.
 

Back at Embassy Photo, the one guy told me I could have the smiling set of photo for only 5 dollars and he would redo them sans smile for free. I told him it sounded like a bargain but i'd just as soon not keep them as since they were bigger than US passport photos, they would be totally useless in an application I could think of except maybe for collaging.

Ezra made friends with everyone there including a friendly fellow whose myspace name is Pete Mitchell or something, who took not a few pictures as Ezra ran up and grabbed his legs to hug them over and over. The store had what amounted to an aisle down the sideof the counter and Ezra, now overtired from our 4+ hour embassy adventure, ran up and down it stopping as each person he met and doing something that made them pay attention, like slapping their ass. Incidentally, the guys whose real name is not Pete is on his way Syria because he is bored and wants to check out what really happening over there.

Finally, we left. Tucking away the newer, more severe pictures into the depths of my pack, we walked the rest of the way to Dupont Circle Metro stop and rode the longest escalator in the free world down to catch the subway to meet our friend David for a late lunch.

After finishing our fruit and cheese plate - which I highly endorse (Josh and I look at the world though our cheese plate from Starbucks) and my coffee, we got on the move again. The next mile proved as easy as the first and before we knew it we were turning don a lovely tree-lined Wyoming Avenue. I took a picture of the embassy and a picture of myself. If my arms were a little longer or if I could have been bothered to use the self-timimg feature, I might have captured the shot I was hoping for- me in front of the Polish embassy. I should have asked Ezra to snap it, becasue his pictures always come out perfectly quirky with an only an ear in the frame.

We went up to the door and were greeted by a sercurity guard named Macheck (sp) who spoke almost no English and a very well-dressed and proper staff of three who seemed at first not to know I was coming despite a confirmed appointment and not to know who I was when I told them despite 20 months of phone conversations. As Ezra and I were locked in and waited in the little consular room for an hour and a half, I enjoyed watching a TV court show in Polish. I couldn't hear it really, as the volume was very low, so I practiced my Polish lip reading skills while cutting out picutes of things from a Smithsonian museum catalog for Ezra to keep him happy and quiet. In retrospect, I don't think most people bring their three-year-old on embassy business, at least not to te Polish embassy where raising your voice above a barely audible level can actually cause fragile vases to astonishinly crumble into piles of dust.

My friend Mr. Sergustofski took all the papers I had brought and made copies and came back 38 munites later with what is now my own personal DVD copy of Warsaw Uprising, which I simply cannot wait to watch (maybe the next perfect girls night film, if we can't get Manny and Lo.) He then recommneded I fill out some additional paperwork and walk to a place called Embassy Photo and Camera to have yet another round of passport pictures taken. Two things I learned about Polish passport photos that may come in handy to some of you... they are a different size than American passport photos and you CANNOT SMILE AT ALL. I only learned this after we spent a fabulously rauckus time with the old guys at the photo shop, who took an extreme close-up of Ezra and put it as the screensaver of the shop computer. I paid $23.00 for 4 passport pictures (!! I guess they can charge really whatever the like since they are the only place nearby all the embassies.) We trudged back and gave them to the pale-faced lovely who seemed pained to turn us away because my teeth were showing.

So we left on foot from Marcus and Kim's place and had a lovely urban adventure backpacking tour up Colombia Avenue to Embassy Row. Armed with a Google map and my giant pack strapped to my back and Ezra in the rickshod umbrella stroller dragging his feet on the ground for 1.7 or 17 miles in the June humidity, I had my American and my mom's Polish passport stuffed into the hemline of my skirt held up by the elastic in my underwear and held in place by the 600 pound wight of my backpack (cuz you know how they love to slash and grab in big cities.) It was about halfway there when I for Starbucks and decided it was totally stupid to be so worried about someone stealing my passport. So I pulled them out of my underwear and found mine to be almost ruined and soaking wet from the sweat that was pouring down my back. Anyway, my 87th DC Starbucks experience was great and I got to watch two businessy guys huddled over a table taking direction from their girl boss on speaker phone in the middl of the table who kept repeating annoying phrasing like "So, let's keep this straight, I want to train her without letting on that you are, you know, training her." And they would say, "OK, so train her without letting on. How do you recommend we do that?" There were laptops everywhere and cops coming in from walking the beat to grab a quick frozen green tea 1/2 caf skinny latte.

I haven't had a minute to post anything and 217 things of note have occured since the 2 days ago we got here.  We are to leave Marcus and Kim's house this morning with my giant top-heavy pack strapped on- to go on our big errand to the embassy.

Yesterday we trekked around alot, spent the morning at the Natural History Museum where we saw the big deal Butterfly exhibit, alot of skeletons and hung on at the Washington Mall- the giant outdoor space where people just love to protest.  We walked across to the caurosel and had a rickety- nice, ride despite the fact that is was hot, sticky and for some inexplicable reason they were playing Auld Land Sign.

We went to a cook out that moved inside due to rain and I got to quiz all the attendees about what they did for work, how long they have lived in DC and how much their aparttments cost.  

This morning we are off to the embassy to run what I am almost sure would qualify as a fool's errand...

I thought I would call Fonda to catch up during the last bit of our
long ride to the Amtrak station in Rocky Mount, North Carolina.  As
though I wasn't already warned by Kara, when Fonda mentioned something
about late trains- I didn't think she meant mine.  We talked long
enough that she got on the Internet to find me Starbucks coffee in
Rocky Mount (the only one in the town is inside Target) which I didn't
get because A) I couldn't see it even though it was supposedly right
in front of me (how the F can you not see a TARGET?) and B) Ezra had
fallen asleep and I didn't wanna wake him.  I ended up with an
undrinkable McDonald's iced coffee and a fear that I would be a few
minutes later than the 1/2 hour early I was supposed to be to catch
our train to DC.  It didn't really matter at all though because the
train came 4 HOURS late.

Ezra and I had the best time we could possibly have in Rocky Mount for
4 hours.  The highlight was when we got matching tattoos at the dollar
store- one of those where everything really cost something other than
a dollar but unique in that alot of things are used- a thrift store/
dollar store hybrid- and the shining beacon of hope the the revival of
downtown Rocky Mount.  OK they don't really match except in style as
his is a unicorn's head and mine is a dagger stuck through a pretty
pink rose- both have gold edging- you get the point right - they are
really high-dollar looking.     Anyway- I digress.

The train ride was jolly good fun, expect the dining car never
actually opened and I paid $2 dollars for the first bottle of water we
had before finding out they were giving them out for free in the next
car as a concession for being so exceedingly late.  We had a great
time in the really surprisingly roomy seats that recline halfway and
have leg rests and were seriously, actually nice.  We made friends
with the dad and son next to us that we on their way to Baltimore for
a baseball game and Ezra enjoyed pinching his fingers at each person
we passed by on every one of many trips we made up and down the train
(think KITH "I'm crushing your head" kind of pinching.)

More to come...