Caña, books, and basketball

Sorry I haven't updated my blog in a while...I'll try not to let it happen again.

Sunday: We were invited out by two seperate people on Sunday. First we went to a park with Leonidas (orange boss) and his family in the morning. We were planning on going to one park with a pool but after waiting an hour for a bus that didn't come, we decided to walk to a different one. It was pretty fun. There was a small zoo at the park, but it was pretty sad. The cages were way too small for the animals. We had some Pollo Campero (basically KFC) for lunch with french fries and Pepsi. Theo and I really didn't want any for two reasons...First: we had a free lunch waiting for us at the monastery and we had eaten a big breakfast only 2.5 hrs before...Second (the main reason) is that both of us are health conscious and didn't want to eat deep fried chicken and fries. O well, Leonidas was set on getting it and we didn't want to try and explain it or upset him.
Immediately after we got back from the park we went out with Estuardo (IT guy) and his friend Axel and someone else. They took us to a restaurant that serves Caña (cane, as in cane sugar). The restaurant is outside and the cane fields are right there, along with coffee fields (Theo and I walked around a bit afterwards). The Cane was served in 4 different forms. The first was quite interesting. There was a huge steaming pot of green soup with nasty looking foam on the top...kinda like the greenish tan algae muck sometimes found on lakeshores. Yummm. Well, little did we know, that was actually the part we were supposed to eat. We reluctantly did try it. We used lemon tree leaves as spoons for the foam. It was sweet, but kinda gross. The second form of cane was cane juice. It was a little better than the foam, I think because it was cold and looked kinda normal (it was still green however), but I still didn't like the flavor or pure cane. The last two forms were candy candies (like fudge squares) and cane honey (it looked like green molasses). Axel bought us a small tub of the miel (honey). Neither of us really loved it so we gave it to the cooks at the monastery so the community could eat it. Only two days later we saw one of the brothers eating it....with a spoon! Hermano Matias we quickly found out has a serious sweet tooth, and since their deserts aren't that sweet, we often see him eating spoonfulls of honey after meals. Back to the cane. The restaurant was about 10 minutes outside of Esquipulas. We drove over there in the back of a pickup. The mountains surrounding Esquipulas are gorgeous, and look more impressive when you get further away.

This week: The major event this week was a book drive. Theo and I got up the guts to walk into the school near the monastery to see if we could organize a book drive for the library built by last years volunteers. We thought that would be the most nerveracking part...nope. The next day we had to go back and walk around from class to class explaining what we were trying to do and to ask students to bring in their old books this Friday. SCARY. Fortunately the administrator went with us to further explain what we were doing, since they probably didn't completely understand us. We hope the drive will be a big success and are glad to finally start doing something productive.

The other event this week was basketball. Theo and I went to the school on Tuesday because we wanted to play some basketball. We ended up waiting for about a half hour for one of the two courts to clear up and started playing. Within about 5 minutes a girl, probably 14, came up to us and said that there was a problem. We were both a little confused and slightly worried we were going to have to leave because they needed the court. She then said the problem was that some of the girls wanted to play with us, while others wanted their picture with us. Hehe. We are like celebrities here. Apparently they don't see many 6ft tall white college students. Within a few months, I bet if you were to ask about the gringos (whites) in town, people would immediately know who you're talking about. We ended up taking some pictures and then playing 3 on 3 with 4 girls. It was really funny, and pretty fun...I felt like Shaq. We now understand why Michael and Liam said that their English class consisted of mostly girls. I wonder what tomorrow will be like when we spend the afternoon in the school collecting books?