Friday, January 9, 2009
Morning came again and to my surprise, I had to take my first cold bucket shower. At first, it was very hard to pour the water onto my body. For some occasion, I even missed my body and poured the water onto the floor. Toward the end, I went all out and poured a large bucket of cold water onto my body. At the end, I had to use about 10 gallons of water to wash myself. That's a lot of water. After my long and difficult shower, Sarah and I went to breakfast. Staring at the breakfast table, I declined to eat.
When breakfast ended, we continued our schedule and drove to the Picachu Statue. This statue is giant statue of Jesus on the top of the mountain in Tegucigalpa. For this part of the trip, we met with the UNAH Industrial engineering students (Contact: Alejandra Ardon 9977-2196). They were a few of them and they were very friendly and interacted with us in English and Spanish. While I sat on the rocks in this park and wrote in my journal, the others were having fun and taking pictures with the UNAH students. While the most of the group was at the Picachu Statue, Monroe was attending a meeting with the UNAH Professor (Roger M. Vallejo Ham, 9952-2822) to discuss about future projects.
As we prepared to leave the statue, one of van had a flat tire. As a result, we spend some time changing the tire. While many students talked and danced to the van's radio, I remained alone with my journal.
Then we drove to the Central Park in front of the Cathedral to have lunch with the Industrial engineering students. We walked in a large group to the little market to get lunch. As we walked, we came across a statue of the first president/founder of Honduras. All the students gathered around the front of the statue to take the photo with it. I avoided being in the photo by volunteering to take the photo.
After the photoshot, we continued to walk to the market. On the way, Rustom accidentally tripped over a man who had no legs in the middle of the street. When we reach the market, I noticed its similarities with New York City small Asian markets of random products. Further in the market, there are many small restaurants that reminded me of the basement of the Triple Palace in Chinatown, NY. The small restaurants are crowded together. As I went around with Nadia to find a place to sit and eat,, we joined John at a location where it is very cheap. I ordered two huge burrito-like things and a natural drink that tasted very good (like a tofu drink). The drink was brown/coffee color that is made out of rice. For the whole meal, I paid 35 lempira. Basically, I spend two dollars for my whole meal. That's cheap!
After consuming my delicious meal, Nadia and I walked back to the meeting area. On the way, we walked with Jeff who went to order a pizza from PizzaHut. His one slice was 30 lempira and his previous meal of 3 burritos and a soda cost 25 lempira. As always, name brand food is very pricey. After we walked a little further, we joined other students from our group and they went to buy snacks like cookies, bread, ice cream, coffee, etc. Everything in Tegucigalpa costs relatively low. In addition, the streets are clustered with many various colorful stores. With full stomachs, we arrived to the meeting area late. However, one of the vans had not arrived. Once we finally got into the vans, we visited the SANAA Los Laureles plant (Contact: Engineer Pedro Ortiz)
This water plant was gigantic with more than one system. The first system has large tanks of water exposed to the air which run all seasons. The other system is more complicated and only runs during the rainy season. The whole plant is huge with about six control plants. Also, their water source is from an inflated dam. Due to the limited source of water, the water plant does not offer water to the people everyday. Furthermore, the operators took us to a lab to show how they measure the quality of the treated water. At this point, I was exhausted with vast water plant.
After saying our gratitude to the operators, we had dinner at the restaurant in Tegucigalpa called La Capera. This restaurant is gorgeous with expensive meals. This restaurant proves that Tegucigalpa is huge city with many rich Hondurans. Despite the great food, I skipped this free meal and wrote in my journal. Why? I don't know. Basically, I was in a journal mood.
On the contrary to its grandness, the service in this restaurant is very poor and some people received their food at a much later time than others. When we headed back to Tamara, we stopped at a gas station and I brought a magazine for origami. I spend around 87 lempira on my magazine and green tea. From this, I concluded that on the main streets of Tegucigalpa sell products at a very high price. Furthermore, Tegucigalpa is a very dangerous place, especially after dark. Leo reminded us to lock all the doors to the van and close the windows. If not, Leo stated that some gang members attack people in vehicles waiting for the red light turn green. That's scary, but I believe that Tegucigalpa is not the only place that this may occur.
When we reached Tamera, Leo received a phone call from his wife. Turns out, one of his wife's coworker was killed at a bus stop because she did not give up her possessions. Therefore, Leo needed to go to her mourning in the morning. This shines a light on me. Human life is very fragile and people can easily die. Tegucigalpa is indeed dangerous along with other places in the world. Thought: Carpe diem.