A long weekend...

Hello from Copan! So far I have let Andrew do all the writing - the public nature of a blog has been a bit intimidating for me, but here goes...
We´ve been attending language school for over a week now. I´ve never been so motivated to learn something in my life, but I am finding language study to be tedious and frustrating at times, with exciting moments when something finally clicks or I remember the word for "around".

We actually only had four days of classes last week. Friday we had the day off because it was the beginning of the Independence Day celebrations, which lasted all weekend. We watched kids parading around the central square in school uniforms and band costumes and all kinds of interesting get-ups both Friday and Saturday mornings. After the excitement of the parade on Friday morning, we realized we didn´t have much to do except study for three days. Andrew and I were both sitting around our room Friday afternoon when it started raining pretty heavily. A few minutes later the power went off - and stayed off for the rest of the evening. We sat in the dark, books in hand, for a few minutes before making our way to the kitchen where our host mom, Sara, was kind enough to give us a candle. After playing Farkle and various card games by candlelight for the next few hours Andrew wondered out loud what our friends at home were doing... this marked the beginning of our first home-sick, or at least friend-sick, thoughts of our friends and family since we´ve been here. Up until that point I think we´d both been too busy with daily things to think of home much. Nothing like sitting around on a Friday night in a new country to bring out some lonesome feelings!

Amazingly, we got a phone call about 10 minutes after the power went back on. It was Ben Beachy, of course, a friend from college who just happened to be working in San Pedro Sula for 10 days and had the smarts to figure out how to reach us at our host family´s house. He wound up taking a bus from San Pedro the next morning and so we spent the next 24 hours happily catching up with him before he had to take the bus back the next day. We never expected to see a familiar face quite so soon in our journey but it was a very welcome surprise!

We are getting in good walking shape here - we usually wind up walking the steep cobbled streets downtown at least three or four times a day. We decided to explore one of the roads that winds up into the mountains the other day and found a whole new, less-touristy and much more impoverished side of Copan. I´m still trying to get used to the fact that we are really in Central America. It´s helpful for me to just walk around and soak it in sometimes - it´s easy to get caught up with studying Spanish and kind of forget what a big turn my life has taken in the last two weeks!

I tried to upload some pictures to jazz this up a bit, but the computer here at the school is pretty slow and it was taking too long - we´ll post a bunch of pictures from Copan when we get back to San Pedro Sula. Our stay here just got extended another week, so we wont be getting back to the big city until probably around the 29th or so. Yay! More classes! Hopefully my head can take it.