Tela, honduras!

welcome to honduras! if the flight attendants on your airplane can welcome you to where you are landing then i feel that i should be able to welcome you to here via my blog without any trouble. i am proud to report that i swam in the carribean for the first time this trip the other day, and that i am once again living in my bathing suit. life is saweeeeet. the last time i wrote i was still in nicaragua, so let´s sum up whats passed. crossing the border we promptly got scammed at least twice which was awesome. i think that day we took a total of 6 different busses to get where we wanted, and got there at 10 at night and with much difficulty. the last vehicle we ended up in that day was a van, the driver of which said he would take us to the hotel we wanted. next thing i knew i was in the back corner of this largish van stuffed with 16 people and did not physically have enough leg room to put my thigh straight. and i remained that way for approximately 3 hours, near the end of which the driver admitted that he didn´t actually know where the hotel was, and when he found out, refused to take us there. so we agreed to go to a different one and i said that we were going to pay him less. and next thing we knew we were at the gate of the hotel we wanted originally haha. money talks baby. of course then it turned out that we had to wake the owner up by banging on the locked gate, after which he sleepily and grumpily told us there was absolutely no more rooms. so we had to set up hammocks and a tent. it was not a good day. anyways, this hotel also doubled as a private beer brewery and thus we had very tasty raspberry and apricot beer. they also made rootbeer, which my german travelmates had unbelievably never tried or even heard of. much to my dismay they thought it tasted like toothpaste. the place was at lago de yojoa if anyones looking at a map.
from there we came to tela, which is my current location. its a very nice town right on the beach which is white and the sea which is turquoise. and we have a kitchen to cook in finally which is awesome because i was getting damn sick of rice, beans, and fried meat for every meal. the hotel itself here, however, is about the worst ive been in and the room is more reminiscent of a musty prison cell. i havent looked in a mirror for over a week now, which is a very strange feeling and something i never really gave thought to before. today i went snorkeling for the first time in 3 years and while it was cool i am proud to report that hawaii was like a bagillion times better. go america! oh, heres another crazy thing-the germans were taught that there are only 5 continents! according to the web its debatable, but i think the more accepted way, and the way i was taught, is that there are 7. anyways the way they know it, antarctica is completely neglected, and north and south america dont exist, its just america. this results in one of the girls getting mildly offended when i refer to the way something is in america, which for me is the US, but for her is the whole continent. and so it sounds very conceited of me to refer to anything from the US as american. verrrry interesting. i´ve also been thinking a lot about languages lately, since im learning one and all, and how accents or fluency affect the impressions people get of you. so mainly, if someone would come away with a completely different impression of me if they met me speaking english or my not so great spanish. and i think the answer is definitely yes, because ive met some europeans here who, because of their accents, sound stuck up, or not very smart, or whatever, and therefore i automatically don´t like them as much. but maybe they wouldn´t come off like that in their own language. i dunno. also the germans told me almost all the movies they watch are american (okay, USan) ones dubbed into german. which leads to the unfortunate conclusion that they dont know any of the actors real voices. which also makes me wonder how much recognition the voice-over people get. probably not enough. and finally, two awesome nature sightings: 1, an enormous black snake with a yellow stomach that was by our estimates almost 6 feet long and 5 inches wide. it was huge! and 2, i finally got to see a jesus christ lizard run across the water! it was sooooo cool. and really fast. we also visited the 2nd largest tropical garden in the world, but to us the most remarkable part was how much grass there was and how wonderful it smelled freshly cut. it reminded us all of home, as there is absolutely no grass in the cities here. oookay, thats more than enough words for one simple blog, so ill wrap it up. hope everyones well, ill tell the sun sand and fish you say hi.

gus