The Honduras Aftermath
April 26th, 2010 by Blake
As long as I was not able to post for majority of my trip, I’ll sum up my experiences here. (In bullet points!)
- First day down there, I heard about four songs I was listening to the night before. Really? Electronica? In Honduras?
- Cell phones appear to be a higher priority to a lot of people than food / shelter.
- The cell phone companies are amongst the biggest, if not the biggest companies in Honduras. Everywhere you go, you see advertising or resellers. Coke and Pepsi are runner-ups.
- We caught a Moon Jellyfish at the beach. It was already dead, so it did not have any stingers. We gave it a proper burial.
- Bugs tend to find there way into your personal belongings somehow or another.
- Animals, such as bats and geckos, tend to be found on the walls / ceilings of rooms.
- Powerlines are an absolute mess. Power is also rather touchy to weather.
- Pepsi and Coke are consumed religiously. A glass bottle of Pepsi costs only $0.70!
- Black market exists in Honduras just as you would expect to find in China. Counterfeit movies, music, etc.
- Police can be easily bribed.
- Everything is protected with barbed wire. Yards, homes, gates, etc.
- On the higher quality homes, most windows are doors are re-enforced with metal grids to protect against break-ins.
- There is no water pressure in most buildings / homes. There is no hot water.
- Toilet paper needs to be thrown in the trash can. It is not to be flushed down the toilet.
- In the smaller communities, the women are usually stuck taking care of housework / errands.
- People let their pigs, cows, chickens, turkeys, etc. just wander around freely.
- There is no real trash service around most of Honduras. Most trash is just thrown on the ground to either decompose or to be blushed into a pile at some point and burned.
- Lady Gaga appears to be fairly popular. On more than a couple occasions, I heard some of her songs.
- No CDMA service in Honduras, so anyone with a Sprint / Verizon phone will be out of luck. That is, unless it’s an international model. However, if it has WiFi, you can make / receive calls with a SIP gateway if you are around a WiFi hotspot.
- American fast food restaurants are very _nice_ jobs in terms of pay. They all seem to have free WiFi too. (Pizza Hut, Burger King, Wendy’s, etc.)
- Taxi drivers do not like to have their doors slammed. I guess Americans tend to slam their doors.
- Taxi drivers also tend to try to take advantage of Americans by jacking up their prices. Even though it would still be _really_ cheap for an American, it’s outrageous if you make a living in Honduras.
- A lot of Hondurans admire how American’s don’t really care if they look silly. (Head-banging to music on a bus for example.)
- On buses, random people will get on the bus to try to sell something, some will get on to give speeches, and then have people donate.
- School children are required to wear a school approved uniform. White shirt, Blue pants / skirt.
- Many kids are seen trying to sell food and other things on the street instead of going to school so they can make money. A lot of parents pull their kids out of school because they don’t have the ability to support them financially if they go to school.
- Other than I suppose cell phones, in the classrooms, there is really no technology. American students are spoiled with everything they have access to.
- Stray dogs seem to be more fond of Americans than Hondurans. Most Hondurans throw rocks at the dogs to get them to go away, where Americans actually want play with / pet / feed them.
- The mall in the capital city of Honduras mainly consists of American / European stores. Once you enter, you feel like you are back in America. It’s mini-America, or home-away-from-home.
- The TGI-Fridays in the mall was playing a remixed version of the Super Mario Bros. theme song. It was awesome.
Update 2010/05/06:
- Old retired school buses from the United States seem to be used in Honduras for public transportation.
- Ocean is not exactly clean. There was a lot of trash floating around in it.
- Some kids use empty 2-liter soda bottles for flotation devices in the water. I’d say that’s pretty creative.
- Standard American power outlets are used in Honduras. Same socket type.
- When an English movie is played on TV, words that are censored in America are not censored in Honduras.
- PETA type commercials are played on TV about how animals should not be pets.
I’ll probably rotate the photos that need to be rotated later. (I said this with my photos from China last year too, and some of them still have to be rotated.)
