I know, I'm a slacker

Sorry team. I know I've been slacking on writing on this thing. I've been busy since the colored chicks visited our house… update on the chicks: Estefany (the 2 year old) KILLED all the baby chicks over a week by strangling them.. yes you read that correctly, STRANGLING them. Note to self, don't let your 2 year old play with tiny, live animals.

At the end of April, two other teachers and myself visited a lake in Honduras called Lake Yojoa thats about 5 hours from here. It was in a very small town and about 2 hours of the drive there was on a bumpy, dirt road. Not so pleasant sitting next to stinky farmers while sweating from head to toe on a chicken bus. BUT it was so worth the drive because it was the best place I've been to in Honduras so far. Honduras as a whole is not a very pleasant country, but it definitely has its perks and the lake was one of the top perks by far. It was such a beautiful, quiet town. We stayed in a hostel called the D&D owned by a 25 year old American dude that the girls had met the last time they went to the lake. They had the BEST hamburgers ever. And Bobby (dude who owned the hostel) said the beef was illegally imported into Honduras.. thats how good the hamburger was! The water in the hostel was all purified.. so I could shower with my mouth open, brush my teeth with sink water and fill my water bottle with tap water. It was GLORIOUS! About 15 minutes from our hotel on the outside of this town, there was this place kind of like a swimming park. The water was from the river and Honduran families were there swimming. It looked like this:

All this water dropped off into a waterfall down the hill from there. Let me tell you about this waterfall… it was SO beautiful and HUGE! The girls had already gone under the waterfall the last time they were at the lake and had told me all about how cool/terrifying it was. They explained it as "Lori you HAVE to go under it.. its the best thing ever but its really scary and you could probably die… but you HAVE to do it".. so of course I was intrigued. Annie wanted to go again this time, so we had to pay to get a tour guide to go underneath it (thats how serious it is.. you can't go under it without a guide) So Carlos was our little guide. Annie and I both were about a head taller than Carlos.. I was of course questioning his ability to save me if I was to go under but he said he had worked there for 12 years so I felt pretty confident with Carlos's abilities. So we go down a path to the bottom of the waterfall and Annie asked Carlos if he would take our picture before we got started with her waterproof camera and so he just took it upon himself to be our little photographer the whole dang time.. every step we took Carlos would say "wait. picture!" Hahahah So we have a well documented waterfall experience to say the least bit. It was very scary walking underneath certain parts because the water was coming down so hard and we had to duck our chins to our chest and breathe while holding hands. The rocks were very slippery, but Carlos was a champ and helped us along great. I would have been really scared if there were more than just the two of us going through because he was having to help us along. There were little caves all behind the waterfall that we got to go in. After we went under it, we got to jump off rocks into certain pools around the waterfall which was the best part. At first I said "Are we sure this is safe to jump into?" Then Carlos does a swan dive into the little pool to answer me so I said "welp, okay" and jumped in too.  It was so much fun and if you ever visit Honduras you HAVE to go the lake! Here our the pictures from the waterfall:

About to go under

terrifying.

Good thing we had Carlos to capture every one of my glorious moments.

Jumping!

under one of the caves behind it.

This pretty much sums up my experience walking under the waterfall...

Carlos diving like a champ.

Carlos was the best guide ever. I'm a giant.

A bridge across the lake.

So the following week after the lake, I got to fly home to attend two of my best friends wedding. It was so fabulous to be home and to see my friends and fam. After a week of relaxing and drinking tap water, I had to come back to Honduras and finish out the last 2 months of school. It was bittersweet leaving home to come back, but it was good to see my class when I got back. 

We took a mini vacation this past weekend to Tegucigalpa,the capital of Honduras. It's supposed to be the town where all of the Honduran wealth is and violence. But we didn't leave our fancy hotel all weekend. We stayed at the InterContinental… fanciest hotel I've ever stayed in my whole life! A-M-AZING. We literally did not leave the hotel all weekend. We laid around in our big, comfy beds watching tv. We went swimming in their fancy, schmancy pool. We ate way too large of portions at the continental breakfast buffet… we acted like we had never been out in public before at breakfast each morning, smuggling out pastries and cute little jars of jam. It was a restaurant continental breakfast, what?!? So awesome. We were just so baffled that we were in Honduras living like queens. Well I lied when I said we didn't leave the hotel… we did walk across the street the MALL! It was a totally normal mall, just like back home, but with Honduran stores of course. We walked over there each day to eat in the food court where they had delicious American fast food. So good.  We also got to dress up and look cute.. just to go downstairs and eat for an hour.. then head back upstairs to watch tv on a Saturday night. Livin the dream. We almost cried when we had to leave Sunday and head back to the not so glorious part of Honduras where we live. But it was really nice to see a semi-normal/developed city here.  Good times. Here are some pics from Tegucigalpa.