La Barbacoa

I think my stomach has finally decided to rest. Yesterday was a pretty awful (although not surprising) day of adjustment to Honduras cuisine, which involved lying on the couch and holding my belly in pain between numerous trips to the bathroom. It was miserable. Fortunately, I´m feeling better this morning, although I´m not quite sure if I´m up for going to a barbecue with Debbies boyfriend Oscar and his friends. Apparently at 11am people are going to head over to someone´s house just outside of town to hang out and grill some food. None of the gringos seem to know many details about the barbecue - what the occasion is, who´s all going, etc. - but by now I´ve already learned that this is a common theme.

10:30am
Debbie calls Oscar to see what´s going on. Oscar says we probably won´t be able to leave at 11, but he doesn´t say why. When Debbie asks him, he acts a little weird and just tells her everything´s cool, not to worry.

11:00am
Debbie gets Oscar back on the phone to figure out what´s going on. Oscar says Levi´s the only one who knows the whole plan, so Debbie calls Levi. Levi, however, stayed out until 7am this morning and is still sleeping. After a round of confusing phone calls to figure out what to do, it´s decided to push everything back until 12:30 to give people a chance to recover. I think I actually might feel better by then, so I´m happy with the decision. We´ll chill for another 2 hours, everyone will meet up here at 12:30, and then we´ll head out. Cool.

12:30pm
Debbie gets Levi on the phone, who says he´s on his way and he´ll be right over. Debbie, Megan, Oscar and I are sitting in the apartment dressed and ready to go, just waiting. Oscar suddenly gets up and leaves, without explanation.

1:00pm
Levi still hasn´t shown up, but when we call him he continues to claim he´s on his way (even though he only lives 5 minutes away).

1:15pm
Levi, Oscar, and Edwin show up at the apartment with a plastic grocery bag full of meet. Now we´re waiting downstairs on the sidewalk just outside the apartment building. Debbie tries to ask the Hondurans what´s going on, when are we going to go, but they just tell her to relax, chill, not to worry. They seem to be acting super sketchy about why we haven´t left yet. Finally Levi tells us that we´re waiting for their friend Sergio, who has the truck, to get off work. Why this was too hard to tell us in the first place I have no idea. But even now, we still don´t know who we´re going to meet up with or exactly when we´re going to leave.

John walks by and says he´d like to come, but doesn´t want to just stand around and wait. He asks us to call him when everyone is ready.

2:00pm
Sergio finally shows up 3 hours after the initial projected start time and we all pile into the back of his pickup truck and head on our way. No one calls John.

2:20pm
We arrive at a house on a dirt road just a little outside of town. It soon becomes aparent that we´re not meeting anyone here - it´s just the fearsome foursome (Oscar, Levi, Fernando, and Edwin) plus Sergio and us gringos sitting here at a house that is apparently Sergio´s second house (he also owns one right in Juti). So we waited 3 hours and drove 20 minutes to hang out with the same people we hang out with every day in a house identical to all the other houses we´ve hung out at.

There´s some discusson and some movement, and then Sergio and Edwin hop back in the truck and take off. They´re going back to pick up John and the other teachers (who could have easily fit in the truck when we came the first time). I´m learning new lessons about efficiency every day.

3:00pm
Levi and Sergio arrive back with all the other teachers in the truck, and we finally start to barbecue. All in all, aside from the ridiculous delay in getting started, we had a great time just hanging out, eating and talking. Not very diifferent from the usual, but we got to end this evening with a sweet ride in the back of Sergio´s truck, cruising down the highway with the cool night breeze rushing past us, Fernando and Edwin yelling "Tópelo, tópelo!" to encourage Sergio to go even faster. We had 6 guys crammed in the back amidst a stack of plastic chairs, a guitar, and a gril, so their wasn´t a lot of space to brace yourself for turns in the road. The cargo kept shifting and bumping into everybody, and at one point the wind whipped one of the plastic chairs so hard it flew off the stack and would have flown off the back of the truck had Fernando not caught it. Maybe not the safest way to travel, but definitely one of the most fun.