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Tomorrow marks the three week anniversary of arriving in my site, Catulaca, Lempira. No it doesn´t seem like that long but in total I have almost been here in Honduras for four months. It is crazy to think how fast the time has already gone and after talking with other volunteers to think how fast my time will go over the next 23 months. Things have slowed up quite a bit since getting in site. No longer do I have 18 other gringos to talk (in english) with, a consistent 730-5 schedule, patient teachers willing to listen to my horrible spanish, and random classes about composting and animal monitoring. Now, I sit on my porch roughly 5 hours a day, enter random peoples houses and try and make conversation with them about planting beans or their children, and play crazy eights a ridiculous amount of times with my dad. Though I am nothing but optimistic. I live in a beautiful community (yes I know I still havent put up pictures), have a great potential for projects, and slowly my spanish is developing from painfully slow to just slow. But what is my community like? What have I been doing? Thanks for asking:

1. Catulaca began as a Spanish colonial town established in 1868. Since the first inhabitants were European and not indigenous Lenca, many people call the residents "The Gringos of Catulaca." A vast majority of the people have blue eyes, very fair skin, and could easily be mistaken for fellow gringos if it wasn´t for their obviously campesino spanish. Basically, I fit right in (sort of).

2. Only in Peace Corps do you prefer to hang out with people seven years or more younger than you because there is less pressure to speak great spanish. Even though I should be talking with the established leaders of the community, sometimes I just want to draw beanie babies with my five year old neighbor or play cards with my host brother. At least I have learned about 20 different names for card suites.

3. I am slowly growing accustomed to campesino life. My family has already let me spend a day doblando corn (folding over the stalks so the corn can dry), deshojando (stripping the corn leaves to prepare for planting beans), branding cattle, and castrating bulls. Granted, I only held the bowl while cutting the huevos of the bull, but I did eat them the next day for breakfast. And thus my Honduran accent was born.

4. I have never eaten so many corn products at once. corn corn corn corn corn corn corn corn corn corn corn corn corn corn. corn.

5. Have already survived a 104 degree fever in Honduras. Also found out it is impossible to find an available doctor on weekends. Also, Hondurans think any sickness can be cured with a stomach massage and some laxatives.

6. There are two cockroaches in my bathroom that are always sitting in the upper corner of my bathroom. Instead of freaking out and retrieving the closer shoe like any normal person would do I instead named them the Flinstones. One night there were four cockroaches. Yes, it was a yabadabadoo-time day.

7. It is COLDDDD here. As you may know, it is currently the winter here, which I thought only meant that it rained a lot (which it certainly does). But no. I am freezing, and my family says it is only going to get colder. So your previous misconception that Central America is nothing but beaches and banana trees, you are wrong.

8. Everyone loves to show off the few English words they know to you. Yes, it is very cute and endearing when it is your community or family saying "hey" to you as you walk past. However, when you ask the bus driver how much the trip costs and instead of simply saying "diez" they instead count it out to you on your fingers, it gets extremely frustrating. I get it, Im 2m and obviously am not from here. But when I step out from the home of a small Honduran aldea and get on a bus to go to the next closest town, they could at least assume I know my numbers in spanish.

9. There are quite a few volunteers near me and it was great this past week to meet them all. There are five volunteers right in Gracias where I work in the office as well as another Protected Areas Management volunteer the other direction from my town. You know I am going to aprovechar these opportunities to collaborate on projects.

10. Miss you all but am so happy with what I am doing with my life right now and look forward to you all taking an adventure of your own. I have mapped out about five different potential vacation routes for when people come and although Honduras is small, it has it all. Mayan ruins, beaches, mountains, cattle, what more could you ask for?