My mentor teacher at Happy Days quit about two months into the school year and headed out to Santa Rosa de Copan to teach at a school there. A couple weeks ago, Gabrielle and I were able to go out and visit him. It was a really exciting weekend. For one thing, it was his school's science fair, which he had turned into a fair slash expo. It was really fun to check out. There was also a culture festival that weekend, which was really cool. You don't see a lot of culture festivals down here.
Santa Rosa is a really, really, really cute little town. It is near Copan Ruinas on the map, but by road it is a couple hours away. Right now there is apparently a highway under construction that will connect the two towns and shorten the trip to about 30 minutes. One of the things that I loved about it there was that people liked to be outside for more than just walking to or from their car/taxi/bus. The town square was beautifully kept and clean, and had a lot of benches and a big gazebo with benches. lovely.
We spent a large part of the weekend in the gazebo listening to live music (bands and marimbas!) and just hanging out. One of Josè's friends was supposed to do a poetry reading of some poems he has written, but the marimba band was really loud and he did not feel he could compete with their volume. In addition to music, there were small acting troupes, mimes, face painters, canvas painters, and potters all showing off their stuff. It was really fun, and it was exciting to see something like that here in Honduras. Had this been all the weekend entailed, the people watching would have been spectacular. But fortunately, like any arts festival in the States, this one attracted hippies. This made the people watching phenomenal.
Our favorite hippie was a man named Cucaracha. He is from Copan Ruinas, and he is the ultimate, quintessential hippie. He is tall, has dredlocks and wears flowy pants. He makes jewelry. He tried to sell Gabrielle's friend an "adult" brownie when they visited Copan before our trip to Belize. And he has perfected every form of hippie sport available.
Santa Rosa is a really, really, really cute little town. It is near Copan Ruinas on the map, but by road it is a couple hours away. Right now there is apparently a highway under construction that will connect the two towns and shorten the trip to about 30 minutes. One of the things that I loved about it there was that people liked to be outside for more than just walking to or from their car/taxi/bus. The town square was beautifully kept and clean, and had a lot of benches and a big gazebo with benches. lovely.
We spent a large part of the weekend in the gazebo listening to live music (bands and marimbas!) and just hanging out. One of Josè's friends was supposed to do a poetry reading of some poems he has written, but the marimba band was really loud and he did not feel he could compete with their volume. In addition to music, there were small acting troupes, mimes, face painters, canvas painters, and potters all showing off their stuff. It was really fun, and it was exciting to see something like that here in Honduras. Had this been all the weekend entailed, the people watching would have been spectacular. But fortunately, like any arts festival in the States, this one attracted hippies. This made the people watching phenomenal.
Our favorite hippie was a man named Cucaracha. He is from Copan Ruinas, and he is the ultimate, quintessential hippie. He is tall, has dredlocks and wears flowy pants. He makes jewelry. He tried to sell Gabrielle's friend an "adult" brownie when they visited Copan before our trip to Belize. And he has perfected every form of hippie sport available.
We originally began watching him when he was playing with...balls on a string. I don't know the technical name for this sport. I will do my best to describe it. Someone has two strings with a ball on one end of each string. And then they swing them around rhythmically and make cool shapes with them and stuff. You know what I'm talking about, right? Well, he was really good at that. Then he went behind his table and reached into his hippie bag and pulled out...three sticks. Another hippie sport that I do not know the name of, but have seen it at every Renaissance fair I have ever been to. Basically it there are two sticks of equal length that you hold, one in each hand. Then the third stick has weights on either end, and you hit it around with the other two sticks. Most people do not look cool playing with these sticks. Cucaracha made it look pretty bad ass. When he was bored with that, he again retreated to his bag of goodies, and got out a bowstaff and began swinging and dancing around with that. We joked that someone should have brought their hacky-sack to toss down to him. But wait...he had those in the bag, too. It was like watching a one-man hippie olympics. If there was such a thing as the hippie olympics, Cucaracha would be Shaun White. In every event.
He was accompanied by another man, who was like Rambo-ninja-hippie, if such a combination could occur without causing the universe to implode. He did a super sweet routine with his bowstaff lit on fire. We are sitting watching him with kind of slack jawed. It was pretty impressive.
He was accompanied by another man, who was like Rambo-ninja-hippie, if such a combination could occur without causing the universe to implode. He did a super sweet routine with his bowstaff lit on fire. We are sitting watching him with kind of slack jawed. It was pretty impressive.
Lest you think all we did was gape at hippies all weekend...we checked out my friend's science fair and checked out the Santa Rosa nightlife as well. And, because no Latin American adventure is complete without this, we got scammed by someone. Actually, just Gabrielle did. And it wasn't too bad. We were checking out the cathedral on the square. Gabrielle went outside to take some pictures of the front, and an old man asked her to take his picture. So she did. I came out and joined her, and the old man came over and started talking to us. I thought maybe he wanted money, but he didn't mention it...he just told random stories and kept throwing out Spanish colloquiallisms with which I am unfamiliar. He was really interesting. At long last, he said "if you don't work, you don't eat" to which I replied "si, es verdad, jefe" which may or may not be the grammatically correct way to say "you're right, man". At this point he says "it is customary for photographers to pay the people they take pictures of. I would like to be paid for my services." He only wanted 10 Lps., which isn't too big of a deal, and that made the situation funny rather than frustrating.
This lovely town is on the job-hunt watch list. So...perhaps you will hear more about it at some point in the future. I am brushing up on my juggling technique, just in case.
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