Already been here a month!!

I arrived in La Paz yesterday. It´s a great town, from what I´ve seen so far. The bus dropped us off at the city center, where we then had to lug all our bags around town looking for our host families. Luckily, my friend lives nearby, so he dropped off his stuff and helped me with mine. My house here is amazing. The people of La Paz appear to have more money, in general, than in Santa Lucia. My house resembles a hotel...you walk through a living room and kitchen to get to a common area outside, where there are 2 giant hammocks to lounge around on. My host mom is amazing, although it will be difficult to work on my Spanish with her...she has a cleft palate, so her speech is a bit slurred. The house is sort of like a boarding house. There are 10 Honduran students living there in addition to the Japanese JICA volunteer. The students are from all over Honduras, and are in La Paz to go to the Normal, which is a school to become a teacher. My mom also has a glorieta at the Normal, which is like a kitchen-type thing that serves snacks and stuff. My host dad works in Tegucigalpa, which means he takes a bus 2 hours each way, every day. The house is huge, so they must be doing pretty well with the jobs. In addition to the 10 students, my host mom´s daughter lives in the house as well. She is 8, and has been helping me understand when I can´t make out what her mom says. I forgot to mention that in my room, I have a TV with cable (yesterday I watched Dukes of Hazzard dubbed over in Spanish) and my own bathroom. Pretty luxurious! Strange thing is there are no mirrors whatsover in the house, so I have no idea what I look like when I leave the house...it´s a nice change.

Yesterday we all went to the Supermarket here, and I told her all the foods I like and dislike. She had no problem with my vegetarianism, and I think she will be an awesome cook. We have an hour and a half every afternoon to go home for lunch. Today I had fish (I´ve been eating this occasionally because I don´t see any reason to turn it down), which was interesting because it was the entire fish (head, bones, everything) fried, with rice, tortillas, and a salad. I have no complaints.

The weather here is much hotter than Santa Lucia, but not unbearable. For those of you wondering about pictures, I have them, but have not found a computer with internet that has a USB port. There are several other internet places in town, so I´m sure eventually I will find one that will work. I´ve also discovered there´s a gym here. It costs 300 lempira a month (about 17 dollars) and has a lot of weights, bikes, and elliptical machines. I may not be on the internet much after I join, because I will be spending the majority of my wages for the next few weeks on the membership. There´s no ATM here, so once I´m out of cash, I´m out for a while.
Other than that, I don´t have much else exciting going on. For those of you that have been texting me and not getting a response, it´s because I don´t have any more minutes left on my phone. The way phones work down here is you buy a card with a certain value, and once you use that up, you have to buy another one...which I am still deciding if I can afford, at the moment. However, even if I don´t have minutes, I can accept calls for free.

I´ll try to post pics sometime this week!