Pimp My Taxi

One of the defining characteristics of La Ceiba is that there’s an excess of taxis roaming the streets. Way more cabs than a town of 80,000 could ever need. I can stand on the street in my residential neighborhood for 5 minutes waiting for friends and have 15 taxi’s drive by and honk at me in the hopes that I’m just looking for one of them to pick me up. Sometimes they will pull over as you are walking and wait for you to get in. Like maybe you won’t realize you hadn’t flagged them down.

Apparently the phenomenon is specific to Ceiba and taxis aren’t so numerous in the rest of Honduras. The only requirement for being a taxi is that your car is white with a purple stripe and that you have a taxi registration. Supposedly you have to pay for the registration, but there are rumors of corrupt officials giving them away. A flat rate of 75 cents per person gets you almost anywhere in the city. Given how hard it is for cabbies to find customers, it seems it would be difficult to make a living, but it must be working for most of them.

Frankly the cabs are kind of annoying. Always imploring you to splurge and spend the 15 lempiras and screw the exercise that will help burn of your lunch of eggs, refried beans and fried plantains. But what I love about the taxis is that they are fucking pimped out. Most of them have names or sayings on their windshields to distinguish them from the pack. They say things like Capricornious or Evolution or Guiami Senor (Guide me Lord). The vast majority of them are Christian messages. Some have Bible verses covering the whole back windshield. They’ve got spinning rims and flames on their panels. One or two extreme ones have their back lights redone or artwork covering the hood. Unfortunately, all the personality doesn’t equal business. Although who knows, maybe Abuela feels safer on her way to Sunday Mass in a Christian car.

Machismo

After spending last weekend soaking up the sun, this weekend was pretty slow. Most of the people I know here (myself included) don't have phones so its a little difficult to get in touch. If plans don’t get made after class, they often don’t get made.

So I wandered around the local market on Saturday in effort to entertain myself and bought some sweatshop wares. I happened to run into a friend from the school who convinced me to go with him to some church fundraiser dance his house mom was requesting he attend. Not to0 exciting, as the majority of the people there were 50-year-old Hondurans, but it was interesting to see them doing different latin dances. During one slow song, I was sitting at a table with my friend watching people sway on the dance floor and thinking , oh, its so nice to see so many old people who are still in love. My friend suddenly leaned over and goes, “Ninety-eight percent of those men are unfaithful.”

According to the local paper, which was referring to a recent study by the United Nations Population Fund, 98 out of every 100 Honduran men have extramarital relations. The article also talked about a people sleeping with as many as 1000 women who weren’t their wives. 98% is unbelievable to me, but my teacher didn’t seem to think the numbers were wrong. My male American friend was much more flabbergasted by the concept.

Being here reminds me that if you’re gonna be a woman, the best place to do so is probably the US. Every time I step out of the house, I realize this as every other man from the 65-year-old on the street, to the entire 10-year-old soccer team being transported in the back of a pickup truck yells, “I love you, baby.” My favorite was when some rich 19-year-old in his brand new SUV pulled up next to me as I walked to the mall alone. He introduced himself by saying, “Where are you going?” A few exchanges followed after I told him I wasn’t going to tell him where I was going. He then proceeded to say, “You people are not good with Honduran people.” (All this in perfect English.) What a fucker. For as horrible as we people are with Hondurans, he thought he’d give it one more try and yelled “You seem cool,” As he was forced to move through the traffic. Bah. I thought briefly that maybe its just part of the culture and the women here don’t mind it, but my teacher told me the second thing she would do if she were president, was institute a fine for men you yell nasty things at women. Luckily their English isn’t quite good enough to get crude. Fuck machismo.

Una Vida Diferente

Monday I got back from a weekend on the Bay Islands off the northern coast of Honduras. Words can’t properly describe that experience. But I’ll try. Some of the teachers at the school arranged the weekend and brought 6 of us to check out their life. I concentrated really hard on not upchucking during the horrendous hour long ferry ride across the ocean. The nice captain guy gave me a barf bag and a piece of gum to feel better and counted down the minutes til arrival for me. The rest of Friday was fairly uneventful other than watching some super tan gringos with blond dreadlocks travel around Utila on golf carts and motor scooters.

The next day with all the massive miscommunication that accompanies traveling in groups, three trips to the super market were made and we left for a private island without my Spanish teacher. I still don’t understand if she was never coming or she just decided to stay at the last minute. Yay for shitty language skills.

I’ve somehow rambled on an on about the boring part of the trip. The fun was being on an island owned entirely by some friends of the teachers. Somebody’s dad died and, Boom they were in possession of a fucking island 5 times the size of my parents yard. There was a huge house with beds for everyone to sleep in and a million hammocks scattered around the property. The only catch was a lack of electricity and running water. No worries. We flushed the toilet by pouring a 5 gallon bucket of rain water down it and then used the same bucket to wash chicken and do the dishes. Thanks to an overuse of hand sanitizer I successfully avoided getting diarrhea again.

So we pretty much laid around, swam/walked over to another island 300 meters away, laid around, smoked, drank rum out of coconuts from the trees, swam some more, laid in the hammock, swam, drank, etc. One of the island dudes made some kickass soup from fish and lobster he caught himself mixed with coconut milk and some potatoes and onions and “bread fruit,” something that looks like a white melon, but tastes more like a potato.

As boring as all this laying around was for one fellow traveler, the group of people on this island was bizarre enough to keep me fairly entertained. I found out another student had broken off an engagement just before coming and was all excited that the tan line from the ring had finally vanished. She also told of sending chocolates that had been replaced with her own poo to a guy who fucked over her friend. Yeah.

But the really interesting folks were the island natives whose first language is English. Sort of. It’s some kind of creole or pigeon dialect or whatever. They sound kinda like a Jamaican Brad Pitt from Snatch. When they talked to each other, I had no clue what was happening. When they spoke directly to us, they were comprehensible and incredibly humorous, saying things to the effect of, “You know what really sucks man is when you’re on a boat and it starts goin down. That’s a really bad feeling,” or, “We’re destroying ourselves because we’re not meant to be this smart. We’re meant to be like animals.” They talked about finding 6 kilos of coke on a beach when some fool mistook their hunting shots for police fire. Another anecdote being at the rave that happens on the next-door island and hearing people talking about a hog running around. Upon investigation, they found that, sure enough, the pig they were raising had swum over to join the party. As far as I could ascertain, these dudes didn’t have any reputable means of making a living. They just kinda chill on the islands and maybe sell drugs sometimes. And fantabulous as the weekend was, God I was excited to shower and rid myself of all the salt when I got home.