Our new digs

Well, the time finally came….we’ve moved into our own place. And how sweet it is! Here are some photos of the new house: The front of the house is surrounded by a wall, which is nice for relaxing in the hammock without being stared at. There is only so much staring and piropos a person can take in a day.

And here is Javi relaxing in the hammock. That is a prime spot (especially after work) and it is our most prized piece of “furniture.”

As this next picture illustrates, we don’t have much by way of furniture. Actually, what you see here is all we have, plus our bed and stove. The guy in the photo is our site mate Connor.

Not having a lot of furniture is actually nice so far. It makes cleaning easy and nothing feels cluttered.

Here is the kitchen. We won’t have a fridge until next weekend, when the owner of our house can bring one for us. We’ve managed to cook without it so far, but it’s a lot of work since we must cook everything that is perishable right away and eat everything we make.

Man has it been nice to have a clean kitchen again, which is OURS. The last host family we stayed with here in Comayagua had the kitchen that was being “remodeled” and was in a serious state of disrepair. There was also a whole ecosystem of wildlife in there. Besides the cockroaches and geckos, there were mice (a perfect hole in my ramen noodles cup was evidence of that), bees (on one occasion Connor was actually stung by one) and there was even a huge sapo (toad) that would wander in at night from the indoor patio.

This last photo is of our pila area. (A pila, if you remember, is where you keep water if you do not have running water. We do have running water in Comayagua, so our pila is where we do laundry.) The various buckets in the background and the scrubbing surface on the left hand side of the pila is where all those clothes got clean today.

And so, our 7 month stint living in the homes of other people has finally come to an end. Since we left our apartment in Dallas last November, we have stayed with friends and family in New Mexico, Texas and Tennessee, and then on our Christmas trip to Europe in Spain, France, Germany, and Italy. Then, since February, we have been guests in 3 different homes here in Honduras. There was the host family in Santa Lucia, Cantarranas and the last one here in Comayagua. It feels great to unpack our bags, listen to music again (on speakers at least), decide what food to make, walk from the bathroom to our closet without a towel and just feel relaxed in our own house!