Routines

I have two housemates, both Irish girls, who are by far my best friends here. Both are leaving in July. This has prompted numerous conversations about what we love about Honduras, and what we’ll miss. Out favourite thing is Friday evenings.

We finish work on Fridays and go to the market. Sometimes I give an English class to my Honduran colleagues first, sometimes we work late, but we always end up in the market. The market cheers us up and stops us being pissed off and reminds us why we love this country.

We have it down to a fine art by now. We start with pupúsas in the food stall area, or sometimes fried fish at the garífuna stall. Then we go direct to the alleys of fish and seafood to buy prawns and tilapia. Always prawns and tilapia. They quote us the price per pound, and we ask how many people a pound feeds. Who buys food by weight? Then we weave our way past the pigs trotters, tripe and liver to where the live crabs in a bucket indicate the end of the flesh zone and the start of the fruit and veg.

We are ridiculously enthusiastic. We coo over the enormous aubergines, the butternut squash, the tiny red tomatoes and the most sumptuous mange tout I have ever tasted. Eva nearly cried when she discovered pak choi. The toothless man selling it had no idea why the gringa was so happy, but he was very pleased with the sale. Once Eva told a vendor that squishy fruit terrifies her - apparently it does - so that he'd select the right strawberries. Whole families come up from the countryside for the weekend market, and the boys line up to stare at us, gringas being a fairly unusual commodity in this very Honduran space. This week, we saw a father and son shoving at each other in competition for the best view of the three foreign girls gravely sizing up papayas.

Honduras is the most fertile, fecund place you can imagine. Parts of the market reek of ripe, bitter fruit, a smell I remember powerfully from the orphanage in Guatemala as heaps of marañones – cashew fruit. Everything grows here. Fresh fruit salad means watermelon, papaya, melon, pineapple and mango. We buy a bag of strawberries and a bag of blackberries every week, just for juicing. Stalls are marked out by ludicrous heaps of oranges, mangoes or potatoes; piles so immense they can’t possibly all be eaten – but they can’t not, since they’ve come all the way from the mountains and can’t be taken back there. There’s a corner that is heavily scented with blossoms: immense tropical flowers, lilies and orchids and god knows what for about a dollar a throw.

The fecundity goes beyond agricultural productivity. The market is bountiful in humanity too, hundreds of filthy faced kids hiding under their parents’ tables, or pushing barrows full of chamomile or garlic. Not just the market: all of Honduras is the most abundantly productive place you can imagine: pregnant women, babies, rotting fruit and vegetables. All the mothers I know are single mothers, and even the most educated middle class girls seem to get pregnant by 22.

Anyway. We finish our shopping and wander out delighted with ourselves. On the way home we stop in a petrol station to buy wine, and then we go home and cook prawns and watch a video. It's been a solid Friday night ritual for 5 months now, and I dread the day the girls leave and I start going partying on Friday nights instead.