For those of you in the tl;dr camp: Hondurans are culturally predisposed towards early-onset deafness.
Honduras has been an interesting exercise in flexibility. Different food, different language, different culture. Overall it's enjoyable, but it's not entire. It's like Jello spiked with broken glass: not that bad if you just eat the Jello part. And if you get some glass it's ok, because then it's something to tell the grandkids about, assuming you live that long.
I knew I was in for a lot of adjustment before I left, and was ok with it. The food here is great, by the way, in case I haven't mentioned that enough. I'm cool with learning Spanish, I've got a thing for languages. My biggest problem there is being disciplined in studying it. The trouble comes in the culture department, in a couple of areas: noise and what I will refer to as "Professionalism" for lack of a better term.
Hondurans, to put it nicely, are
bloody noisy. I'm not even kidding. Your average American with a Big Stereo, a Camaro with no muffler, an Outdoor Voice and three TVs on in the background 24/7 doesn't even know what "noisy" means, compared to these people. If they're not making noise, they're not happy, and when they
are happy, then they're shooting things to show it. (If you're happy and you know it, shoot your gun!)
Car horns are a way of life in Honduras. If you're driving here and you need to pull into traffic, you honk loud and long to let people know you're pulling in. If someone lets you in, you honk at them to let them know how appreciative you are. If you think someone might not know you're there (such as the pedestrians crossing the street 150 yards ahead) you honk at them. If you're a Real Man in Honduras and you go to a friend's house to visit, you don't ring the doorbell; you sit in your car in front of his house and lay on the horn for about 30 seconds straight. To ring someone's doorbell here marks you as either a Sissie or a Beggar or a Conman, and sometimes all three.
Music in Honduras comes in only two volumes: maddeningly painful, or literally deafening. The neighbor behind me (I call him Thumper) has a Bumpin' Stereo through which he blares music of a genre I cannot discern, because it's so loud that it's gone fuzzy and all I can make out is that
there is a beat. I know there is a beat, because it's making my skull throb and resonate while it gleefully imparts its subliminal commands to
Burn Them All. Thumper will do this for up to 6 hours without interruption, sometimes until 1:30 AM. I want his stereo to short out and burn his house to the ground while he's at work.
My neighbor to one side, a guy I've started calling
Señor Unce for his love of All Things Techno, has a Bigass Truck with an exhaust system specifically altered to be as noisy as possible, which he cannot start without revving it like he's trying to break it for about 10 minutes. His schtick is that he parks this truck with the doors open in front of his house and blasts his Techno. I've only seen him go for 4-hour stretches at a time, but he makes up for it in psychological aggression by sometimes playing it as late (early) as 3 or 4 AM, on weekdays. I have a fantasy in which he is driving this truck and runs afoul of a military checkpoint: he doesn't see the soldiers directing traffic because he has looked down to adjust the stereo, and he cannot hear their shouts over his music. As he plows into the rearmost stopped car, the soldiers mistake this for a vehicle-bombing attempt.
The neighbor across the street has a thing for classical music, and has the loudest stereo of them all: we call him NBC, for Neighborhood Broadcasting Company. Even our very nice next-door neighbors do it, though much less often, and so far always during the day. A while back I got a ride with them to the mall, and before leaving, they popped a Big Band Jazz CD in the player. They played it so loudly that the husband and wife, sitting next to each other, were
shouting at the top of their lungs at each other to be heard. Not an argument: he was trying to tell her to go move the other car into the driveway, and she couldn't tell what he was saying. At no point in this back-and-forth did it occur to either of them to
simply turn the music down.Screaming is a big deal in Honduras, too. When the neighbors argue (approximately one big fit per day, all three kids and the mom, with scattered smaller arguments),
they scream. When they throw tantrums (approximately once every ninety minutes when the kids are home), they scream. When they
play, they scream
. The "oh God it burns, get it off me, it took
my arm" kind of screaming, what we euphemistically refer to as "screaming bloody murder", except that it actually sounds like they're being murdered. We have been brought out of the house more than once to see if they're alright, because we thought someone had broken a leg or something. No, just playing around. I thought at first it was just them, but it turns out the kids at the school I did tech stuff for do almost the same thing.
Professionalism is a rant for another time.
-- Cynic
