Columbus Day

Today is Columbus Day in Honduras too and most of the kids are out of school. Unlike the US where it is pretty much known that the Vikings discovered North America before Columbus, it is still believed that Columbus was the first foreigner to actually come to Honduras. Also unlike the US where the colonists lived separately from the indengineous people, in Honduras the Spaniards who came after Columbus intermarried with the indengineous people and most of the population has both Spanish and indengineous relatives in their family trees.

The US soccer team was here Thur. to Sun. and beat Honduras 3-2 Sat. night about a mile from the casa at the stadium. Unfortunately for Honduras, it makes the road to the world cup very difficult now. They need to beat El Salvador on Wed. and hope that the US beats Costa Rica the same night. If not they will have a very difficult playoff against a strong team from South America, possibly Argintina. Soccer is HUGE here and the build up to the game on Sat. was more that you see in the US before the Superbowl, front page of the papers for days before and 20+ pages of coverage the day after, hours of TV coverage before and after. The game is of so little interest in the US it was not even on TV, and you really had to look hard on the internet sports pages to find coverage in the soccer sections, burried after the NCAA, NFL, Baseball, Golf, Tennis, etc. on the front pages.