Day 104 – Sunday 1st January 2006
New Years Day is a public holiday in Honduras and as such the boats to Utila were not running. We were therefore forced to spend a day in La Ceiba. It wasn´t much of a scenic town, and one of us being much in the mood to lay on the beach we went to the local shopping centre, ordered fast food and went to the cinema.
That shopping centre is probably the first one I have been into since leaving England, and to be honest it was set out in exactly the same format as those in the UK, the main differences being the latino faces and the different shop names. Groups of teenagers were hanging out, girls were dressed up and it was packed. Really packed actually. There was a huge amount of people in the centre, about as busy as the UK gets during the final Saturday before Christmas.
To escpae the crowds we went and watched Kong at the cinema (played in English, with Spanish subtitles). The problem with seeing films that are subtitled into the local language is that the locals don´t feel the need to listen to the words, only read the screen. As a result they see no problem in chatting amongst themselves or even to their mates on their mobile phones. When the person sitting next to you is chatting away on their mobile phone it does become reasonably annoying, especially when they shout in order to be heard over the noise of the film. This happened a lot. Another annoying thing was the hoardes of kids who decided not to watch the film, but to run around the cinema screaming at the top of their voices and jumping over the seats, and everyone sat in them.
At first it took a while to shut the disturbances from my mind and concentrate on the film, but after an hour of it, the background noise kind of drifts into, well, into the background!
