Dangerous cities

I'm in Tegucigalpa, supposedly one of the most dangerous cities in the world. The thing is that the danger hype in all of these cities usually keeps people away. And sometimes that's sad. 

Yesterday I walked down to the historic center of the city. I didn't see any white people the whole day, but I did see an amazing museum, a couple of cool churches, a thousand Hondurans just living their lives.  I didn't walk into any super sketchy areas, it was day time and I wasn't in any place that was super isolated... So it felt really safe the whole day.

Today I woke up after sleeping in, realized there was no water in the normally ice cold shower and so set out to the mall in the same dirty clothes with dirty hair and all... 

I walked in the direction of the biggest mall, over some massive hills, through some suburb looking places, then past a street that was closed off by police. 

I kept going not realizing that street was the street I was looking for...

So I went about 3 miles down the road in the wrong direction, checked out some other neighborhoods and eventually turned around heading home. I decided that I could take a different route since I hadn't found my mall, and I might as well explore some more of the city. 

I ended up in a variety of Colonias (upper class neighborhoods), eventually finding the big mall. I watched the new terminator movie and ate an auntie Annie's pretzel, then headed back to the hostel once again trying a new route.  This time it was getting dark and a lot of businesses were closed, eventually I found my way, and everything turned out well. I looked on the map of tegucigalpas and realized Id been to a huge part of the city all accidentally. If I hadn't explored and potentially risked getting jumped I wouldn't have seen much at all. 

The reality is that when you can't go down alleys, and need to stick to high pedestrian areas, you still see these huge swaths of (usually) commercial areas. You see the public areas and stare down the street at the neighborhoods from there. It's not entirely different from the things you'd do at home.  Unless you're like me and like getting lost(as I did today a few times), most people stick to the routes they know, the main roads, the highways etc.   I got to do that in Managua and Guate, got to do that in Lima, São Paolo and Bogotá, it's nice... And so is getting a little lost in some neighborhoods (when everything turns out ok).  

Anyway... I'm glad I came to Tegus - as they call it. 

I'm headed to Comayagua tomorrow (pronounced differently than one would expect).  

Which reminds me of two things: 

1) Hondurans and Nicaraguans have not been as friendly as Mexicans and Guatemalans, perhaps they are more laid back and so they don't jump to say hi, or maybe they don't want to deal with tourists... Or maybe I look grubby. 

2) Nicaraguan and Honduran accents are way different than Guatemalan and Mexican. Like they drop letters and things... It's so hard to understand sometimes.  Spanish is supposed to be this language where every letter has a sound and yet in these places they don't pronounce some of the letters, or they pronounce them differently. 

Comayagua should be like coma-ya-Goo a...but here it's like coma-ya-wa