Balthusian Tegucigalpa, Ten pm

A large statue of the Virgin Mary looks over the city from its highest point. A worn white Coca Cola sign is the next prominent landmark, also surveying the city.

Dinner in the place to be on a Saturday night. It's crowded with locals, empty beer bottles covering the tables, drunken conversations. The waitresses keep track of drinks by the number of bottles on the tables. A security guard at the door frisks entering customers. Hondurans love their machetes. I order Imperials and the plato tipico - steak, an egg, avocado, beans, rice, and plantains. An Indian couple from the mountains enters the place cautiously, sits near us. They don't know what to do. It takes them time to arrange themselves at the table. They appear nervous, looking around, fumbling with their hands, perhaps their first time in such a place. They look at their money, exchange sharp words, get up and walk out.

A cover band plays Elvis, Santana, The Doors, the obligatory "La Bamba." The guitarist, all 5 foot 3 of him, rocks on his Les Paul. The band is too good to be cheesy. We're leaving when they strike up "Another Brick in the Wall." British schoolboy angst in a smoky bar in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. "Dark sarcasm" probably exists in all classrooms, but Honduran kids are hardly bricks in a modern socioeconomic wall and state bureaucracy. A Northern conceit - what a luxury to decry bureaucracy. Tegucigalpa is a sea of exhaust fumes carving, eroding rivulets for splotchy buildings and streets along which people navigate a crumbling valley.

Rhinestone designs on jeans pockets. I don't notice these on latinas in the US. I notice them in Honduras. I start to see a different kind of fashion. I'm trained passively to be attracted to NYU, Greenwich Village hipster chic. I begin to see the lovely simplicity of things like rhinestones on jeans. Nearly everyone wears blue jeans here.

We pass John's Barber Shop. A guy woos a girl in the doorway, which spills a phosphorous glow from its green-painted walls onto the night street. A shirtless boy steps out quickly with a towel, steps back in. A man comes out on a balcony above the street, looks both ways down the street and returns to the blue glow of his television. A car alarm blares. It's allowed to run too long, a sign of status that one has something worth securing.

The dome of Iglesia Dolores is dark, but its peeling whitewash reflects the ambient light. The tile roofs absorb it. Electrical wires run across the balconies in a daunting tangle.

Three women pass under the flickering streetlamp, boxes of fruit balanced on their heads. Their children prance around them. One of them wears a t-shirt that says "Brave." A bus loves JesusChristo. An old man passes with a recordkeeping book. He drops something, looks at it, mutters, kicks it angrily into the gutter. The man comes out on his balcony again, looks both ways, returns to the tv. Two women with flowers from mass.

A car stereo somewhere nearby sends out the thump and treble of indiscernible music. Maybe the ubiquitous reggaeton. An accordion harmonizes elsewhere. A kid climbs the iron-grated door of a closed shop, pulls down a sign and rolls it up. The children in Honduras are far older than children of their same age in the US. A man stops at the front door of a small rundown shack with a "Se Vende" sign on it, he looks around for other people, then reaches under the weathered door and pulls up on an iron bar. The door cracks open and he slides into the lightless house.

In the morning, the parrots fly and squawk. A church group sings and praises the Lord. We have coffee in little plastic cups. And flag a taxi for the airport.