Revisiting Catelin's Time in Honduras
In our first episode, one of our hosts, Catelin, briefly mentioned when she lived in Honduras for a year. We promised we'd revisit that part of her life in a future episode, and it's finally here! This week we dive deep into Catelin's time in Honduras and how it helped shape her into the person she is today.
Cuba Libre
Catelin enjoyed plenty of Cuba Libres on the beach with her friends in Honduras. It's just cola and rum, but with added lime to give it a bit of citrus. A perfect simple drink almost anyone can make on a hot summer's day. Or, in this case, a drink you can make while imagining yourself on the beach.
Ingredients
- 0.5 oz. of freshly squeezed lime juice.
- 2 oz. of light rum.
- 4 oz. of your favorite cola.
Steps
- Add lime juice into a glass of your choice.
- Fill glass with ice and pour in your rum.
- Fill with cola and gently stir.
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Episode Transcript
Rich: Hi, Catelin.
Catelin: Hi. We're back.
Rich: We are back. I am super, super excited for today's episode. I've been waiting for this.
Catelin: It's been a long time coming. I'm actually a little bit nervous that I won't do the experience justice. Today, we're talking about-
Rich: Oh, I think you would.
Catelin: ... my time in Honduras. I opened up all of my old Facebook albums to try and like-
Rich: Wow.
Catelin: ... get the juices flowing. I know, right? Back when you would upload 400 photos to an album and not tend to a carousel.
Rich: Yeah. And you could auto upload from your phone if you wanted to and they would sit in private until you push them out.
Catelin: Nope. These were from a real live camera. They were not from a phone. They're from a camera.
Rich: Wow.
Catelin: Do you remember that?
Rich: I remember using... Gosh, what was it? It was Apple's version of Lightroom, which I've now forgotten, Aperture.
Catelin: Oh, yep.
Rich: You could connect Aperture to Flip Flicker and to Facebook, so you could push albums out and up and it was really handy. But gosh, Facebook albums.
Catelin: Right? They're all still there. You have to be my friend to see them and that's-
Rich: You have to hunt for them. We've got a good remodel album that I think is actually open because it's just pictures of our remodel that we did to the house in San Diego. Very dramatic changes. And then there are private albums as well just for friends and family and stuff.
Catelin: Great.
Rich: Well, it's fun. So we have been a long time coming with this. Has it been a year. When was our first episode?
Catelin: I don't remember. Time is a flat circle. It doesn't mean anything to me.
Rich: It is a flat circle. So Catelin dropped just off the cuff in our very first episode. Like, "When I was in Honduras, blah, blah, blah, blah." And we were like, "Wait, hold up." But we didn't have time to cover it. And so we promised we'd cover that in a future episode. So it's not really a marketing question, But it's more of a life question and career choices.
Catelin: Life experience.
Rich: And experiences. So we're going to be talking about that today. But before we get to it, we need a cocktail. And I think this book is especially good for-
Catelin: It's really sweet.
Rich: Talking about our Honduras. And I was mistaken on what this is. So I get a Cuba Libre and a caipirinha mixed up. Even though caipirinha is from Brazil, they are not the same thing, just from different places because there is a very key difference. Aside from the alcohol is a little bit different, but they're both a sugar cane based alcohol. So do you want to roll with this one or do you want me to roll with it?
Catelin: Yeah. Well, I should say too that our other drink of choice in Honduras, so I spent time in Guatemala, three weeks in Guatemala while I was still in college. And that was like... Cuba Libre was it there.
Rich: Wow.
Catelin: And then I think because I was 22 and didn't know how to drink anything that wasn't sugar water. And then the other, when I moved or lived in Honduras, we had just drank a lot of Central American beer. It's like Pacifico.
Rich: Yeah. And I think that's where it came up with Pacifico 'cause a lot of the Mexican beers make it down through Central America, which makes sense.
Catelin: I'm trying to remember.
Rich: Not a lot of Bud Light.
Catelin: No.
Rich: No natty's best?
Catelin: No. Oh, I wouldn't do that anyway. Gross. Or
Rich: Or natty light mud's best. Yeah, right.
Catelin: I don't know. None of those, none of those thank you. But Cuba Libre is just rum and coke basically.
Rich: With lime juice.
Catelin: If you want to be really schmanzy, you can do half an ounce of freshly squeezed lime juice. Typically, about half of a lime, two ounces of light rum, and four ounces of your preferred cola. At the time, really loved Mexican Coke which is just made-
Rich: Made with sugar.
Catelin: ... with actual sugar instead of all of the nonsense.
Rich: I love the Costco always has the Mexican Coke almost everywhere. Even in Omaha, we can get that. Because we could get it in San Diego and we're like, "Well, we're like stones throw from Mexico." You can miss an exit and you're in Mexico. But up here they have it too which is really great. So this one is also super simple because there's no, you don't need a shaker. You don't need anything.
Catelin: No, you can just put it all together and give it a little stir.
Rich: You want to do some with glass.
Catelin: You don't want to stir too vigorously. Yep.
Rich: Rum in the glass. Can you measure the rum with your soul or with your heart?
Catelin: Yeah, definitely.
Rich: You can definitely measure two ounces. I pour and go one, two...
Catelin: You just go with what feels right.
Rich: Yeah, I think that's good.
Catelin: You might go three, four.
Rich: Yeah, some days. Some days. My problem with this is I just don't drink. I'm going to show my California time here, but I don't drink soda anymore. I don't drink coke, pop.
Catelin: I don't really either.
Rich: I go back and forth between saying soda and pop, but soda seems to come out more for me.
Catelin: Club and soda.
Rich: Every once in a while, I just want a fountain Coke from McDonald's because whatever they do with theirs, I don't know the crack that they put in it, or whatever it is. But I get about halfway through it, and then I'm like, "Yeah, I don't want this anymore." So I'm done. But I think that I could make this work. The rum is in there, the lime juice. I also think that if you were doing this as your budget, you could just use the Diet Coke with lime and pour some rum in it. It's not going to be the same-
Catelin: You could do that.
Rich: But you could do that. You're going to have sort of a...
Catelin: You'll see, he'll get the idea. But Maybe with the good in theory, not necessarily in practice.
Rich: I was talking about... It reminds me of a caipirinha, which has not been a cocktail yet, but will be. I had a bunch of those in Corpus Christi when I was working for the wireless carrier. I had so many that I'm not entirely sure how I got back to my hotel room, but I did wake up there and I did not have a hangover, which is surprising because-
Catelin: No, I'm really happy for you.
Rich: The liquor in that is Kashasa which is like a rum because it's a sugar cane based booze.
Catelin: It's fermented sugar cane.
Rich: Yeah. It's powerful is what it is.
Catelin: I think it's gross. Tyrell, my home bartender husband really is into cachaca. I think, actually, if I'm remembering our holiday party correctly, that was the liquor that broke Zach that he came and he's like Laphroaig is delicious. And then he tried.
Rich: I remember that.
Catelin: And I was like, "Oh, Zach's wrong. What's wrong with Zach's tongue? It's broken." But then Tyrell was like, "Well, now I have to find the thing that will get him to say that's gross."
Rich: Somebody did likened it to Brazilian Everclear to me, basically... Especially on potency.
Catelin: It's also super vegetal. There's a tomato thing and it's really weird. I don't like it.
Rich: Well, and covering these are a little bit more difficult as well 'cause you've got to do some muddling with the lime and the raw sugar and all that.
Catelin: Yeah. There's more steps. It's not just [inaudible 00:07:22]
Rich: The other thing this reminds me of, and then we're going to move on and talk about Honduras. It reminds me of a calimocho in Spain. So calimocho is... You're probably going to go, "Oh my God, that's so gross." It's coke and red wine. Almost one to one. And it's typically, because obviously in Europe the drinking age is much lower. And it's not as much stigma to it.
Catelin: Oh, sure.
Rich: So it's how kids get started on red wine 'cause wine is a big thing in Spain, of course. But you can also just order them at a restaurant and things. It's just a calimocho. Exciting. All right. So why don't we let producer Zach give us a dance break, and then we'll come back and we will grill Catelin on her time in Honduras. Not really. We're just going to have a conversation about it.
Catelin: I can't wait.
Rich: All right. And we are back. So this is not the most structured episode.
Catelin: Because we have such a rigid structure to begin with.
Rich: Yeah. So we're so regimented on this. But I think the first thing that I want to know is how did you end up in Honduras? What got you there?
Catelin: Well, I majored at morning psychology in Spanish and photography. So I can take your picture in two languages if you need me to. Right. It's my bit. I'm doing a bit. But my parents primarily were concerned that photography was not going to be an employable skill. Imagine. They really leaned into the starving artist narrative, which has not necessarily been the case either, thankfully.
But I knew that if I was going to increase my fluency and actually be able to use Spanish in an employable way, I needed to be more fluent at it, or needed to get some more real world experience.
Rich: Absolutely.
Catelin: At the time, and I think still to do that is to just go and immerse yourself. I was really conscious of going on a paid program. I didn't want to spend... At that time, I didn't realize that I could probably have afforded to spend time just volunteering, but the peace corps wasn't really an option because you didn't get to actually choose where you ended up. They just kind of assign you places. I was nervous that my level of fluency at the time wouldn't guarantee me a spot in Central or South America.
So bilingual school came to Morningside looking for teachers. And the education system in Honduras is different in as much that you don't need an actual teaching certificate to be considered a teacher. And so I was hired because unbeknownst to me, the year before I started Honduras had actually had a military coup and their president was ousted. And then three or four months later, I was in the country. I think I had my parents know that. They might have had some concerns about my safety, which was never an issue that I knew of.
So I was hired by a school to teach. It ended up being first grade. And then I made the mistake maybe of mentioning that I really love proofreading and grammar. And so they're like, "Oh, great. We have-"
Rich: Do you?
Catelin: So then they're like, "Well, that's so interesting. We have an opening in eighth grade language arts." So I was teaching an entire class of 30... I think I ended up with 31 first graders. And then one of my free periods, I was also teaching eighth grade English.
Rich: Oh, wow. Which was wild. Was that 14-year-olds? 13, 14-year-olds?
Catelin: I think so, yeah.
Rich: 15, maybe?
Catelin: Yeah.
Rich: I think 13, 14.
Catelin: 13, 14, yeah.
Rich: I think that was oped time if I remember right from my childhood.
Catelin: And those kids were so smart and tricky. They knew how to get away with stuff in eighth grade that I was like, "Ugh, I am out of my depth here at managing human beings."
Rich: Luckily you've got to always-
Catelin: It's wild.
Rich: You've got to ways until you have an eighth grader in your house. She's still pretty.
Catelin: Right, yeah.
Rich: Now, first grade is going to come like nobody's business, super fast. She'll turn around and be like, I know.
Catelin: Those sweet babies. Oh my gosh. I had no idea what I was doing. Zero idea. And I had always said, growing up, my mom taught, she retired from teaching after 35 years. I always said growing up that I'd never wanted to be a teacher because I saw the nonsense she had to put up with. And then I was like, "Well, this is one year. I can do it." And it turns out that I could do it, but I would not necessarily enjoy all of the aspects of it.
Rich: Not a career choice for you.
Catelin: No. I like children like three at a time, but 30 at a time is a lot, a lot, a lot.
Rich: It is. And I can tell you from teaching the college courses that I do, that 26 to 30 kids, or young adults, I guess at that point, even if they're in their early 20s is still a lot.
Catelin: It's still a lot. And so much of what I was doing was like, "You have to teach them how to be people too." And I was barely a people. I barely knew what I was doing at 20. I think I was 22. I turned 23 while I was there. So I was a baby myself. I had no idea. But we spent as much time as we could traveling and seeing other parts of the country. We lived right outside of... So it was me and I lived with three other American women and then across the road from us.
Rich: You didn't know them before going.
Catelin: I didn't know-
Rich: You went on your own not like you and three friends. It's just you went there and met these people and, "Hey, here's your new roommates. You've never met them and you're in a foreign country."
Catelin: Exactly. I.
Rich: I mean, you're an extrovert, so that makes sense. I would imagine that was a little bit uncomfortable out of your comfort zone for sure.
Catelin: I don't know if I have-
Rich: Or were you just fearless? Fearless, 23 year old like, "I'll just go to another country. Sure. Why not?"
Catelin: I think it's that. I think I didn't know. I didn't know as much about the world as I thought I did. But I had so much passion and curiosity about the other cultures that I ignored the rest of, I don't know, the red flags. I don't know.
Rich: I think that nobody had... You hadn't had your curiosity broken yet. You had a huge letdown property in that area.
Catelin: Personally still have not. I was raised in such a way that the world has always been safe for me. And there's not ever been a time where I was concerned about real threats to my wellbeing. I always had a safety net. Quite honestly, that feeling persisted throughout my time in Honduras. The school did the most wonderful job making us feel safe and giving us resources to travel. But also, I think they shielded us from a lot of their realities, yeah.
Rich: Especially if a coup was happening while you were there.
Catelin: Well, it was over by the time I got there.
Rich: Okay. Well, that's good. I mean, that's good. I can imagine your mother was like, "There's a coup?"
Catelin: They had no idea. They had no idea.
Rich: I mean, the internet was a thing when you were in college 'cause it was a thing when I was in college. But it wasn't as ubiquitous as it is today where we have so much information. And the olds weren't on it. It was just the youngs.
Catelin: And also just the level of awareness that's required to understand the geopolitical ramifications of military coup in a small Central American country. To conceptualize that is beyond even still my understanding of how the world works. It's a lot. It's a lot.
Rich: I have a story that goes with that, believe it or not. Yeah. So I did not get to study abroad. Tangents is one of the names of the words in the title. I didn't get a study abroad. I didn't do a semester abroad. I really wish I had and so I did a whole nother degree in two semesters for my last year of college. But when I left high school, we did our Spanish class. Six of us in our teacher did a trip to Mexico and we went to Mexico City, Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta. It was really neat. So we stayed in Mexico City and it was much safer back then, wandered around, had tasks. It was an organized group. There were other schools there as well. There were 20 of us.
We had to go to a bread shop and buy bread and somebody had to go out to a meat shop and buy sliced meat so that we could eat our lunch [inaudible 00:17:16] basically.
And then we took a train to Guadalajara through the mountains and stuff, which was neat. And then we flew to Puerto Vallarta. When we got to Puerto Vallarta, so this in... It would've been the summer of 1990, since my age isn't a secret anyway. When we got to Puerto Vallarta, we were getting off the plane. I mean, if you've gone to Hawaii or even Florida, sometimes you get off the plane and you walk down the tarmac.
Catelin: You walk out on the tarmac. Yeah.
Rich: So we came in a door and there was security there which foreign countries, security and airports and things generally have machine guns and stuff. It's military. They had blocked the whole aisle and we were stuck in that little kind of waiting area where you would... The boarding area. All of us getting off the plane because they were escorting Manuel Noriega through. He had been arrested and was going to the US for trial. We saw him walk by and he's got such a distinct face. His nickname was Carapina because he had so many pockmarks and things on his face.
So that's my, I guess, deposed dictator brush with in Puerto Vallarta. And then we went to our little resort and had a good time. And then we came back to America. So aside from the school, let's get into some other stuff. Did go out in town? Where there bars? Where there clubs? Because you're a college or post-college student in a foreign country.
Catelin: We're all pretty young.
Rich: Of age, but young. I mean, it sounds like it could be a fun time.
Catelin: It was really-
Rich: We want the dirt. We want the dirt.
Catelin: So that quite honestly, there's not a lot of dirt to be spilled from that period of time. It was a Christian school, and we worked in a very small town that there were kind of, I don't know, stigmas attached to imbibing.
Rich: Oh, wow. Okay.
Catelin: Yeah. So anytime we didn't buy alcohol at the local grocery store, because it would've been reflect... It would've reflected poorly on the school.
Rich: Oh, scandalized for the school. Okay, I get that.
Catelin: Yeah.
Rich: Wow.
Catelin: But when we traveled... So we would get long weekends and we would get... They observed American Thanksgiving for us and took us-
Rich: Oh, nice.
Catelin: ... to the capitol and hosted a really lovely dinner. And then we traveled on... I think our first long weekend was in the fall. We went to a beach in the Gulf. I'm Forgetting the names of places already. It's been-
Rich: It's okay. So a beach in the Gulf.
Catelin: [inaudible 00:20:13]
Rich: So it's warm. It's beautiful.
Catelin: It's warm, it's beautiful.
Rich: Hot probably.
Catelin: Yeah. And so when we traveled outside of the town that we lived in, and we didn't actually live in town, we lived in a village and we had three kind of actual neighbors. So it was me and my three roommates lived in a house and then across the road from us was a married couple that were... We were all very similar age, very close in age 23, 24 at the time. We all got along really well. So that was kind of our American pod, and we did a lot of stuff together, the six of us.
Rich: Do you still keep in touch with any of them?
Catelin: Yeah.
Rich: You do?
Catelin: Less now. The three women that I lived with were all in our wedding, and we were all it. So for a while, Shelly and Laura Beth both lived in Des Moines, so they were from Iowa.
Rich: So they were near. It wasn't-
Catelin: It just happened. Yeah. And then now Shelly and Jennifer both live an hour from each other outside of Kansas City, and Laura Beth still lives in Des Moines. So we get together. It's been less, like I said. The last time we were together was February 2020 when we were all together.
Rich: That makes sense because then we all shut down. So you could triangulate like in Omaha, you could all drive an hour to-
Catelin: And that's what we did. After we got back, we would meet in Omaha and stay at the Holiday Inn sort of in the old market downtown-ish, right near the ball field.
Rich: Oh, yep. I know that one.
Catelin: We would just wander around and be together. I liken the year that we were together to an extended summer camp where it was very dreamy and relaxed, but also very fraught. We were all doing so much growing and changing and learning at that time that it was like... In college, I didn't have a typical roommate experience most years. And so it was like that for me too.
Rich: I had a psycho roommate.
Catelin: And it was like... Yeah. And nobody else outside of the six of us knew what it was like or knew... We had such a crystallizing experience together that it's hard to let other people into that without... It's like you had to be there. It's one big long inside joke [inaudible 00:23:08]
Rich: Yeah, of course. You were spending a year with those people.
Catelin: It was so formative. Yeah.
Rich: I mean, you're semi-cut off from your regular life, so this becomes your life, but it's sort of this-
Catelin: Yeah. I mean, it was our life. We cooked. And two of the gals, they were... It was the first time that they had lived outside of the dorms or their parents' home. And so had never to cook really for themselves. They relied heavily on the cafeteria at school. And so it was like, "Here's how you cook things and here's how..." The best part of that experience, one of the best parts in our day-to-day experience was like Laura Beth and I were in charge of cooking, and then Shelly and Jennifer would clean up.
So I could make a mess in the kitchen. I was our head chef. And then they would just come behind and do all the dishes. It was the best.
Rich: That's how our house-
Catelin: We're still trying to figure out how I [inaudible 00:24:06]. I want that in my home.
Rich: I'm big on after I'm done eating, I don't want to do a bunch of dishes. And he's more like, "Oh, it'll all be here when we're done eating and we can clean it up." And so he'll be done with a pan and I'll take it out of his hand. And as long as it's cool enough, go wash it. He's finished with his bowl or the cutting board, and I've got the knife and everything. I'm washing as he's going which used to drove him crazy, but now he's kind of appreciating it because when you get done, all you have to do is put your own dishes in the dishwasher and you're finished.
Catelin: And then you're done. Yeah.
Rich: That's nice. So what do you think was... Well, what's the strangest thing, I guess, that you encountered or that you had to adjust to in Honduras. I know I should have given you these questions ahead of time. So this is totally Catelin on the spot.
Catelin: Right? I don't know if there's a singular strange thing. I mean we were all sheltered Midwest kids, dropped into a completely different culture.
Rich: So it was culture shock in general?
Catelin: Yeah. I don't know if this is the strangest thing, but I remember... So Tyrell came. We were dating at the time, and this is such a testament to him and his personality. I had dated this idiot in college that was like... I don't know. I had said, "I want to join the Peace Corps. I want to do it" And he's like, "I don't know why you'd ever want to do that." And I was so deflated. So I applied to go to Honduras, I think before Tyrell and I actually started dating. And then I had the interview and the acceptance two or three months into our relationship.
I remember calling him and being like, "I got the job. What do you think I should do?" And he's like, "You should go." And then he said, "Would you really think that I would expect you to stay here for me?" And I was like... There were a lot of other formative things happening in my life as well. That was the first time that I was like, "Oh man, he really believes that I can do hard stuff that I should be my own person outside of him."
Rich: Independent, my own human being.
Catelin: That was pretty much spectacular.
Rich: Was that your "he's a keeper" moment?
Catelin: One, yeah.
Rich: One of them?
Catelin: Yeah, one of them.
Rich: I think the bartending skills would've would've done it for me.
Catelin: Right. He didn't have those in college, shockingly enough.
Rich: Wow. Interesting.
Catelin: Yeah, it's been a late development.
Rich: [inaudible 00:26:35]
Catelin: Yeah.
Rich: As you were saying.
Catelin: Yes, thank you. I was like, "Well, what's the point of this?" But he came, Holy Week, Easter week is a big deal.
Rich: Of course, [inaudible 00:26:45] Catholic country.
Catelin: Observes and shuts down. We went to a resort on Roatan, which is one of the big diving islands. So the second largest just barrier reef existed in Honduras.
Rich: I know it from Survivor. They filmed it there once.
Catelin: Sure. Okay. So he came and visited before we left to go to the island, I was kind of giving him a tour of the little town that we lived outside of. We were just walking around. Neither of us are small people. I'm five foot 10. He is almost six feet tall. And both of us are sturdy. We're sturdy Midwestern folks. I remember we were walking down one of the side streets, and this man who I think was intoxicated, just looked at us and said [foreign language 00:27:35] which is just like, "What large white people." I was like, "Yes, sir. That is accurate."
Rich: Not wrong. Thank you. We're going to move.
Catelin: Tyrell looked at me saying, "What did he say?" And I was like, "He just said we're we're large white people." And then we just kept walking like, "Okay."
Rich: So the random people you meet on the street sort of... I don't know if that's an insult or just a statement of awe.
Catelin: Oh, it is a state statement of fact. A hundred percent. I am a large white person. That has not-
Rich: But you get that in a whole different language, which is really great. It's just more beautiful.
Catelin: Yeah, it really was.
Rich: Let's see.
Catelin: The other thing that I thought was when-
Rich: Oh, go ahead.
Catelin: ... he was thinking about when he came to visit, I had gotten so used to... As we were riding the bus in the ferry across to the island, which was kind of a haven for other English speakers. Like I said, really popular diving, scuba diving area, and then a popular cruise ship destination. So there were more white people on the island, more English speakers than I was used to at the time. Because it was April. So I had been there for eight months at that point. And he was visiting me-
Rich: So you're getting the tourists coming down and through now versus just locals?
Catelin: Yeah. And I'm at that point, kind of acclimated, used to being one of the group translators. And Tyrell is visiting. We were sitting in a boat with going... I think from the ferry or some... I can't remember, but we were talking to an Australian group and I had gotten so used to regurgitating what people were saying to him that they were speaking English and I heard it. And then I looked at him and I said, "This is what they're saying." And he goes, "Yeah, I know that one." It was like, "Oh, right."
Rich: Yeah.
Catelin: We're all [inaudible 00:29:33].
Rich: They're not Scottish. You got to get used to it, but it's understandable.
Catelin: But I've just been so used to being like, here's this half of the conversation now, let me say this half, and going back and forth to translate from Spanish to English that I forgot that I didn't need to translate English to English for him.
Rich: That's interesting. I wonder if that happens with sign language interpreters. They're so used to signing [inaudible 00:29:57]
Catelin: Probably. Like talking with them. For sure.
Rich: They're talking with their hands is literally like they're sort of mildly signing because they know nobody needs to see it. But it's like, "That's what my hands do when we're having a conversation."
Catelin: Yeah. It looked really funny. He's like, "No, I got it." I'm like, "Oh, right. Carry on."
Rich: English, just slightly different. Got it. Those are funny. I didn't realize you were there for a year. That's wild to me.
Catelin: Technically it was like 10 months, but I just round up because [inaudible 00:30:28]
Rich: And you came back to the Midwest. You didn't like... Because a lot of times people will go do that for a year and then be like, "I'm going to..."
Catelin: "I got to get out of here."
Rich: Yeah. "I'm going someplace big. I'm going to go to Europe. I'm going to go someplace else. I'm going to stay." Was it Tyrell that brought you back?
Catelin: Yeah.
Rich: Or family?
Catelin: I had the option. No, I didn't. My parents were like, "You may not move home." Because I still was kind of under the guise of-
Rich: And reluctant.
Catelin: ... not living together before we got married. So I told my parents when I came... I came home for Christmas for a week or two. I can't remember. I think it was two weeks. And I said, "Tyrell said that I could live with him when I get back and I wouldn't have to pay rent or anything. He'll cover me until I find a job and stuff." And they were like, "That's good, because you can't move home." And I was like, "Thank God I didn't want to move back to the middle of nowhere in South Dakota. Thank you." Now that Sioux City is this grand metropolis, but at the time it was like [inaudible 00:31:28]
Rich: Well, and it's also for that area. For a very large area, it's the city.
Catelin: That's true. Yeah.
Rich: Because you're an hour and a half from anything that size or bigger.
Catelin: And so I moved back in June and he had gotten an apartment. He was hired by his still current employer in July-
Rich: Wow, that is longevity.
Catelin: ... of 2010. Yeah. And this is just another... I don't know. This feels more personal about me than about Honduras, but it's funny to look back at that. He had gotten hired as a call center floor rep.
Rich: Well, at that time, there was so much call center stuff going on in the Sioux City area.
Catelin: Yeah. Just taking calls on the floor. And then I think he had gotten promoted to at least twice before I came back, because he's a really great communicator and he's just ridiculously smart. And so by the time I came back, I think he was making 15 or $16 an hour, not adjusted for inflation. I don't know if something around there. I mean, it was a decent job. He liked the hours. I just kind of landed here and then we were going to figure out what we were going to do. And then my first job after I got back was doing in-home safety work for a subcontractor to the state of Iowa like DHS.
Rich: Oh, wow. Okay.
Catelin: Which was hard and heartbreaking, but I was hired because I was bilingual, which was the plan kind of all along that I would come back and be super employable because I could speak two languages. And I did that for, I don't know, probably about a year and then moved into banking, financial services and had two or three different jobs doing that. And then while I was working in banking, I was also kind of slowly launching a photography business then.
Rich: So did you-
Catelin: So here I am.
Rich: Did you do photography in Honduras? Did you take a good camera and actually shoot stuff?
Catelin: I had a DSLR I took with me. I didn't really know what I was doing at the time. I should have maybe taken some more good photos, but most of what I have is snapshots. I have some, I don't know, landscapes and things. There's one picture of a tree that was up the hill from us. I don't know.
Rich: Those can be good.
Catelin: There's some stuff, yeah. I'm just looking and scrolling back through my album now.
Rich: Oh, just to put a finer point on the difference in time from when I went to Mexico, I took my Pentax P3N with me.
Catelin: Oh, wow.
Rich: Because I had moved from a K1000 up to the P3N which was the pinnacle affordable camera at the time. I still have it. It sits on a shelf just with other cameras, but took a lot of film. So my big thing was I took some black and white film with me. So some of my photos from Puerto Vallarta are in black and white and some are in color. And then what we did is our group and the group that was attached to us, they had two teachers and four kids, four students. And we had one teacher and six students. We all got together afterward and printed our photos and shared and swapped back and forth.
Catelin: Oh, cool.
Rich: I don't even know if I've scanned any of those. I should send those in to a service 'cause I don't want to do it myself. It's a pain in the butt. But yeah, I should send those and get it scanned.
Catelin: I can connect you to a lab if you need... Yeah.
Rich: Very cool. I think we've kind of gone around on the journey there. Less scandalous than we were hoping, probably. But I know you. I knew it wasn't going to be... Especially at that age-
Catelin: Right. That was not sewing a lot of oats at that point in my life.
Rich: Especially-
Catelin: That came before.
Rich: ... teaching for a Christian school, small community. I mean, it's like growing up in a small town in Iowa or South Dakota or wherever. Everybody knows everything. By the time you've driven by someplace doing something, you shouldn't... They called your parents. And by the time [inaudible 00:35:44] you're home, they're like, "Hey, were you on this street at this time where you weren't supposed to be?" And you're like, "Yeah, because somebody called you."
Catelin: Yes, I was doing that.
Rich: But it was nice that you got to get outside of that sphere of influence of the school and do a few more things. I mean, just go to bars and things like that, just clubs, have fun. And just [inaudible 00:36:03]
Catelin: It was more... Not touristy. We kind of bridged the gap between tourist spots and living the locals.
Rich: So exploratory?
Catelin: They weren't a lot of places... Yeah, exactly. Where it was like we wanted to eat what the locals eat and go where the locals go and actually live there as opposed to see the sights. I don't know. We did a lot of both.
Rich: Yeah, that's what I've done when we were in San Diego. We went to Mexico quite a bit. 'Cause we could go to Cabo super easy. Puerto Vallarta wasn't as easy, but it wasn't hard. And then just the Baja Coast with a lobster. You get a whole lobster for $6. It was ridiculous. But we would always want to go to that local place or that funky place. The place where no one is speaking English. I mean, even when we went to Italy, we wanted... So Google Maps actually has a thing where you can look at ratings when you're traveling abroad and you can toggle it to local reviews only, instead of local and tourists.
Catelin: Oh, isn't that brilliant?
Rich: And it's interesting how the difference of those, especially when you need to get authentic food and what people expect coming from a different country. So that's good. I think I do call that exploring. Just wandering around, looking at things, figuring things out, finding that weird grocery store or cute little shop that you can buy a knickknack in or whatever.
Catelin: Yeah.
Rich: Well, cool. I think that does it for your time in Honduras. We've covered that now, so that's great. We'll wait for you to drop another random thing that you've done in your life and we'll explore that in depth at some point.
Catelin: I can't wait.
Rich: But really good.
Catelin: [inaudible 00:37:46]
Rich: It's interesting to me the things and the skills that you picked up there and the skills that made that something you would do, and how you've used those in different aspects of your career moving forward. Because I can see those threads. I can see the teaching thread. I can see the exploring thread. So what a great, great thing to do right after college.
Catelin: Yeah. I remember my parents at the time, my dad, I was a little bit nervous, but he's like, "This is the time to do it."
Rich: Yeah, absolutely.
Catelin: You're unattached. You don't have a mortgage you have to pay. You don't have really any strong relations that you're trying to... That you're bound to that-
Rich: You don't have a house full of furniture.
Catelin: Yeah. I left my bed and my dresser with Tyrell. He used it while I was gone. I didn't have to pay for a storage space. It was like I didn't have to move anything. It was really, really formative still and I think ways that I don't necessarily recognize even now.
Rich: So I think I know the answer to this, but in closing would recommend?
Catelin: Yeah, absolutely.
Rich: A hundred percent?
Catelin: Yeah.
Rich: Cool. Thanks for sharing your story and getting a little personal there [inaudible 00:39:05]. It was really fun to talk to you.
Catelin: My pleasure. My pleasure.
Rich: That's it for another episode of Cocktails, Tangents and Answers.
Catelin: We hope it was as much fun to listen to as it was fun to make.
Rich: You can find me on Twitter or Instagram @richmackey. I try not to make it too difficult. It's just my name. And you can find our agency @antidote_71. That's A-N-T-I-D-O-T-E underscore 71 on Twitter and Instagram as well.
Catelin: And you can find me at home sipping a craft cocktail prepared by my in-home bartender. It's my husband.
Rich: We'll be back with another episode every other week and a whole new cocktail recipe, plenty more tangents and of course answers to those pressing marketing questions.
Catelin: And if you'd like to send us a question, you can go to ctapodcast.live to send us an email.
Rich: Or you can call our hotline at 402-718-9971 and leave us a voicemail. Your questions might be used for future episodes of the podcast.
Catelin: For now, like and subscribe and tune in next time.