The kids with their sparklers on New Year's Eve
He doesn't know what his shirt says.
Edith, the woman who owns my house, preparing banana leaves to make tamales.
The New Year's Dance
A political rally for FMLN, the liberal opposition party that started with the guerillas during the Salvadoran civil war. This was taken from a roof in San Vicente.The wake, funeral, burial and two receptions are finally over. There were a lot of morbid and depressing parts, but I'm just going to focus on the things I'm happy about: family, hot showers (like WAY hotter than the hottest ones in ES), the disappearance of my stomach problems, a whole slew of foods I didn't even know I missed like cheesecake and deviled eggs, fast wireless Internet, shopping, riding in cars all the time, central heating, snow, English, the list goes on and on.
I never thought I liked winter until I came back here and realized I missed the muted colors, the quiet and tranquility that it inspires. People describe El Salvador as tranquil too, but it's a kind of hot, exhausted lack of energy. To me it's entirely different.
My laundry situation did put one thing into perspective, though. I was so stoked to wash a quick and easy mindless load of clothes -- to just press a few buttons and come back in an hour. But my grandpa's dryer is dying and I ended up wearing PJs all day, toying with the dryer and eventually rushing to blow-dry my outfit half an hour before leaving for the wake. The entire time I was so frustrated because this is America, and things are supposed to work in America, and doing laundry shouldn't be even more stressful than it is in the Third World. It made me remember that things are things, and even when you have them they break, and life is always stressful no matter where you are. It's easy to blame life's craziness on being in a poor, "inferior" country, but that's not really fair.
So a dryer taught me a lesson. That's weird.
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