October

This weekend we finally saw the sun! It was so lovely outside that my bedsheets were dry just a couple hours after I washed them. It’s been quite a trying week, all told, but this weekend made up for it. Laura and I decided to see a movie on Saturday afternoon to spend a little time with an airconditioner. We settled on the sub-titled “Todo sobre mi desmadre,” which I later realized was “Get Him to the Greek,” and spent the hour or two before the next showing at the Photo Café, a really pleasant little café nearby with yummy coffee and groovy photo exhibitions. 

I’m not (very) embarrassed to say that I laughed aloud throughout all of “Todo sobre mi desmadre.” That evening, my host mother showed me how to prepare tortilla soup: with cheese, cream, avocado and fried tortilla strips. It was delicious. Later that night I caught up an old amigo who actually lead my high school delegation to El Salvador in 07, and with whom I stayed as an elections observer in 09.

            I spent Sunday in the Centro with Laura and a couple amigos. We were lured in by tales of a free theater performance by some folks from the National University. We bused to the centro, which was pretty deserted, as it was Sunday. We weaved through the still ample vendor stalls that lined the narrow streets between what would be stunning old colonial buildings that stand in precarious disrepair, through the plazas peppered with women I had to be told were prostitutes, to the national theater, one of the few buildings downtown with its glamour still intact. It turned out that the next showing wasn’t for another couple hours. We wandered into a beautiful church, Iglesia El Rosario, that folks thought I’d like to see. It’s beautiful, super 50s(ish)-modern and really breathtaking. Then we wandered into a little panderia for pastries and coffee and conversation. 

               We stepped out into the plaza in front of the national cathedral and spent some time watching a collective of circus performers/clowns; they weren’t bad at all, a bunch of scruffy looking dudes that easily could have stepped out of Olympia, juggling and making jokes, riding unicycles, etc. The play itself was interesting. It was like a portrait of daily life for the majority of Salvadoran, taken from recent headlines: a 12 year old raped by her professor, a deported gang member, a homophobe, an abused wife, a drunken and underpaid husband, a neglected grandmother, a prostitute and her baby with AIDS, a drug-runner…All portrayed very well but to no real end, there was no real message, and indeed much of the audience laughed at the sexist remarks made by the machistas in the play, and the homophobic character was portrayed in a very homophobic manner…All in all, the whole experience seemed to authentically encapsulate Salvadoran culture, perhaps in an unintended way.