Happy (late) Thanksgiving! And happy Black Friday!
Being here makes me a little more aware of all the things we really do have to be thankful for.
For real. Electricity? Hot water? Or even running water, period, however sporadic it may seem to be on and off. And that's just the material stuff. But, regardless of how cliche it sounds, family and friends are the most important. Seriously, what would we do without them?? :)

I don't have a whole lot to post about, hence the fact that it's been a really long time since my last post. Well, that and the fact that I've been pretty crammed with school work lately... But, I have been having a lot of people ask how we celebrate Thanksgiving here, so here you go!

El Salvador doesn't celebrate it. At all. It's just a normal November Thursday to people here. That answers that, right? Okay, now to what most people actually asked me about.

Food.

No, we don't have turkey here. We had chicken. There are no pumpkins to be found in the entire country. Which was really disappointing to Nathan, who loves his pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving. We did, though, have broccoli casserole, green bean casserole, hand-mashed potatoes, and rolls. All of which was completely homemade, and tasted delicious. I also helped Mom make cinnamon rolls Wednesday night, which was a ton of fun. Plus, they were amazing. Like, super amazing.

If you don't follow me on Facebook, then you also probably don't know that we took a mini-vacation to celebrate Dad's birthday in San Salvador last weekend! After the really long week and stress I posted about last time, it was an amazing time to get away and relax. We sat out by the pool, had great food, saw the new Harry Potter movie (which was great, bee-tee-dub.), and Mom and I even got to listen to live jazz music Thursday night. We sat out under the palm trees with hot tea and just chilled for a while, and then we all watched a movie in the room, and just had a great time all together.

More to be posted soon!

Su amiga,

Erin

PS: Blogspot has made some changes, so my followers have been changed! :O Now you can follow through Google Friend Connect, over on the side, though! :)

Wow! It has been so long since I've posted, and so much has happened! Over 3 weeks is way too much time. I apologize to all the people who complained to me about not posting.

I have had a crazy awesome past week! We had to go to San Salvador to renew our visas at the immigration office. That's where we started out Tuesday when we took the express bus down the mountain. That was a mistake we do not plan on making again. Can you say, car sick? Blech. But we got to the immigration office with Carmen, the woman we stayed with, and Pedro, our driver. They kept our passports there and said to come back on Thursday. So from there, we decided we needed lunch. And since we were in San Sal, we wanted American lunch. Burger King was amazing. :D Afterwards we walked around through the mall, Metro Centro, and did some shopping. That night when we got back to Carmen's house, she made us some pretty great chicken and potatoes. Nathan also had a fun time playing futbol with the little boy across the street, Jonathan.


Wednesday was a super fun day of all touristy stuff we wouldn't normally get to do. We got up that morning and headed to the zoo!




We had a blast. It was a pretty nice zoo, actually. When we finished there, we ate lunch at Pizza Hut! Salad bar and all.

We went to a museum afterwards. It was the national museum, even though we had been planning on going to the museum of arts or something. But it was kind of interesting. Nathan liked the stuff about jaguars:



Thursday turned out to be amazing as well! I've decided that Pizza Huts in America should take a lesson from the ones here. Salvadoreno Pizza Huts serve breakfast! And it is pretty yummy, let me tell you. That's where we ate that morning and met up with Joel. They surprised us by taking us to the beach afterwards! It was so beautiful. Some of the group that came this past March got to go and ride horses there. Unfortunately for us, the storms caused too much debree and junk to wash up and now the beach isn't flat enough for them, so they weren't there anymore. But we still had a great time going up and down the pier, seeing all the nasty dead fish, the gorgeous ocean, the boats and fisherman, everything. It was a ton of fun. There was a cute little popsicle stand, and we just had to stop there. They had all sorts of flavors; spicy ones, fruity ones, chocolatey ones, etc. I was feeling super adventurous, and had officially the weirdest thing I have ever tasted in my entire life. An avocado ice cream bar.

I only had a little, and then Joel took it. But I was glad I'd tried something new. He took us to a different part of the beach, then, where we could actually go up to the water.

And then we went to one more and had some delicious sea food with a great view. It had a little pool down on the beach with a geyser thing that blew when a wave it. Nathan wanted to swim so bad, but we didn't have time. He did, however, get to walk down around it with Joel.

When we drove back to the city, we had to go to the immigration offices again, praying they were done with our passports and that we could take them and go home. They were! :) Joel came back and stayed the night here in La Palma. The guys played a ton of Halo last night.

Today, we had a great time again! I went with Teresa, Joel, and Nathan, and we met up with Cristian at the park. There was a big festival going on with dancing and stuff to celebrate the anniversary of the start of the signing of the peace papers that ended the civil war here. We got some lunch, and then basically went exploring. There's one store that we were wanting to go to, but it didn't open till later, so we walked around town. We went out on this edge and checked out a gorgeous view of the mountains. (WLH!) There was another pretty hill we walked up, and it had an amazing view as well. It was crazy, unreasonably windy. Apparently it always is in October. It made for some really cool pictures! They're on Teresa's camera and not mine. She's going to be putting them on facebook, though. Well it has (obviously) been a pretty long week, and I'm ready to go chill and watch some Hulu. Thanks always for the prayers!
More to be posted soon!
su amiga,
Erin

A few hours ago (hey, that's an improvement from my usual "many days ago!) I posted about the independence day celebrations. The day afterwards was Nathan's birthday. We celebrated with Grandma and Teresa and had some cookie cake. He got to open presents that were brought down with the group that was here (in Honduras at the time), from people at home. And because Dad was feeling sick, he and Nathan spent the whole day putting his presents to use together. Nathan later claimed it was "the best day of his life" :)



Something else happened that morning, though, that I would really appreciate your prayers for. There was an accident involving a semi and a motorcycle. I'd rather not go into details or anything, but it left our friend Janixa a single mother of their adorable four year old son, Vladi. Please, please pray for this family during this difficult time. This is a picture of Vladi and his mother less than 24 hours before the accident:

Grandma, Mom, and I left after Nathan's celebration with Angelino and drove to Honduras. We started at Jorge and Gloria's house. They are always so hospitable and welcoming of people in their home. She fed the team a lunch of some sort of sea food soup. It was actually pretty good! Amy was sitting at our table and she got "the prize" as we joked with her ;)It's difficult to see here, but it was part of a fish.

Pretty soon, all the suitcases from the team were loaded into the van and we headed off for an afternoon in Guatemala! Just a little road trip. I'm still not over the fact that going to GUATEMALA is just a little road trip. Not that I mind ;) We took them to the big Catholic church and Black Christ statue that I posted about about a month ago. But this time, we got to go shopping afterwards! The vendors' booths went on forever and then some. We literally could not see where they stopped. Some were under a huge tarp kind of covering, and divided almost like cubicles. I bought a pretty neat (even if it's tourist-y) bag! I think I have a picture with it on facebook. It was funny to realize that even though the man selling me the bag acted like he spoke English, he really only spoke enough to try to get me to buy his purses. When he first told me the original price, I started to walk away. "How much to pay?!" I turned around at his way of asking how much I was willing to give him. Still unsure, he assured me that "Is nice! Is very nice!" I also got a chance to check out these neat little hats :D

I didn't get one, but they were fun. I absoluetly loved having the American team here. We were really upset when they left. After a teary goodbye, we are all already looking forward to the next visit! Thank you to every single one of you on the team for the gifts you brought, helping us out, and just making this week great. We will miss all of you! When the bus left, we all went home to enjoy some cake and a happy, "feel good" movie. Though none of us can remember right now exactly what. Thanks again to this wonderful team, love you all!

More to be posted soon!
su amiga,
Erin

Wow, I have so many great, new experiences to post about tonight! I'm going to start with yesterday. La Palma is pretty well known for its art. At every little shop you will see something with the "typico" art style. It was designed by Fernando LLort (pronounced like Yort). Yesterday morning we went to this museum with an original drawing of his, and then a whole bunch of orher things that were done by people he trained. Unfortunately, there were no cameras allowed. After we finished there, we did get to go to the place where he used to work and make all of the stuff. Norma had "connections" with the people who work there now, so we got to tour the whole place and see how everything is made. Cameras were allowed here.

This is a man cutting the wood into the shape, I don't remember what they were working on here. Possibly a bird, I think.
After it's cut and sanded and all of the other stuff that all of my shop friends will know about that I don't, they paint it. This is the part that I enjoy watching, even though I totally love the smell of the room where they do all of the wood working. The man here is painting on some alphabet blocks, and then these ladies are working on several different projects. I love how their children come to work with them, and are "learning" how to help them at so young.

Today was really neat, too. This morning was the children's program, where all of the sponsor children got to get their bags of groceries. It's pretty cool to see them get so much; they aren't used to that. After the children's program was when the "adventure" began, though. Jorge drove us across the border to Honduras. We started off at his house and we got to meet his family. They have three girls, 12, 11, and 5. We played soccer in their hallway together, and it was actually a lot of fun. His wife helped my mom with shopping around town because they have things at the stores there that we need for cooking and can't find in El Salvador. Then, they said we were going to Esquipulas for some more shopping. We didn't realize till on the way- Esquipulas? Is a famous city in Guatemala. There is a huge, beautiful, and very very old catholic church

in the middle of town. It is home to a famous statue called Cristo Negro, or "Black Jesus". The whole city was really pretty, it was an amazing experience. A huge thanks to Jorge and his family :)

More to be posted later!
su amiga,
Ruth Erin

So, yesterday was our first full day in El Salvador as a family- wow!
I'm not sure where to start... I guess I can actually start from Wednesday when we left. Saying all of our goodbyes over the past month has been really tough. Wednesday at the airport was no different. I'm going to miss everyone a lot. The flight itself went well, and all of our stuff made it, too. This picture is to prove to Jenna that I followed through on my promise to take Jo Jo on the flight :). We stayed at a hotel near San Salvador when we got there. It was beautiful; the weather was great, there was a pool and palm trees, and we had all sorts of great fresh food for breakfast. But yesterday was the fun part.
Ruth and Angelino picked us up in a van from the hotel and we headed to the beach! It was pretty, and we saw a lot of neat things on the shore- lots of shells, and I even found a starfish. When we left the beach we went for lunch at a place where the seafood we had could easily have been swimming shortly before... here it is:
When we drove through San Sal after lunch, we saw something really funny. A huge tanker truck thing, like the ones that carry oil, was full of molasses. It had apparently leaked and was spilled all over the streets, several inches thick for about a mile! Cars were sliding in it and sticking, and other cars would spray it back onto the ones behind them.
The prettiest part of the day, I thought, was the ride from San Sal to La Palma. The mountains are gorgeous, and we were in such a high elevation that we drove through the clouds! And now that we're are up in the mountains, it's actually pretty cool. From what I'm seeing on facebook, Missouri is pretty hot and humid right now, so this weather is really nice :).
Today we got to see the place we will be living. What is going to be a children's home/ orphanage thing isn't open yet, and we're living in that until it is. It's actually pretty nice, except for our welcoming visitors today: Several big spiders and a couple lizards... :P
We shopped around for our furniture for a little while, and got to visit this really cute little coffee shop with pastries and stuff. Right now we are back relaxing at the hotel we're staying at until our place is ready. Mom took Nathan down to the pool, and Dad and I are sitting outside listening to all the parrots talk, :)
If you noticed by the title, I am going by my middle name, Erin, while we are here. In Spanish, Ruth is just Rut, and I like the way Erin sounds in Spanish better. It's not uncommon here, though, to randomly switch which name you go by; some people use a couple different ones, even.
More to be posted later!
su amiga,
Ruth Erin