Amigos de verdad

A wise woman once told me, "there are cool people everywhere".

It is still hard to imagine a group of friends as wonderful and full of life as our friends in Minnesota. We had a mountain of support, community. It makes my heart ache sometimes, to think of you.

But here we are in a new country, speaking in a new language, building a new community.

We are living in a tourist town, and there is a hostal at the arts center where we work. We see a lot of people come and go, and it is fun getting to know them. We have met some volunteers from Spain, people from Mexico, Germany, Holland, Italy. It is fun getting to know new people, and hard to see them go.

We live with two awesome Salvadorans, Noel and Elba. They are both fantastic, with a great sense of humor and openness to our friendship.

A couple of weeks ago, Elba knocked on our door at 8AM Sunday morning. I was still sleeping. I stumbled out of bed and opened the door. "Cambiamos nuestra plan, vamos a la playa, quieres ir?" Ok, let's go to the beach.

We spent about 6 hours in the car together, in total. El Salvador is a tiny country with a lot of holes in their roads. It took us a bit longer than we expected to reach the beach, and afterwards travel to their parents house in Cabanas. Chris and I were in the back of their truck, with Siamara Elba's sister.

We ate fish, threw sand, tossed a ball, ran from the waves. It was a great day. A celebration of life day.

We have also had the chance to meet Sara and Konstantin in San Salvador. Sara is a yoga teacher who has been helping me learn the yoga vocabulary in Spanish. Her boyfriend Konstantin is from Russia, and teaches Kung Fu.

What a cool couple! They introduced us to MetroCentro, a gigantic mall in San Salvador. Last weekend we traveled with them to the Puerta del Diablo, a beautiful view of the mountains and the city. We even got to eat Chinese food.

So, we are making friends. People do not "go out" at night like we are used to, they are much more family-focused in general. We spend a lot more time at home, reading and doing laundry and such. (Laundry takes a lot longer than I expected).

"In the end, maybe it's wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices.”

-Elizabeth Gilbert