all that jazz

This past thursday, my jazz band had a concert in a cute little cafe...tiniest stage ever, but fun and a relaxing atmosphere. We were playing for free in hopes of getting hired later on to play for real money, but we each ended up making $5... i guess we are officially professionals now that we are getting paid =) We also got an invitation to play at some cabins up in the mountains this coming weekend, so Elvis and i are really looking forward to staying in our own free cabin! Here are some pics and some videos (again, the sound quality is not great but you get the idea!):

And last, and well, least..."My (not so) Favorite Things":

Meet our friends...

Meet our friends, Belen and Aldo Duque...married as of this past weekend! We were blessed to be in their wedding which was beautiful even though it was still raining all weekend. They are good friends of ours from church which is really exciting because now we have 3 married couples in our church: our pastors David and Lucy, us, and now them! It's exciting to see that our congregation is growing up! We even have a nursery now because we have 2 toddlers now in the church! That may not seem like a big deal, but remember that our church is only young people. Anyways, Belen is also a lawyer and she performed our civil wedding service (here you have two different marriage services, one is legal and one is religious). And Aldo, like Elvis, decided to not date anyone until he met his future wife, who was Belen! I think it was the first wedding i have been to that both the bride and the groom each prepared a song to sing with the band for the other one during the reception! It was also fun(ny) to see all of our friends from church dressed up in fancy clothes. Ive never seen most of them in anything other than jeans and t-shirts, including our pastor wally!

Here are some pics of our studly friends:

Elvis found a picture of his twin in the gym of the place where the wedding was:

Felicidades Aldo y Belen!

scrumptious salvadorean food

I got to thinking that it´s only fair that i dedicate a blog to salvadorean food which we love so much, since the last one was about southern food. first of all, i had a good question from kelly about what exactly is a pupusa?? i forget that not everyone has experience the miracle of the pupusa. Pupusas are our national dish here in El Salvador, which you can eat for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, or all of the above, even in the same day! There are pupuserias (where they make pupusas) on every street corner, and we are lucky enough to have about 7 on our block. Anyways, pupusas look like tortillas, but they have a yummy filling...our favorites are the classics, bean and cheese. You can also get plain cheese, cheese, beans, and shredded pork, and sometimes other not so common variations, such as squash, chicken, etc. They are made either out of rice flour, or like cornmeal. Our favorites are made of rice flour. You eat them with homemade tomato salsa and slaw (well, the slaw is recommended once you build up good defenses in your stomach!) Mmmmmmm...elvis and i eat them about 3 times a week, and they are about 30 cents each. That means that we can eat dinner for about $2 for the both of us, drinks included! It´s really cheaper here to eat out instead of cooking at home most of the time. You would think that people would get tired of them, but NO!! we always get excited. and pupusas from different places totally taste different, depending on the cheese, etc. After writing this blog, we've decided that's what we'll have for dinner tonight =) If you run across a pupuseria in the states, definitely go check it out, even though i've heard they are more "mexicanized" there. in college, i used to eat pupusas in durham, and they were $2.50 each!! i used to think that was a deal, now i know that they are selling them at 10 times their real price!!! Oh, another key thing you should know before trying pupusas...they are eaten with your hands, never with a fork. so don't wait for them to bring you one! you pinch off a piece (watch out, they're hot!) and use it to scoop up the slaw and sauce.

I also thought you might like to see what a typical Salvadorean dinner looks like...well actually this is what most people eat for breakfast AND dinner. We usually eat a little more americanized because everybody here eats their main meal at lunch (chicken, rice, salad, etc), but we prefer to eat our big meal at dinner when we´re together. However, last night we did eat salvadorean style, homemade beans, plaintains, avacado, fresh cheese, tortilla. There are variations of this meal to switch it up...people usually eat eggs with this, and you can mix rice with the beans, trade bread for the tortilla, add a sausage link, and really the one thing we were missing last night was crema...a sweeter version of sour cream which you can put on top of everything!!! Again, no one gets tired of eating beans here. Bean soup, refried beans, etc etc etc. i can't think of an equivalent food in the states that everyone eats every single day. I think that before elvis met me, he ate beans every single day of his life! Also, like with pupusas, the tortilla or bread is used to scoop up the beans instead of a fork. We are now accepting reservations for december when we go to the states for anyone who wants a traditional salvadorean meal ;-) You won't even have to wash forks afterwards!

My Favorite Things?

For those of you that know me well, you should know that ironically enough, one of my least favorite songs in the whole world is "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music. I really just can´t stand anything about that movie. Maybe the only song worse than that one is any song by Kenny G. I LOVE music but i also feel very very strongly about some songs. Anyways, here is where my situation gets to be more complicated. The dilemma is that in my jazz band rehearsal last week, we were talking about the new songs we are going to start rehearsing, and one of them pulls out "My Favorite Things". I thought, for sure he is joking, but oh no. He was serious. And so i start trying to explain the fact that that song makes my skin crawl, but i think they just thought it was funny or that i was exagerating and definitely did not pay attention to my cries that we not play that song. So, what am i supposed to do?!?!?! I don´t want to be devisive in the group, but I really don´t think that i can play that song. Suggestions??

On a more positive note, we did get a package this week from Tyler (getting packages is definitely one of my favorite things!!) She had sent us a whole bag of those chewy Halloween pumpkins!!!! MMMM my fave!!!! Last year we almost went crazy going to all of the grocery stores, looking for candy corn, or any hint of those flavors so familiar to my childhood, but to no luck.

Keeping in line with the theme "my favorite things", we have also been experimenting in the kitchen lately. We usually like to try cooking ethnic dishes from around the world that we have never cooked before (Elvis´s specialty is Thai food!) But recently, we have been trying to actually use recipes and cook my favorite recipes from my mom´s kitchen. Elvis loves Southern cooking just like I love Salvadorean food, so it works out nicely. Most of our dinners turn out to be a southern/Salvadorean hybrid. I was really excited when my first quiche turned out well (broccoli, spinach, and cheese), and my first key lime pie also, using fresh limes from the patio behind our church. We were also really excited when we found Bisquick in the grocery store for the first time (and surpringly enough, it wasn´t overpriced!) so we made homemade biscuits and some oh-so-yummy chicken and dumplins!!! maybe it was just because i havent had chicken and dumplins in a long time or maybe it´s my pride getting in the way, but i feel like it was right up there with Cracker Barrell. =) We did add some salvadorean squash in there to put our personal touch on it. Now, Elvis really wants to try to make homemade ground sausage....people here eat lots of sausage, but only the sausage links, not ground sausage patties. We really want some good ol´sausage biscuits, so Elvis is on a mission to make homemade sausage. We just aren´t sure yet of the herbs and seasonings that they put in it. Any ideas???

My first key lime pie:

Elvis got artistic with the chewy pumpkin picture:

P.S. Marcie's comment was so witty that i decided to just go ahead and put it on the blog. Her suggestion was to sing these different lyrics in my head while i play that song whose name we won't mention...

Thai food by Elvis and fresh limes for pie,

Cool, breezy evenings and papusas to fry

Chewy Halloween candy good friends will bring,

These are a few of my favorite things

When there’s carrot pizza,

And no Chick-fil-A,

When I have to say goodbye(s),

I simply remember my favorite things

And then I don’t want to die.

Thanks Marcie!! You've already got me humming =)

wacky weather and a japanese night

Sadly, we don't have fall here in El Salvador, nor do the leaves change colors. However, the winds will pick up at the end up the month, the temperature will drop down a few degrees, giving a little bit of relief after months of strong heat (just cool enough to have an excuse to finally wear long sleeves for a day or two, and just cool enough to make cold showers in the morning a little painful!) Rainy season also ends in October, but it doesn't go away without putting up a good fight! There are always days on end in October that pass without the rain letting up, and turns out we are having one of those storms this week. Actually I think they have declared it a tropical depression. The bad thing about these really rainy days is that our country is very fragile in this aspect. We don't have the proper infrastructure to drain off all that rain, so lots of flooding happens as well as landslides. Even here in the city, there are areas that become really dangerous. Here are some pictures from today's newspaper: It rained so much yesterday that they cancelled school for today and tomorrow (well, us teachers still have workdays). The funny thing is though, that as soon as we finished calling all of the parents, the sun came out and it hasn't rained again! So, it's a win-win situation...no class, and no more danger for those affected by the rains!

So, to celebrate no classes, and to celebrate that tomorrow is our 3 year anniversary of getting engaged =), elvis and i had a japanese day: first, we went to a cute little japanese restaurant (good, but i'm still disappointed we can't find that pink sauce they serve at japanese restaurants at home which we ate by the bucketfuls in college!) Then, tonight we went to a free concert of a jazz trio sponsored by the Japanese embassy. It was really interesting and a great mix of cultures: a awesome Japanese jazz pianist who now lives in New York but also studies drumming in Africa; a 62 year old Japanese guitar player who has won the "world's best jazz guitarist" award several years, and a vocalist from Africa who has a 4 octave singing range, who also played different African drums. He also used pretty much every part of his body as a percussion instrument, and sings for "Dora the Explorer". It was a great mix of jazz, Japanese melodies, and African rhythms. Plus they threw in a traditional Salvadorean song! It was really neat.

So, we were leaving the parking lot, and apparently this lady didn't see us, and backed into us, moving at about 5 mph. The thing about cars here in El Salvador is that pretty much nobody has car insurance (including us), so if you get into a fenderbender (which happens pretty regularly), you just get out and settle it with the person right then and there, and they pay you on the spot what you think is fair. Also, pretty much the laws go that even if it wasn't your fault, if the other person gets hurt worse, its your fault. That's pretty much why I don't drive here. So anyways, the lady gets out, says "oops", and gives us $20 on the spot. I mean, let's be serious. We probably aren't going to go to the shop and get that little dent out, so we were pretty excited about earning 20 bucks so fast! hehe, we were thinking up more ways to use our car to make money. PS, our car's name is Cecilia, the Sentra. Thanks, Ceci, for taking one for the team!

Happy Children's Day!!

When I was a kid, I would always ask my parents why we celebrated Mother's Day and Father's Day, but never Children's Day. Their wise answer was that every day was children's day. However, here in El Salvador, we actually do have a national holiday, Children's Day! At my school, we don't celebrate Halloween, so today we celebrated Children's Day which was actually this past wednesday, and let the kids dress up to come to school. The theme this year was "Noah's Ark", so they all had to come dressed up as animals, and of course, in pairs. Here are some pictures, the first one of some kids with Noah and his wife in front of the ark:

Some of my former students:

These are my cutiepie real-life twins:

All the kids from the 3 year old class up to 12th grade dressed up, and even the staff. Here is our principal and vice-principal, aka "The human piñatas":

And as promised a while back, here are some pictures of my new classroom after i got moved again:

To get more of a feel for where i work, thought you might also like to see our beloved train which all of our 3-6 year old students ride in to go to the kindergarten everyday:

Happy Children's Day to all of you younguns out there and all of the kids at heart!

mutli-cultural weekend

So, we´ll call this past weekend "multi-cultural." First, on Saturday, I was invited to play again with the traditional ska band, so let´s call that Jamaican culture. It was a benefit concert for animal rights. Right afterwards, we went to another concert (as spectators this time) of a really amazing French rock band. Can´t say that i had ever really heard French rock before. But I really liked it...especially the songs that were in French because you don´t get caught up in the words. Their one song in English said, "This is my first song in English, this is my first song in english, and i have nothing to say...." repeat repeat. Hence, i enjoyed the french songs even though we didnt understand because the lead singer/guitar player was super dramatic and she was a woman, leather pants and all, which was great because really here in El Salvador in all the concerts we go to, there are hardly ever women playing nor singing. I´m trying to make a breakthrough here in the country... =) Here's a video of "Mademoiselle K":


On Sunday, we experienced a completely different but very cultural experience...a quinceaños party for Elvis´s "cousin" (we´ll call her a cousin because that´s what you call relatives here when you aren´t quite sure of the relation!) It was in a little town out in the countryside and was oh-so-salvadorean! I think that i have finally met all of the relatives that are still living in the country! We had a big lunch of "sopa de gallina india" (literally, hen soup...its really a lot yummier than it sounds!) and then hen with rice and salad and an insane amount of fresh, hot tortillas (tortillas here not your typical mexican tortillas that you are thinking of...they are about a 1/2 inch thick, made of corn, and a staple food in any typical salvadorean dish). The best part was that the hen was cooked in a clay pot over a wood-burning stove!

After stuffing ourselves, they proceeded to have a sparkling cider toast for the newly fifteen year old, in which they passed around the microphone to practically every single person there to say something. That´s pretty typical here too...the fact that everyone is expected to share words for the birthday boy or girl, even if it´s not a quinceaños. Which, is great and really meaningful when you are celebrating a close friend´s birthday, but pretty awkward for me when it is a "cousin" that i have never met before in my life. i pushed myself to the back of the crowd so far that i was actually outside of the house, on the street when they called my name to come up and say a few words. Luckily, one extra bonus of being married is that now Elvis can say that kind of stuff that gets me nervous, and say it on behalf of us both! so i lucked out! then they started up the discoteca in the living room and starting dancing (check out this sound system!!!) This was my favorite part, when the girl's grandma started hitting the flower in the ceiling with an umbrella to get the confetti to fall on the birthday girl and her dad as they were having the first dance:

Elvis and I in the gardens:

Independence Day Adventure(s)!

So, this past Monday was Independence Day here in El Salvador, which means day off for everybody!! So to celebrate, we went with a group of friends from church to a little town called Cinquera that was just completely destroyed in the civil war in the 1980's. It's just full of history, and really it seems like they just can't get past the war. Not too surprising because everyone had family that was killed there. Turns out that Elvis's dad was around that area for part of the war (he was in the National Guard). It's just so hard for me to comprehend sometimes the fact that Elvis was born and grew up in a war...I mean it's hard when all of our friends are reminiscing about bombs dropping, having to huddle down in the dark everynight, not being able to go outside and play like normal kids, family members being killed...that was Elvis's life until he was 9. Marty and I actually went to this town of Cinquera like 4 years ago, but it was a little weird because it was just the two of us, and around town you see signs "Yanki fuera!" ("Yankees get out of here!")..all of that because of the war and US's involvement. Anyways, here is a picture of the church in town that was mostly destroyed, and then rebuilt. Out front, you can see that they have put up some bombs that never exploded in the war. After walking around town in the morning, we went to a forest there in town to picnic and to go hiking the rest of the afternoon. It was really neat because we saw campsites of where the guerrilla fighters hid out during the war. I don't think i've ever sweated so much in all my life. So that's why we were super excited when our trail ended up at one of the waterfalls in the forest!

Oh, but we are just getting to the adventuresome part...We had a great time swimming and getting pounded under the waterfall until it started pouring down rain. So everyone took off running to the cars, but we stayed back with another couple to change clothes because i can't stand riding in the car wet (oh you will see the irony soon!) So, I changed and we ran off ahead of the other couple, except there was a small detail of a little path that leads to the car that everyone ran down...except for us. We took off running in the same direction we had come from, which actually was back UP the mountain we had just come down. Our nice little path in the woods was now a small river gushing down the mountain, which we were running up, trying to catch the others. We decided to stop and wait for the other couple, who never came....and never came....so Elvis took off running again down the mountain to look for them, thinking THEY were lost. Turns out, they were smart enough to see the little pathway to the car, and have a little better sense of direction than we do, and WE were the lost ones! I can't tell you a more desperate feeling....the two of us (thankfully together!) in unknown woods, in pouring rain, soaked to the bone, without cell phone service, and without a clue of where the car is. After about a half an hour of running up and down, yelling, some of our friends had come out to look for us and found us! Praise Jesus! I wish we had a photo of us after getting soaked...a friends loaned me some clothes to change into again, but i was so wet that i just soaked right through them and had to change again. So, that was adventure #1.
We were so busy celebrating the fact that we were alive and sharing stories with our now reunited friends, no one noticed that the little creek that we had to pass over in the 4 wheel drive cars to park in the woods had now risen to a 30 foot wide, rapid-filled RIVER that we could no longer cross. We waited there with the other locals that were stranded for about 2 hours, then they decided it had gone down enough to cross by foot on some stones in the river. Check out this picture, find the man with a hat on the horse, and see how the water is up to the horse's butt:
So, we waited another hour, but by this time it was definitely getting dark (it gets dark here about 6:30pm, and it's not a gradual process...it's like a 10 minute process that's it). We kept measuring the depth of the water with a big stick, and it was still about 2 feet deep or so, and moving pretty quickly. Deep enough to be able to cover the exhaust pipe of the cars and therefore shut them off. We were starting to think we were going to have to spend the night in the woods. But, we had a 1.5 year old baby with us, and several of us had to work the next day, so we decided to all turn around and not face the river, and just pray, thank God for being there with us, and ask Him to miraculously lower the river. We did, then on a burst of faith, we decided to give it a try because really it was now or never (well, until the next day!) So we sent our fearless leader, David, in the first car, and he made it!!!! We were all jumping up and down and shouting until we realized then we had to cross the river on foot to not weigh down the other car too much. With the illumination of the second car, we saw our way across the river, and waited for that one to pass (with Lucy and baby Lulu inside the car) Success!!!! I can't tell you what a rush that was! Not the kind that I want to experience again, however. We celebrated with a late-night dinner of pupusas in a nearby town...mmmm best celebratory pupusas ever!! So, that was our Independence Day adventure(s)...God bless El Salvador!!

jazz and ska

This has been another busy week music-wise. Last week we had our jazz concert, which went really well i think (videos hopefully soon to come!) and last night i played for the first time with a ska band that invited me to play with them. i was really nervous because i had never even rehearsed with them, and had to figure some of the songs out right there on stage! but a good lesson for me in relaxing while playing and just going with the flow and improvising on the spot. it was a lot of fun because everybody there was dancing and its just fun music. it's a traditional ska band, so it's not the kind of ska like Supertones or Five Iron Frenzy that you may be thinking of. We played a lot of songs from Elvis's all-time favorite band, The Skatalites, which started in Jamaica back in 1957 !!! I mean, these guys are legends and started ska music, which later gave a start to reggae music. It's such fun music, and the amazing news is that The Skatalites are coming HERE in October! i can't believe they are still around, playing. So here's the best part...the band I played with last night, "Groovy Time", is opening up for the Skatalites, and they have invited me to play with them again for that concert!!!! i can't even really digest that yet. we're just really excited about even having the chance to see and maybe even meet the Skatalites. Here are some pictures from the concert last night, a video, and then a video of the Skatalites. Enjoy!

And now the real deal, The Skatalites...

Orchestra

So, I'm a star! well, not quite. but, this week, we had our debut concert with the orchestra i have been practicing with. we played theme songs from different movies, Superman, West Side Story, Pirates of the Carribean, Indiana Jones, Ben Hur, etc while they played clips from the movies behind us and had characters roaming through the audience. We played in the Presidential Theater, and had about 700 in the audience the first night, and over 1000 the second night!

It was a lot of fun, and i even made it into the national newspaper! You can check out the picture: http://www.elsalvador.com/mwedh/pdf/20080823/EDH20080823CUL042P.pdf (i'm the one wearing red)

and if you want to try to read the article: http://www.elsalvador.com/mwedh/pdf/20080823/EDH20080823CUL043P.pdf

anyways, here are some videos, even though the sound quality isnt that great:

and the week of music continues...tomorrow night i have a concert with our jazz quintet! last time we only played 6 songs, this time we are playing 15. so keep posted for some videos from that. also, sneak peek of another future post...turns out that they moved me into a new classroom (again!), so ill try to put up some pics of that.