Today our household goods finally arrived. We don’t have our own house yet, so everything was delivered to my father-in-law’s house. The moving truck arrived at 9 AM with 8 men! That’s something really interesting here in El Salvador: the cost of labor is low, so for a job like this, you get a larger number of workers. My wife and I have to balance between the desire to unpack our things we haven’t seen in months and the likelihood that we’ll be moving again soon. My wife thinks it won’t be until after the holidays. The house definitely feels more livable now with all our furniture. We have sofas, a TV, a dining room set, and all the normal things people have that we’ve been doing without for a while.
October was an interesting month. It was the Fiestas Patronales here in the village. The patron saint for our village happens to be San Rafael (one of the archangels). The festival lasted a full month and included a variety of parades (especially of high school kids playing instruments, marching and dancing), religious processions, horse marches, singing performances, live music, food vendors, amusement rides, a disco (set up right on the street in front of our house), and fireworks almost every morning and night. When I say there were fireworks in the morning, what I mean is that at 5 AM there was a religious procession that passed by the house and included setting off fireworks.
One particular night there was a major party in the street at the end of a month of festivities. About 8:30 PM police cleared the street and then lined people up to reenter the area for the festivities so they could pay admission and buy food and drink. As they did so, a fireworks show as good as many Fourth of July shows I have seen was on display above the village. My wife and I went up to the third floor terrace and watched. Later the party included very loud music, which my Apple Watch told me in our house registered as high as 89 decibels! In any case, the fiestas patronales are a huge celebration for the community in a religious, civic, and social sense.
