Day 1: Travel and San Salvador
Thursday, July 18, 2024
My ride to the airport, Mike and Kathy, picked me up at 3:30am; then we picked up Tim at his place. We met up with Nancy, the final member of our little delegation, at the airport.
Flights were fine. There was a big storm around Houston and our plane was first directed around the western end of the storm. The idea was we'd go around and get south of it so that we could land at Houston. But the storm shifted and that plan was abandoned in favor of doing a 180 to go back to the northern edge of the storm and circling until Houston cleared so we could land. All in all, we were only about 30 minutes late landing. We had a several-hour layover so there was no worry about missing our flight to San Salvador.
The only issue we had was that so many flights before ours had been delayed that the airport was a madhouse of people, sleeping on the floor and no chairs to sit in. Our second flight was delayed about an hour but no harm done.
We arrived in San Salvador about 2:30pm and met up with Alfredo, our driver. I'd intended to brush up on my Spanish before I left and just didn't get it done. I remembered Alfredo from other trips but found I was having trouble saying much more than "Hola." You don't use a language for the better part of a decade and it gets really rusty...
The bags got loaded and we headed to the National Cathedral for our first Salvadoran history stop. Here, we learned a bit about Oscar Romero...a Monsignor, then Bishop, then Archbishop. He was dearly beloved by the people, especially the poor, of El Salvador and had been speaking out about the assassinations and disappearances of people the government considered the enemy. He was shot by a sniper as he was giving a memorial Mass at Divina Providencia (a cancer hospital run by Carmelite nuns). His crypt is in the basement of the National Cathedral. At the time he was interred, it was a dirt-floored, concrete-walled space. Now, there is a service space with pews and tiled floors. Displays of photos and information about Romero flank his crypt. My camera wasn't working so I don't have any photos of this.
He was canonized in October 20218 so he is now officially Saint Oscar Romero. However, I noticed that a lot of people still call him Monsignor Romero...that's how they remember him. Especially the people around Berlin. Romero was the monsignor, then bishops for the Berlin area so many people knew him and consider him a local.
After we left the cathedral, we went to Casa Antigua to check in for the night. It's a guest house that is often used by delegations. There is a lovely courtyard out back with chairs and a hammock. My group tended to congregate there for chatting, coffee, or hanging out.
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| View of the courtyard from Room#8 |
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| Part of the space under the tiled roof you can seen in the previous photo. |
My roommate, Nancy, and I were assigned room #8. It's a space with a little balcony and a lovely view of the courtyard. However, when we stepped into the room, it was like an oven. We both looked at each other and said, "I can't sleep in this." So we paid an additional $15 to have the AC turned on. Sooooo worth it!
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| Room #8, at the top of the stairs with its balcony. |
After we'd settled in, we all gathered in the seating area by the courtyard to head out to supper. We walked a couple blocks to Sopón Tipico and sat at a table near the entrance. This, also, is a regular spot where delegations often have supper their first night in San Salvador.
They have a varied menu where you can get a lot of typical Salvadoran foods or things like steak or grilled chicken with a Salvadoran flair. Kathy got a fried fish...the whole fish, head and all...that she really likes there. Nancy had a salmon filet that looked really good. I got a couple of pupusas...the national dish of El Salvador. I hadn't had pupusas in a long time! I got one rice and one corn, both stuffed with a mix of beans and cheese.
I can't believe I didn't get a photo of pupusas somewhere along the way, but apparently I didn't. So, I'll try to describe them. You start with a stiff dough (masa) made from either ground rice or corn.
The corn is a white corn that has been boiled in a lye and water mixture then rinsed well. The cooked corn is taken to a place (el molino) that puts the kernels through something like a meat grinder that dribbles in a little water so that the resulting dough is the proper consistency. In the villages, the women may grind their own with a slightly concave stone (metate) and a sort of rolling pin shaped stone that together work like a mortar and pestle. The resulting dough has the texture of a stiff cookie dough.
I don't know what the process looks like for rice but you somehow end up with the same sort of dough. It's a slightly whiter dough and milder taste.
The filling varies...it could be bean, cheese, shredded meat, loroco (buds of a flower that grows on a vine), or some combination (revuelto) of them. You take a bit of the filling and form a ball of masa around it then flatten out the whole thing until it looks like a thick, flat tortilla. Cook that on a griddle and serve with a pickled cabbage mixture (curtido) and tomato sauce on the side.
Food in El Salvador isn't generally spicy but there may be some jalapeño in the curtido and there is usually a bottle of hot sauce on the table. Pupusas are eaten with your hands. You tear off a bite, add a pinch from the pile of curtido and sauce you put on your plate, then pop it in your mouth.
The restaurant had a case containing some desserts and candies. Kathy said the Pastoral Team likes the molasses taffy things and I love caramel things so I got a couple bags of the molasses for the Team, one for me, and a bag of dulce de leche for myself. They weren't big bags...the molasses ones had about 8 individually wrapped pieces in each and the dulce de leche had about 5 pieces that were maybe 3" long and 1/2" wide.
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| Photo taken after I got home...Molasses taffy on the left, the sole remaining piece of the dulce de leche on the right. |
When the bill came, there was a molasses candy for everyone, kind of like how American restaurants may give you a mint. So, everyone got to try those. I opened the dulce de leches and shared. Everyone took a pinch off one of the sticks. It was super-sweet so a pinch was plenty. It tasted like it was maybe made with sweetened condensed milk.
It had been a really long day, so we didn't linger at the restaurant. We walked back and were so glad we'd left when we did. It started raining, really heavily, just minutes after we got back. If we'd sat any longer at the restaurant, we'd have gotten soaked on the way back to the guest house.
I showered and went to bed. Starting at 3am, it had been a REALLY long day.
