Fiestas!

Ok so I have mentioned to a few people that my town has been in the midst of Fiestas Patronales, or the yearly patron saint festivals. The time of year depends on who the patron saint of the town is, but by some happy coincidence my new town and my old town have the same saint and therefore the same dates for fiestas.

My current town, El Porvenir, has a larger and more full schedule for the fiestas than my old town though. It all started a little while back with the election of the queen for the fiestas. I was invited to sit at the table of honor, not really knowing what to expect, but not really wanting to turn down an invite either. So I showed up on time, which was foolish because lets be honest, its El Salvador. Well to my surprise it turned out to be a full scale beauty pageant. I was a little shocked to see how young the girls looked, and really shocked when they started announcing their ages, chest sizes, waist sizes and weights. I mean I didn't need to know that the sort of cute one was 14 and only weighed 98 pounds. That was what got me, there was no second thought of parading a bunch of underage girls in front of 100s of ogling men. Needless to say things weren't all of that calibre.

Most of the activities are small parades for the various queens and such. Some are parades with kids in masks like above. Others are just people doing dances and enjoying hearing themselves on microphones.

My favorite event was a BMX bike show where people were doing flips and such. I mean these were amateur Salvadorans that they brought in. Not all of them did flips, lots just did basic jumps or took their hands off the handles. They guy pictured got major air and did a flip over another guy. I almost lost it when I noticed he was close to hitting the flags and then almost clipped the guy below him as he came down. You can see he is coming in a bit low. After that there was a skateboarding event, all part of extreme sports day. I didn't really enjoy the skateboarding as much, but I did get out of the sun for it, which was nice. Plus there was good music for the skateboarding.

One of the days was Tropical Invasion, which just meant lots of live bands, none of which were even slightly tropical. I enjoyed the first one which was a ska band of sorts. Last night there was a rock band in the park which I listened to for a while until I could hear my ears ringing from the volume and then left. They were good, but I don't understand the Salvo obsession with volume.

I bought a bike and today I am off on my bike to have a meeting about improved stoves then hand out permission slips to kids who I am taking to the camp later this month. Fun stuff.