Merry Christmas

For Christmas this year I accepted my boss's invite to an open house type party on the 25th not because I really wanted to celebrate Christmas, but because I wanted to see all my Peace Corps buddies and so that I didn't have to be lame and lonely. The side effect of that decision was that there was no transport to/from my site on the 25th, so I had to leave and go somewhere for the 24th, which can be a little crazy here.
The decision I made was to ride my bike to my friend Sam's house in Candelaria which is about 15Km or about 10 miles. It wasn't too rough a ride, but it was windy, and with my luck the wind was blowing right in my face and slowing me down to a crawl. But I made it after a little work and got to Candelaria. I was a bit on the hungry side after that long ride and the small lunch I had to avoid a stomach ache. I had completely forgotten that dinner on the 24th is often eaten very late at night. What I was also pleasantly unaware of until getting to Sam's is that his family intended to take me to mass with them. We went a bit early, which directly contradicts everything that I have come to expect of timeliness in El Salvador. So Sam and I went over to hang out with Sarah, the former volunteer there who was visiting her old host family, and to kill the time. To my utter surprise Sarah immediately introduced me as jewish, which flung her host father into a tirade about why my "race" insists on inculcating hate in their children and murdering arabs. I just sort of smiled and waited it out. Then I went to church and played the nice catholic boy attending mass. Then they got communion all ready and my stomach decided to remind me just how hungry I was. It was screeming at me "you go get that wafer, you suck it up and get me that wafer!" Never in my life have I wanted to receive communion more than I did on Christmas Eve.
Then the morning of the 25th we hopped a ride with Sarah back to San Sal and got ready for the party at Bryan's.