El Salvador

Last day of the month, time to get caught up on my blogs! Luckily, we've been light on countries the last few days, so I'm only two behind. 

A couple of days ago we had El Salvador day, our second Central America country (we did Belize back in March). 

Ok wait, has anyone seen the website,  'If it were my home'?! And if you have, and you didn't tell me about it, we can't be friends anymore.  We're going to need to start using this one! Yay perspective! 

Because if El Salvador was your home, you'd be 10.5 times more likely to be murdered, as it has one of the highest murder rates in the world. There's is even a US Travel Warning because of it. 

But, it also says you'd 97% less on healthcare, so there is that. 

El Salvador is a tiny country, so tiny in fact that it is sometimes called the 45-minute country, because you can drive to any destination in that amount of time. It's somewhere around the size of a slightly smaller New Jersey. 

It's the smallest country in Central America, but it is the most densely populated. 

In a country where 80% of the citizens are Christian, El Salvador literally means 'The Savior". 

It's a country that loves it's soccer (it is home to Central America's largest soccer stadium), worcestershire sauce (it might be English, but Salvadorians consume 450 tons of it every year), and coffee (about 50% of it's export revenue comes from it). 

The country is famous for its volcanoes and it's Mayan ruins. (A 3,000 year old statue of the Aztec god, Xipe Totec, was discovered in El Salvador) 

But El Salvador is also known for it's world class surfing. Punta Roca (Rock Point) is known for having some of the best waves in North America. The waves break for 100-200 yards, and between March and May (the best time to go), waves can get as high as 12 feet. 

A popular dish in El Salvador is the papusa. They are like little cornmeal pockets filled with anything from beans to pork rinds, cheese to spicy meat. 

It just so happened they sell these guys in the freezer case at Sprouts, so we picked up a couple of boxes. 

The box also gave a quick recipe for Curtido, a popular dish served with papusas. I decided to pull out some plantains for our fruit, but plantains are quickly getting grouped in with sweet potatoes in this house. I keep trying to serve them, and everybody still hates them (except me of course). 

So this was our lunch on Thursday. (I thought my cabbage was still good, but it looked gross, so I just used kale and romaine lettuce finely chopped, for the salad). 

This meal earned maybe a few spoons up?

I'm not sure exactly, it's been a few days. Nobody minded the papusas, but everyone agreed they were rather dry (they eventually topped them with things like queso and sour cream and were much happier), but the salad was WAY too vinegary (and it's worth noting I put in about half as much as it said to), and well, we've already discussed the plantain situation. 

The boys made their postcards later that afternoon. 

Calib's featured soccer, volcanoes and surfing. 

Peyton made note of the Mayan ruins. 

And as you can see, Hayden wasn't a big fan of the salad ("That is super vinegary")

And apparently I missed the table picture. 

67 Down, 126 to go! 

Next Up: Liberia