El Salvador - Tequila Sunrise makes you miss the Sun rise

August 6-7

Hello everyone!

I’m usually a morning person. Jet lag, particularly when moving west, amplifies that situation. So it was quite an effort for me to miss the sunrise on my first Sunday in El Salvador. Mainly due to this…

Some sort of strange gyrating competition in Hard
Bar. Thankfully for everyone, I'm not involved.

Let’s rewind slightly. I arrived on Thursday night and am staying, with other new recruits, at a hotel which bridges Santa Tecla and San Salvador. One of the many missions this week is to find a place to live.

Many older houses look charming from the outside

We started house hunting on the Saturday morning. A couple of pitfalls with this were that it was a Saturday which was following on from a public holiday. This meant that many property owners had left the urban sprawls.

A 'garden'. The one in the first house
was about one square metre.

I had other issues. Having two dogs meant that my criteria are a bit more restrictive. I needed a reasonably-sized garden, for example. The numerous apartments we were shown were lovely but simply not feasible for Mini and Maxi, even though it seems that quite a few were inhabited by four-leggeds.

Santa Rosa apartment complex

House hunting in the heat with jet lag resulted in a bit of fatigue setting in. We were taken from a nice but slightly soulless apartment complex called Santa Rosa to a nearby bar, which is part of a microbrewery chain in the country called Cadejo.

There are some of these at the beach as well

Cadejo roughly translates as wolf. There is apparently a Salvadoran legend about two wolves, one with a black head and one with a white head. I imagine I’ll be at many Cadejos over the next few years so there’s plenty of time to learn and share that tale. What was more pressing at this point was enjoying one of the tasty beers.

The one in green is called 'La Suegra'. It translates
as 'the mother-in-law'. It was quite strong!

More house hunting followed for some of us…mainly because the next place was an actual house with a garden. A really nice garden, too. At $1500 per month and needing a car to get places from it, it was also way out of my budget, but it was nice to see that there are places with gardens for the two dogs to enjoy.

Having a covered parking space may be important in rainy season 

One of the bigger gardens - and houses - that we saw

Soon after we were back at Cadejo, meeting some non-new teachers. This involved getting an Uber. The ride-sharing company is simultaneously brilliant and frustrating in equal measure. It is so cheap to get around in an Uber…if the driver decides to collect you. We’ve had many instances of drivers cancelling when only minutes away, even after making contact with personal messages.

I don't think I've paid more
than $4 for a trip so far

I’m in the habit of saying yes to pretty much everything at the moment. This led me and some others in our newbie group to an area called Paseo el Carmen. 

The street is in the centre of Santa Tecla 

On the street is a large church called Iglesia el Carmen

I assumed that this would be a street filled with people, noise and euphoria, especially as it was a long weekend. My assumption was incorrect, unless we were very early. Having returned since in daylight hours, there are a few bars but these are interspersed between shops and even a vet’s practice.

Empty by night...

...and the following Saturday morning,
when I went for a run in the area

We entered a place called Hard Bar, which was playing the reggaeton music some of us were looking for. It was $10 to get in, which could then be recouped in the form of drinks. We got a $10 bucket of beers and danced part of the night away. I found it interesting how varied the age range was on the dancefloor. People of seemingly very different ages all dancing together to the ‘dum-be-dum-dum’ of the music.

Dancefloor at Hard Bar

Whilst sitting down, we noticed some colour out of the window. Women in costumes which wouldn’t have seemed out of place at Rio Carnival. They came in, the dancefloor cleared and some far more professional moves started to be seen.

There is a large carnival in San Miguel
on the last Saturday of November

We were stood on the side watching this performance. Soon after, we were moving back through the crowd. Four chairs had been put in the centre of the floor. Four women enthusiastically rushed up to sit on the chairs. I really didn’t want to be one of the men, and luckily I wasn’t chosen. It would have been embarrassing for everyone. The four chosen men were assigned a woman and…well…danced for them.

No. Idea.

It didn’t seem overly fair, as one man seemed far more athletic than the others. The man with the round belly next to him, who also whipped off his shirt and gyrated in an unorthodox fashion, didn’t seem to care.

I think the man in the white shirt 'won', whatever that means

You may be wondering at this point why this blog has its given title. Well, another one of those $10 papers was used to buy three tequila sunrise cocktails. They tasted like Sunny Delight, if you remember that from back in the day. Akin to having sugar directly injected into the bloodstream, we didn’t really notice that they were quite strong. I noticed the strength of the tequila shot we had soon after. I didn’t notice much of the great dancing happening on stage.

We called it a night in good time, though the slight headaches the sunrise drinkers coped with the following day suggest we could have finished a tiny bit earlier. It was a great evening and a gentle introduction into nightlife in the city in El Salvador. I do hope to have more authentic tequila sunrises in the future, maybe in my own garden, whenever I find a house which has one…

Love you all,

Matt