Dinner with Friends

We flew to California on Tuesday, September 13, and Daniel picked us up at SFO about 4:00 p.m.  We had a quick dinner with the family before Daniel left for Bible Study Fellowship.  Afterward we had some time to play with the grandkids.

Wednesday morning after breakfast we drove 3.5 hours to spend some time with William, Gilma and Amy Flores.  We started by having lunch with William and Gilma at In-n-Out!  

After lunch we followed them to Porterville and checked into our hotel.  Once Amy was out of school, they picked us up and we went to Gilma's sister's restaurant for a Salvadoran snack--first time we've eaten "real" Salvadoran pupusas in the states and they were really tasty.

William and Stephen went to church early to set up for the Wednesday evening service.  Gilma, Amy and I joined them just before the service started.  It was a special praise/worship service with Stephen singing (in Spanish), William singing some of his original songs and then Stephen playing along with William for some congregational songs.  It was like a little slice of Iglesia Bautista Vida Nueva!  We ended the night with ice cream.

Thursday morning we had breakfast at Black Bear Diner.  They had biscuits (the size of hamburger buns) and gravy which was a pleasant surprise for Stephen.  After lunch we began our 4+ hour drive to Santa Cruz to spend the day/night with our son, Jon.

Day of Friendship and Love

For some reason February 14 is not called Valentine's Day here. So, instead, we celebrated "Day of Friendship and Love" three different ways over two days. 

FIRST CELEBRATION:  On Saturday morning the 14th we had a potluck breakfast with our discipleship group.  Not wanting to miss the opportunity to share "gringo" food, I signed up to bring biscuits and gravy.  This became a possibility when I saw that SuperSelectos, my grocery store, began carrying various kinds of Johnsonville sausages, including traditional breakfast links.  Of course, the down side of biscuits and gravy is that there are no canned biscuits here--they have to be made from scratch.  So bright and early Saturday morning I was making a triple batch of my mom's biscuits and a huge pot of gravy.  It's hard to believe that not everyone at the breakfast wanted to try them!  Ryan, Keeley, Stephen and I managed to eat our fair share.  Several weeks ago Stephen and I ate breakfast at State's Diner and I posted a picture on Facebook with the caption, "best biscuits and gravy in El Salvador."  However, after Saturday, the four of us decided to amend that statement to "second best."

The company and the rest of the food was also great, as we hadn't had the whole IDEM group together since November.  

SECOND CELEBRATION:   After being up early to cook, we decided to go out for dinner.  We really didn't know what to expect in terms of whether the restaurants would be busy, but decided to risk it.  We walked to our favorite Chinese place which is called 168, and found it less than busy.  The food is always good and, in fact, when we were in Kansas City over the holidays we thought our former favorite Chinese place was just okay.  Guess we've come to appreciate the restaurant here.  It was a great night to walk, and we're loving the fact that we're in a safe neighborhood and the 4-5 block walk is something we can even do after dark, as long as it's not too late.

THIRD CELEBRATION:  Sunday afternoon I was privileged to share with the single mom's ministry at our church.  This month's theme was "friendship" so we learned what some famous people had to say about friendship, including Helen Keller who said:

and Charles Dickens who said:

and, of course, we passed out Hershey's kisses after reading this quote.  Got to keep your audience involved!

However, we spent most of our time talking about what the Bible has to say about friends and friendship. Not surprisingly, it's quite a lot, including telling us about the friendships between Job and his friends, David and Jonathan and Paul and Barnabus, to name a few.  It was so much fun to share with them and Ena did a great job translating for me!