Surfing for Jesus!
Good God I miss the Austrians. In the last 2 weeks we’ve have met 4 people from Austria and also a couple from Switzerland whose company we really enjoyed. We are still in El Salvador in surfer paradise, but today Ulf and Mike our Austrian friends left and we are pretty bummed that we’d be all alone in the hostel. Luckily in the afternoon a new bunch of surfers showed up and we were looking forward to meeting new interesting people.
We watched them check in and were excited to get to know them. We hadn’t really got a chance to talk them when they started watching a surfing video. Out of curiosity Allison asked what the video was and they responded that it was Christian surfing??? Wow, Christian surfing!! We felt a little bit out of place, especially after they only kept to themselves during dinner and left us with the nice area of the hostel, the place with all the hammocks. When it was time to bring the kids to bed they took over the hammocks and we didn’t really have a place to go, so we decided to wait a little until there were hammocks available so we could join them. There was one guy playing the guitar and the rest were dead silent. The guy with the guitar said in a tone how I would picture Jesus to talk “Please, come and join us”. So we did.
He played real well, but also very silent. It felt that the silence was to show the importance and the deeper meaning of what he was singing. In fact it was so quiet that it was hard to hear him with all the birds, jungle animals and the waves in the background. Man it was powerful music, at least for some of the listeners and I just kept thinking how nice it would be to have the Austrians back. My mood changed somewhat when he started playing Neil Young “A horse with no name” and afterwards a lot of Bob Dylan and Beatles songs. Then it all of a sudden felt really relaxing to lie in a hammock at the ocean and listen to good quiet music. If it just wouldn’t have been for the “Surfing for Jesus” video.
The next day they all seemed even dumber. One girl posed the question “If you could only say one word for the rest of your life what would it be?” One guy chose the word ‘no’, one guy chose the word ‘yes’ and another chose ‘hmm”. After they had a conversation amongst themselves using only these 3 words in every intonation people they howled with laughter. Then they started wondering (aloud unfortunately) if ‘hmm’ is even a word. The girl decided that in some freaky country in the world hmm probably is a word. If I could use one word for the rest of my life it would have to be ‘dumb’, or ‘stupid’, or ‘Jesus, please take these losers away from me.’ Afterwards they exchanged stories of drug deals gone awry, breaking into people’s houses and stealing stuff. These people are just too cool for me. Now that the good company has left we’re ready to move on tomorrow.
We had our surf lessons today. The Pacific really whooped our asses. We were each only out there for about 45 minutes and were totally exhausted. It is hard work to paddle out to where the waves break. It was a calm day, which is perfect for learning. What was really cool was being so close to other surfers and watching them surf. Matthias had 2 rides and stood up both times. I had two rides and only got up to my knees. We are thinking of buying a board and surfing the rest of the way through Central America. We’ll see.
Tags: El Salvador, La Libertad, Surfing
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