Un Beso Santo (A Holy Kiss)

After today, I finally understand what Paul was saying in 1 Corinthians 16. When we went to church this morning, every member of the congregation (granted, there are only about 25 of them) that we came within eight feet of on the way to our seats greeted us with a "kiss" on the cheek. I put quotation marks because we really only touch our right cheeks to each other and kiss the air, though I have heard that the old ladies will slap us with a wet one toward the end of the semester if we come every week.

I recognized the tunes of most of the songs we sang, but I couldn't always remember the names of the songs or the English words that go with them. It's kind of like when you get a church song stuck in your head that you don't know very well, and it bugs you until Monday morning because you can't remember any of the words except for the chorus. There were other songs that I didn't recognize until the second or third verse because the Iglesia de Cristo often has a difficult time carrying a tune. Of course, they don't have a lot going for them since many of the translated songs have a lot of extra syllables crammed into measures that were never meant to go with Spanish lyrics. Every once in awhile, one of us would recognize a song and muster enough confidence to try some harmony. They pretty much think you're amazing if you can sing bass.

This afternoon I went to the beach with Mark Foster and Holly Peck for the first time. After a short walk along the shore I sat down and discovered a new technique for building sand castles. Okay, not very cultural, I know, but still a fun way to spend time in a new place. If you have a hole with water in it, you can pick small handfulls of silt from the bottom of the pit and drop them in piles one on top of the other, like bricks. the excess water drains to the bottom of the wall pretty quickly and the silt fills in the gaps, so you never have to touch the wall or pat the sand with your hands, which is usually when things start to fall down. The result is that you can build very high, very thin walls very fast. When I started, I was one of maybe four people on the entire stretch of beach building a sand castle. By the time we left, there were about ten little Uruguayans building within twelve feet of my castle, and two of them had taken mine over when I abandoned it because of a partial collapse. Little kids kept popping up and asking questions for the better part of an hour before I abandoned my project, but sadly, I couldn't really say much. Three phrases I need to learn in Spanish: "The secret is in the water," "Would you like to help me?" and "That's okay, it wasn't your fault."