I will be honest with you. New Year's Eve in El Salvador is not my favorite thing. Not like Mario Kart 8, which is my favorite thing. I will be honest with you again: I don't really care for New Year's Eve in any country, except maybe Saudi Arabia, where what you do on NYE is stare angrily at the world and wish it would explode (except you have the antidote to exploding).
I love El Salvador. Let me throw that out there. Completely and utterly love it. Just not on NYE, cuz FIREWORKS. Ugh. No one gets that fireworks are the exact same thing as lighting a bunch of 20 dollar bills on fire and throwing them in the air. Except burning money is better, because it's quieter.
There was one year when my dad bought a bunch of illegal fireworks -- the kind that are like surface-to-air missiles -- in Wyoming and smuggled them into Oregon, and we shot them off in the parking lot of the church down the street. Then the cops came and we had to hide in the bushes. And at first I was like, "I've never done anything so cool," but after a few minutes of my dad saying things like, "Shhh. Stop breathing, I don't want to go to the slammer again," I started to think maybe the high wasn't worth the pain. And I've thought fireworks were dumb ever since.
And believe you me, El Salvador does fireworks on NYE. I was out on the highway doing highway speed and someone chucked a cherry bomb out onto the highway and it blew up under my car and I almost wrecked, because, bomb under my car at 55 mph. Later, I was trying to sleep at 3 am. I didn't actually see the fireworks outside my house, but I am pretty sure they were blowing up Daihatsus and medium-sized sno-cone stands and starter houses. That's what it sounded like. Through my white noise maker, the pillow over my head, and the Jesus & Mary Chain playing through ear-fitting earbuds. I'm cool with it though. I am a guest in this country and appreciate the diverse ways that different cultures express celebratory feelings.