El Salvador - Day 1

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I'd been talking about it for a while, and we finally *did* it! From September 19th until the 29th, 2006, Marta (my faithful travel companion and inspiration) and myself were in the lovely country of El Salvador in Central America. She grew up there and has many friends and family that showed us a good time. I'm glad that I could go with her back to her homeland which she had been away from for 10 years.

As a non-Spanish speaking person I knew I'd be in for a bit of difficulty communicating, so I reminded Mchan to never leave my side while we were there. I somehow knew that I could only ask so many times where the bathroom was, and Marta had taught me some bad words that don't really circulate through polite conversation too frequently.

From my arsenal of techno-gadgets I brought along my MiniDisc player with some Industrial and Wumpscut songs on there. Tool carried me through some particularly boring plane travel time. I also lugged my camera along, complete with rechargeable batteries (+ charger) and a 1GB memory card that I promised I'd fill come hell or high water. I forgot my PDA at home, and left my cellphone at Marta's (it would have cost me $3/minute to call home with it, so I decided to save some coin and leave it in Canada). Of course, I'm nothing without a notebook and gel pen to write with. I brought 3 notebooks JUST in case I had a brainstorm ^_~. Also brought along three books to read (but in reality, they just ended up being something for me to carry everywhere ^_^ I wrote the whole time!)

I had originally submitted this to a journal elsewhere with the entire trip in one entry. While submitting this to travelblog.org I will create a separate journal entry for each day of my trip. This will help me keep things organized and have more control over the photographs that appear in this log. (I cannot specify through HTML coding or otherwise where the pictures appear.)

Day One - Tuesday September 19th

Our flight left at 6:30 in the morning, which meant that we had to be at the airport by 4:30. Oh joy. We met a woman in the lineup who started talking to us about how her wife was in a trucking accident in the States and she was rushing over there to see her. I felt so badly for her, since she didn't know everything of what had happened, except that it was serious. I'm glad that she could talk to us about it even if we didn't know what to say to make her feel better. Mchan and I are peculiarly energetic at early hours like that, and since M is such a chatterbox she seemed to cheer the woman up a bit. M's bags were full mainly of gifts for friends and family and the larger of the two was overweight by a couple of pounds, but I think that since she and I are, as I said, unusually happy and polite, the woman at the check-in counter let her pass without paying any fees.

I'll say one thing for Toronto's airport terminal 3: it BLOWS! And I mean that in the most polite and patriotic way, of course! Yes, my dears, it blew goats. There we were, 5 in the morning with an hour to kill, starving for lack of a breakfast and WHAT do you think was available to us? Yes, one "restaurant" if it could be called that which offered a slim variety of pre-packaged bagels with a slab of stale cream cheese on it OR (lucky!lucky!) a shrink-wrapped muffin! Oh man, I had a bitch of a time choosing (between starvation and a muffin). We each bought a muffin, M had a coffee (duh!) and I had orange juice. What's that? Less than $15? What a steal!

Yes, yes, I was a bit nervous about going on the plane. I had a false feeling that something bad would happen to me, and admittedly backed up all my questionable materials on my computer and temporarily deleted it in case the worst would happen. The last thing I wanted to have go through my head while my plane is crashing is the thought of my loved ones discovering the large cache of gay pornography on my computer. What a way to be remembered ^_~

We finally got on our flight, which was miraculously full of empty seats! M and I were seated next to a guy who was asleep the moment he set foot on the plane. The flight attendant told us that we could spread out if we wanted since there were so many empty seats... unfortunately, the guy beside us didn't budge the entire trip!! I managed to catch a few winks (and look pretty dead while I did it), although notice how my shirt is sleeveless, and the guy's shirt is *also* sleeveless. Now, imagine having your bare arm brushing against a stranger's bare arm for 2.5 hours. Erk, yeah, I was ready to punch him... luckily for him I'm not a violent person XDXD

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Got to Miami for our stopover. The Miami airport rocks. Lots of boutiques, places to eat, and ICE CREAM! M bought me some ice cream and I ploughed through it like it was my mission to finish it. I even helped her because I'm a glutton with ice cream.

Side-note: I've noticed recently that my eating habits involve me approaching any meal like a challenge. If you lay the food down in front of me, I will dig into it and eat and eat until I'm full. No breaks or pauses to enjoy the TASTE of the food. No conversation will be forthcoming from me unless someone else starts it. I held onto that ice cream cup and drained the life out of it in less than ten minutes. Marta's ice cream was a little more fortunate, but that luck failed once she offered me the remainder of her cup. Mmmmm, nothing like ice cream to perk up a dull flight!

The flight from Miami to the airport in San Salvador was a little more productive. I got the window seat and began plotting a story that I'd started in one of my notebooks. I suppose that's the benefit of having different notebooks dedicated to different things. On a side-note, if anybody has any knowledge regarding different forms/types of amnesia, or what is plausible in a story, let me know. I'm tempted to make something that is magic-based, although would prefer to keep it magic-free. Bla, I shall speak of this later.

We got to El Salvador's capital San Salvador. Damn. It. was. hot.

Now, I'm a Canadian gal, and I prefer the cold over the heat any day. I love winter and bundling up and all that lovely cold-weather stuff. Marta informed me that it is now El Sal's winter season and as I stood there taking in the blistering heat, I likened it to an unbearably hot summer day just north of Toronto. I then began to regret having worn thick corduroy pants to travel in (although it *had* been a good idea when I'd gone to yaoi con last year ^_^)

We met up with her aunt and uncle who had kindly offered to drive us anywhere we liked while we were staying there. The highway from the airport to the capital was a bit long, but very, very interesting. I was immediately taken by the vastly different driving style that El Salvadorian's have compared to what I'm familiar with around Toronto. Hmmm, how could I put this? As we zoomed along the road at 120 km/h, coming dangerously close to the car in front of us, only to duck around the side and just nearly miss hitting another car to get ahead, I realized that people there do not keep a 1-2 foot cushion of air around their cars like they do up here. It's... almost an art form to watch people drive. Everyone is aware of the size of their car and exactly HOW CLOSE they can get to another vehicle/object/person without hitting them. If there were a two-lane road there, I wouldn't be surprised to see three cars driving down it side-by-side.

One thing that caught and held my attention was my first sighting of a guard with a gun. Oh yes, it was a little bigger than the usual handguns and pistols you see cops with around here. We drove by a gas station and I spotted a man wearing dark pants, a light brown shirt with a white number on the left shoulder. He was leaning against a sign or something, but the thing that mainly caught my eye was the shotgun that was nonchalantly slung over his shoulder. I asked M about it who asked her uncle. He said that a lot of businesses hire private protection (guards) to prevent robberies. I guess the logic being that nobody is stupid enough to rob a man with a shotgun ^_^

Along the road there were many little stands that were set up. Pretty much 4 posts and a board on top for a roof. Under these shanty roofs were people selling either coconuts or pupusas. Now, a pupusa is something like a pancake made of either corn or rice with a cheesy paste on the inside that is then fried and served to eat with your fingers. They're very good, easy to make, cheap, and El Salvador's national dish. See what Wikipedia has to say on pupusas. (Note, in the picture it is the round things on the top of the plate and not the rice on the bottom of the plate.)



One other thing of interest is the political party. This picture shows you the colours of the political party. *ANYWHERE* you went, it doesn't matter if you were in town or driving down a deserted road to the middle of nowhere; the political party colours were painted on every single telephone pole and lamp post. When there wasn't a pole to paint, they'd paint the walls or the curb. Whatever it took to get the colour out there. I asked Marta what happens when a new party is elected to power and if the colours have to be changed every time there is an election (I had visions of the manpower such a task would require). It seems that that never happens. Ever since the civil war 15 years ago there has always been the same political party running the country. You'd see massive rock faces where they'd blasted a mountain away to put the road through, and the section of mountain that was exposed would have 8' tall colours painted all over it. It seems that political leanings is a big thing down there, which is such a stark contrast from up here were nobody gives a fuck.
(Keep an eye out in the following picutres and you'll see the subtle colours painted in random places.)

We eventually arrived at the guest house at which we'd be staying. After our bizzarrely scary/funny stay at a hostel in San Francisco last year, I will admit I was a bit nervous about what this new place would look like. Would there be a creepy guy signing us in and offering to carry our bags up 4 flights of stairs? Who knew. Either way, I knew we'd survive. I mean, we were there for the sights, not the hotel.

While we waited for them to answer, I snapped some pics of the street that we'd call home for most of the 10 days we'd be spending in the country.


Anyways, we got into our room, and it was GORGEOUS!


Well, we got settled in pretty quickly, and paid the manager for the time we'd be there. $140 USD for 7 nights, breakfast included. OMG talk about wonderful! We met the housekeeper who lived there. She was a DOLL, although I couldn't understand her at all ^_^"

M and I walked down the road to the magical mall I'd mentioned earlier. It was called Metro Centro and it's a part of a chain of malls. You know how you can find a McDonalds in every town in America and Canada? Well, there is a Metro Centro in every town that we visited in El Salvador. It's interesting to see a mall in a country that experiences NO snowfall. A lot of it is open-air.

It was interesting to see that, unlike in my town, the stores in the mall were all self-contained. They had glass doors you had to open to get into them. The stores themselves might be air-conditioned or not, but the mall area itself is NOT and it's HOT!


The food was so *insanely* cheap that we bought a lot of it. Doughnuts were 35 cents from the Mister Doughnut, and there is a chicken chain called Pollo Compello that BEATS the HELL out of KFC. Oh yes, we'd decided that we'd come back 50 lbs heavier at the end of our stay. So much readily available food at such good prices; we were sunk! We walked back to the guest house early (around 7pm) because we'd been told not to walk through that part of town after dark. (Later we discovered that that section of town wasn't that dangerous at ALL. Hell, after you've been around Toronto long enough, you develop a lovely, hard stare that just informs people around you that you're not up to entertaining any bullshit they have for you. It's unapproachable, yet, non-threatening. We wore these expressions and nothing happened to us.

Early night after a long flight.

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Photos

Toronto - Miami
On the plane, sitting beside the guy who slept the whole way and WOULD NOT get up. My arm is touching his. I'm sleeping in rage. (Marta is happy at this!)

Stopover in Miami
My tiredness is very evident.

Political Party Colours
Here is a sample shot of what was ALL OVER the place in El Sal. The political party colours are painted on every bit of concrete and every pole visible from the road.

Axihuayan
Marta is ringing the buzzer at the guesthouse. It looks nice and secure from the outside.

Our Street - Looking North?
(Notice the pretty mountains int he background!) This *may* have been north, but my sense of directions kinda suck when I'm with Marta. We didn't walk this way because...

Our Street - Looking South?
...everything we wanted/needed was in THIS direction. All we had to do was walk around the corner and down a street and we were at the "ghetto" mall. I say ghetto in quotes because people *called* it ghetto, but it wasn't. It was an effing NICE mall!

Our room
What we first saw while walking in there. (There is Marta's bed!)

Another shot of our room (from the bathroom)
A look at the nice, large closet that we had. Two twin size beds (hard as a rock, but I sleep on a futon so no trouble with me there). That is the bed I slept on.

Awesome bathroom is awesome
We even had our own bathroom! This was a BLESSING for what would come later on Saturday.

Metro Centro
Open-air section of the mall.

Metro Centro
Closed-in section of the mall.

Metro Centro - TRAIN
In the open-air part of the mall there was a little train that would drive about amongst the people. Children could ride in the back, although Marta and I entertained the idea of hopping on and having the driver take us around. Yes, we had a moment of lazy intent.