El Salvador

Sooo... I just got back from an extremely random, but very fun, week in El Salvador.  This is what happened.  I had met Bertoni (pictured below) a few times while hanging out with my artesano friends around Xela.  OK background: So I have discovered in my Central American travels that if you don't want to grow up, and you want to travel around the world forever, and you are artistically talented, and preferably circus-type talented too, and you like dreadlocks...you can be an artesano like many of my friends from Casa Argentina.  These guys make beautiful jewelry and crafts and sell it for travel/survival money.  They go to all the cool places where all the cool stuff is going on, because there will be lots of people to buy their stuff.  It's a sweet deal.  So... last Wednesday I was selling sandwiches when I ran into Bertoni.  He's an artesano, and is therefore friends with a bunch of my friends.  He bought two of my sandwiches, so I figured I could hang out and chat for a minute.  He told me that he was off to El Salvador the following day to hit up the big carnaval in San Miguel.  I told him that I was jealous because I want to see El Salvador.  I've been feeling a little lame lately for staying in Xela and not-travelling.  He said I should come with him.  We decided to meet in the park at 6:30 that evening to talk about it.  I wasn't really planning on going.  It's a little crazy last-minute.  And yet we sat for hours and planned everything out, and I found myself getting into a taxi at 4:30AM with my backpack.

El Salvador is interesting.  I'm glad I saw it, and would even considering going back some day to see the beaches, but I wouldn't want to live there.  It's like a weird mix of the US and Guatemala.  Somehow the fast food chains and shopping malls, which are totally present in Guatemala, seem more dominant and obnoxious in El Salvador.  They also use US dollars, which is very weird.  There is very little indigenous culture visible.  Someone told me that there is only one department (like a state) of El Salvador in which an indigenous language is still spoken.  It's a sick kind of irony that the US funded the civil war that destroyed much of El Salvador's culture, and now they have replaced it with US culture.  Eek.  

People also talk a lot more about the war in El Salvador than in Guatemala.  I find that interesting.  

What else can I say about El Salvador in general?  The weather's really nice.  After the extreme cold of nights in Xela, the hot and sweaty climate was beautiful.  And I didn't get at all sunburned!  :-)  Salvadoreños also listens to A LOT of bachata. And they seem to listen almost exclusively to the album, The Formula, Vol. 1 by Romeo Santos. Holy crap.  But yeah... for the benefit of my family, this is bachata/Romeo Santos.  I chose this song because a bunch of it's in English...and because it's my jam...and because WTF Usher's doing bachata?

So that's bachata.  The carnaval was very cool.  It was very much like Xela's Independence Day feria, but with more rides.  Bertoni and I slept on the ground in a tent, in a little tent village of artesanos.  I would like to acknowledge that my mother, whether it was intentional or not, did something ingenious during my childhood.  Apparently both of my parents truly prefer to sleep on super hard futons.  I don't know what's wrong with them.  But I always had the most uncomfortable beds ever.  My friends thought my parents were crazy.  Surely they can buy you a mattress!  Or like box springs or something?  But the result was that any bed--be it the bunk beds at summer camp, dorm beds, bus seats, or the ground--now feels super comfy to me.  I can sleep anywhere!

I also had a new bathing experience at the carnaval that I found surprisingly pleasant.  Every morning I got up, grabbed my towel and shampoo, walked to the bathroom, paid the 25 cents to enter, and went into the farthest stall from the door.  Here, instead of a toilet, was a large vat of water with a faucet.  It was like a bathtub, but far too narrow and far too tall, and full almost to the top.  There was a bucket.  And that's the shower.  And it was lovely.  And it wastes far less water than actual showers.

I will admit, I've been getting very comfortable with street food lately.  I will basically eat anything in Xela now (of course, still using my eyes and common sense).  I don't know if it's because my stomach has acclimated to the local buggies and stuff in 5 months, or because I have a tummy of steel, or because the food's not as bad as they say, but I've been fine so far (knock wood).  I even drank the tap water one time (although I'm not gunna push it with that one).  However...four days of living in a carnival and eating only carnival food will do horrible things to your gut.  I am currently in the process of "giving it a few days," waiting to see if I'm just recovering from way too many pupusas and candy apples or if I'm sick.  I think I'm fine though.

After San Miguel, we spent a day in San Salvador.  I wanted to see the capital of the country, since we had to pass  through there to get back to Xela anyhow.  One of the vendors from the carnival offered to let us crash at his place and show us around the city.  We were very grateful for his offer after a half an hour of looking for a hotel.  Apparently the city center has far more amenities for prostitutes and their clients than for travellers.  All the affordable hotels wanted to charge separately for the day and the night, and they didn't have locks on the doors.  Eek.

San Salvador was a cool daytrip though.  I could see spending another day or two there, but that would be enough.  There is very interesting architecture and parks and museums.  I'm also told you straight up don't want to go out at night in the center of the city because of the amount of gang activity.  Everything's kind of crowded and dirty, although to be fair, Guatemala City is the most populated city in Central America.  San Salvador is number 5.

(Oh god they just started playing Romeo Santos The Formula, Vol. 1 in this effing internet cafe! I can't escape!)

There were two very cool/powerful things I saw in San Salvador.  I read about both of them in this blog. After TripAdvisor let me down, I turned to fellow gringa travellers, and was quite satisfied with much of their advice.

1) The Iglesia de Rosario is right in the central park.  It looks like this on the outside:

I know, right?  But on the inside, it's super cool!  It's got this awesome stained glass rainbow thing going on and it's very modern-art-y:

And it's got what I'm pretty sure is a very modern, abstract stations of the cross sculpture thing:

2) The Monumento a la Memoria y la Verdad, or Monument to the Memory and the Truth was seriously moving.  It contains the names of about 30,000 people who were killed or disappeared during the war, arranged by year.  As my blogger guide-lady points out, this is less than half of the total count, and "The wall does not include the 30,000 plus Salvadorans killed during genocide that took place in the country in the 1930s, but sometimes it takes baby steps to get to the truth. It’s a start." Damn.  Looking at the wall, you can see how entire families were wiped out at once, as groups of 10-20 people with the same last name appear in clusters.  

I was possibly most moved by the 1989 section.  The year my mom was pregnant with me and I was born into my cushy, happy life, people were being massacred a couple thousand miles to the south.  What if we had lived in El Salvador, and not in the US?

I also took the blog lady's advice and visited the tomb of Archbishop Oscar Romero, whose assassination is said to have started the war.  My local guide said that the blog lady was mistaken in her food suggestions, though, and brought us, instead, to a cute little comedor to eat.  The food was cheap and awesome, so I believe him.   Also, we were served by what appeared to be an orthodox Jew.  Could it be?  Turns out he's a Chabadnik in the process of converting.  We chatted about kosher kitchens (he's trying to make his diner as kosher as possible, but it's not easy in Central America on a low budget...not to mention nobody cares whether or not their food's kosher here).  I thought to myself, 'maybe San Salvador has a Jewish community!'  I asked him excitedly if there is a synnagogue, and was told that no, there is not.  The Chabad dudes have their own, but I'm not invited.  Fine then.  Then my friends were very confused as our host shook their hands one at a time and then waved goodbye to me...and I, of course, didn't think anything of it and waved back.  So much explaining followed.

On the way back to Guatemala, the customs lady wrote the wrong number of days on my visa.  It now says that I can stay here past my return date, which means I don't have to go back to Mexico!  Even if the airport dude realizes her mistake, my days in El Salvador don't count towards my 90 days, so I will now be 13 days over.  They charge 10Q a day for being here with an expired visa.  That's 130Q, or $16.47.  Way cheaper than a trip to Mexico.

Got to see Guatemala City a bit.  It's pretty cool, I guess.  Very big and full of malls and stripmalls and other places to buy stuff.  Their Christmas Festival was just starting up in the park, where they have an iceskating rink and some sort of ramp thing that you can sled down.  So that's odd.

My closing words of advice from my El Salvador trip are as follows:  If you are going to smoke a lot of weed in public and would like to not be caught by the police, don't wear a shirt covered in pot leaves every single day.  Don't tattoo pot leaves on your body.  Don't juggle machetes (although that was kind of impressive...especially considering his inebriated state).  Don't be such an idiot.  Or I will laugh at you as they drag you out of the fair.  And I will not feel bad at all.