Checking out El Salvador (she`s hot!)

So, we´ve spent the past 4 days in El Salvador.

We started out in Santa Ana, the ´Queen of the West´, according to our guide book. It´s a relatively boring city close to the guatemalan border...but El Salvador is small enough that nothing is too far away from any border. We spent an afternoon sightseeing and had seen everything the town had to offer: a museum with 3 exhibits, one on the eruption of Volcan San Salvador in 1917 (tourists kayaking on the lake in the crater went flying!), one on salvadorean currency through the ages (now they use the US dollar), and one on mammoths (they´re large); cathedral (closed for remodeling, so we saw the outside view); casino (a private members only club we also saw from the outside); an art school. We left the next day.


We arrived at Lake Coatepeque just in time to see the beautiful day turn into a thunderstorm. Even though it prevented swimming, seeing storms over water is always cool. Tori also didn´t care because at this point she was sick as a dog and just slept for 18 hours. Stew had to bide his time wandering around the town....that is, the dirt road. He got a $2 steak though, which made him happy. We left Lake Coatepeque around mid-afternoon the following day, even though we had planned to stay there for two days. After all of the beautiful lakes/water we saw in Guatemala, this wasn´t really up to snuff. I guess we´re getting a little spoiled in that regard.

Other substantial motivating factors leading to our early departure included Stew´s near death experience by electrocution in the shower (Central American hot water means electric coils installed above showerheads.....not very safe, especially when poorly installed or when you´re 6ft4), and the owner of our hotel was an evil trannie. The wo(man) just about killed us with her evil glare when we went out for breakfast, and then tried to charge us for breakfast on the way out....but the night before, she said the resteraunt was closed (at 5pm) when a fellow traveller tried to get dinner. Wack.

We got to San Salvador in two evenings ago. Unfortunately, Stew got realllly sick yesterday. We took it easy, which was actually a welcome change in some ways, except for the whole Stew puking part. We´d been running around from place to place to place for a while, so it was nice to have a day to catch our breath.

Today we went to Joya de Ceren, a Mayan village that got volcano´d in about 600 AD. Unfortunately, the museum was closed for renovation (this is starting to feel like a recurring theme), but we got to walk around the archeological site and check it out. This is one of the only sites where you can see how Mayans actually lived from day to day; i.e., itçs a village, not a temple or political center or astronomical viewing area, ect. Turns out Mayans had saunas! Weird, because all of central america kind of feels like a sauna just walking around. We ran into some older Americans driving out of the park as we were walking to the bus stop, and they picked us up and took us back into San Salvador and dropped us off at the musuem we wanted to check out. Pretty sweet. It turns out that the wife of the pair worked at the Embassy, and she gave us a pretty hard sell on joining the Foreign Service...we´ll see...right now, working for the government - the very gears of industrial capitalist machine- doesn´t sound too enticing.


The anthropology musuem was quite well done. The exihibits included:
-a photo exhibit of U.S. leaders with El Salvadorean leaders. Madeleine Albright was thrown in too. And some of the leaders weren´t from El Salvador, per se, because the picture of Joe Biden was with Costa Rica´s president, Obama was with Trinidad and Tobago´s leader, and Hillary Clinton was looking terrifying with El Salvador´s first lady. It was interesting to see Hillary´s picture from 15 ish years earlier when she had visited the first lady and had been the much more attractive of the two. No longer the case.
-an exhibit on agriculture during the mayan era. This was boring.
-a display of pottery and weapons through the ages. Stew´s dad makes much more impressive guns and knives than the Spanish. There was a breast plate with a dent from a musket ball, demonstrating that the gun was real weak sauce.
-general anthropological hibbity gibbity.
-art and stuff. also some stuff on religiyawn.
- a statue of a naked chick washing clothes hiding behind a tree in the courtyard. Also, a metal sculpture called delirium tremens that is supposed to demonstrate the way that God filled the artist with such hallucinatory exultation that it was similar but better than any intoxication from drugs. Cool?
All in all, a very well done museum.

Now we´re at out hotel, not a hostel, which our guide refers to as "the latin american version of a bed and breakfast." It is nice. When Stew was sick, the owner made him vanilla tea.