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February 17, 2003
san salvador, it´s a crazy place
so last night i was still in that honduran town, ended up hanging out with the traffic cop for about a half hour, helping him write questions in english for a fictional boss character. he was really enthusiastic about english, it was weird but i tried to speak english to him, i´m so programmed to speak spanish to all locals that it was kinda weird but fun. i found that i could explain stuff pretty good since i knew the spanish lingustic stuff back and forth. still i don´t know if i´d ever want to teach english, maybe but it would have to be to an upper level class. other then that went to sleep early in my shitty hotel room, caught up on some sleep.
woke up this morning and caught the bus down to san salvador. i just finished walking around the central part, all the streets were blocked by hundreds and hundreds of booths selling all manner of stuff. the people call out to you and even grab your arm trying to get your to buy there junk, and there are mobile venders with an arm full of shorts or towels or bras for example walking around yelling ¨un dolar!¨ the streets with vendors are covered and in a way it reminds me of the souks in morocco.
one of the most interesting things about this place is that you see an armed officer walking around sporting an automatic weapon about every 3 minutes, i had heard that there were a lot of guns here but it´s ridiculous. this is the largest city i´ve been in since oaxaca i think, at first i was kinda repelled by it but now i´m intrigued, they have the traditional el salvadorean dish, the pupusa, which is corn meal with a bean, cheese, or weird meat filling, i get the bean ones, they´re really good with the cabbage and carrot topping and some tomatoey hot sauce. there´s an el salvadorean restaurant in reno so i´m familiar with this food, but it´s better here, really damn cheap, 3 pupusas cost me 48 cents. that´s the other weird thing, el salvador switched the official currency to dollars about a year ago, so i´m stuck using the damn annoying american penny again. i was trying to remember how to fold the 20 dollar bill so it showed the twin towers burning, couldn´t remember but it didn´t matter cause i went to the bank to get 200 bucks out, that should last me forever here, and all my money came out in 5 dollar bills. i´m carrying that around now in my concealable money pouch but i know i need to get off the street before it´s dark, i read that american gang members that are kicked out of the u.s. end up back here and start up again, tonight i´m gonna stick close to the hostel i´m at, it´s in a little better neighborhood. pascual got robbed on the beach in la libertad where i´m going to surf, so i know to carry around only like 5 bucks.
tomorrow i´m going to the anthropological museum, then plan to pay a visit to the center that coordinates the ngos and volunteer workers. i maybe sticking around to do some work here, it all depends on if the work i could do would be interesting, the best would be getting to translate something but that´s probably not going to be an option. i´m also looking at my money situation, it´s not the best, but then again not so bad.
ok off to catch a bus back to the hostel before the thugs show up.
some humor about how us travelling americans should act.
Posted by bendan at February 17, 2003 04:13 PM
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