El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras

I just arrived in Leon, Nicaragua. Bethany and I left Antigua and headed for the boarder of El Salvador and Guatemala. We crossed without any problems and made our way across the country to San Miguel, El Salvador. One thing I knew before entering the country but nonetheless found interesting was that they use U.S. currency. It just seemed extremely strange seeing everyone walking around carrying dollars, especially since it has been 7 months since I have used dollars and now the first place using my own currency again being in El Salvador. We both loved El Salvador! Although our bus dropped us off in the middle of the city, San Miguel, in a sketchy part of town, every Salvadoran that we met was extremely generous. The people acted as if they had never seen a tourist before in San Miguel, but neither did we (we did not see any other tourists our entire time in El Salvador). We used only local buses which were an adventure! The 3 hour bus we took from the Capital to San Miguel was playing an 80´s MTV music video DVD, all in English. I had never seen so many 80s´s videos! We were both cracking up! Also, I think I failed to mention that I got my haircut one night in La Ceiba with Stacy and Bethany because it had been over 6 months and my hair was hating me. I received a $4 haircut from a salon in La Ceiba and I came out looking like an 80´s male rock star. I had been joking with Bethany about my haircut and how I felt like I looked like a rock star from the 80´s but it didn´t come together until we were on a bus in El Salvador and the Van Halen video for Jump came on. I look like David Lee Roth from Van Halen! We were both cracking up! I think everyone on the bus thought that we were crazy! The buses in El Salvador are great! They are cheap, the perfect temperature and even the cheap local ones have flat screen tv´s. All of the music that we heard playing in restaurants, on buses and in hotels was in English and from the 80´s. We were both having childhood flashbacks.

The locals, El Salvadorans, are amazing. The men catcall, the same as the men in Honduras, but the men in El Salvador are so much more sincere. It did not feel creepy, but rather flattering. I guess it is kind of hard to explain but after being in Honduras for 7 months and experiencing different forms of catcalling we felt we could definitely decipher a Honduran catcall from an El Salvadoran catcall. For example in Honduras we experienced a lot of men saying, hey baby I love you, in a broken accent. In El Salvador it was more, Oh my gosh, beautiful ladies (both in English and in Spanish) in a really sincere, surprised voice. Obviously this totally depends on where you are in Honduras and in El Salvador. But we really enjoyed all of the people we came into contact with in El Salvador and never felt uncomfortable.

Power Outage... I realize now, that with the few and far between power outages at the Hogar we were lucky. Since traveling in Tegucigalpa we lost power twice and I just got to Leon and the power just went out. But I am back after 1 hour in the dark.

Ok back to El Salvador, I loved it. We spent the day in a small hillside village, Alegria. There we met up with a group of people that work for the daily newspaper. They write weekly articles on tourism in El Salvador. We got to be their models in a coffee shop in exchange they let us ride around town with them and their tour guide. They were all very nice and we got to hitch a ride with them to the local laguna, lagoon. Alegria sits on top of a volcano. It erupted some years ago and the crater filled with water, sulfuric water, and is now a green lagoon. It was beautiful. We went to a local bakery and bought a piece of higo pie that was amazing and reminded me of a peach pie my grandma makes. Higo is a local fruit that is like a kiwi.

While we were waiting for the bus in Alegria 2 men pulled up and offered us a ride to the closest town Santiago de Maria where we could then get a direct bus to San Miguel, our home base. We jumped in the car (after analyzing how safe we felt) and chatted with the two men up front. They had just spent the day in Alegria trying to get a group to help them build a donated soccer field for the local community kids. After talking to the men, we learned that the driver is a teacher/director at a local Catholic school in a beautiful small town called Santiago de Maria. While waiting for our forwarding bus he bought us some water and took us to the new community church that he is helping paint and to the school he works at. He said that the students at the school are all very interested in learning English and asked if we could help him with suggestions on how to get volunteers to come and teach English for 6 months to a year. We suggested he make a web page and offered to help translate the page into English and provided him with our email addresses. If anyone is interested in teaching English in El Salvador please email me. Mauricio, the director of the school, said that the volunteer would live in a spare house with the room free. The volunteer would only have to pay for their flight and food which in El Salvador is super cheap. The town is darling and you can find pretty much everything you need. It is about 1.5 hours East and a bit South of the Capital. You would not have to be Catholic in order to work at the school and all that you would be responsible for teaching is English. In San Miguel, where we were staying we were paying $4 a night for a hotel with a private bathroom, a fan, and cable tv. We payed $1.15 for dinners which included a drink down the road at a comedor. For breakfast we lived on wheat rolls and peanut butter and for lunch we just bought street food, same as dinner. The pupusas were awesome and ranging from $0.15 - $0.35. Pupusas are a corn based flour with either cheese, beans and cheese, veggies and cheese, veggies and beans, cheese and meat, basically with whatever you want inside. Imagine a pancake, stuffed with beans and cheese with the pancake dough made of corn flour and then doused with shredded cabbage and hot sauce. Mmm...

We left El Salvador and headed to Tegucigalpa which we had heard was the ugliest part of Honduras. I loved it! I thought it was a very nice city surrounded by mountains with a perfect climate. Sunny, with a good cool breeze, and rainy at night. I really enjoyed Tegucigalpa. The people there were also very friendly and helped show us around and get the right buses when we were downtown and lost. We stayed with a past volunteers grandparents in Tegucigalpa and got to eat delicious homemade, local food and really practice our Spanish, oh and get a warm shower. We spent the day on Saturday in Valla de Angeles, which is a small town in the hills of Tegucigalpa. It was a very nice and relaxing day. This morning Bethany and I parted ways (sad day, now traveling alone). I will miss Bethany, we share the same appetite for good local street foods and sweets. She headed back for the Hogar and I headed South to Managua, Nicaragua where I caught a bus to Leon, Nicaragua. I am going on a day hike tomorrow with a non-profit, volunteer run, organization called Quetzaltrekkers to a nearby volcano. After a couple of days here I am heading back to Grananda, then to Managua, then to Isla Ometepe, then to Costa Rica making sure I save a good 10 days to spend in Panama.

I hope that everyone is doing well. I miss you all and cannot wait to hear what has changed in your lives when I get back home (SOON)!