San Salvador

On Thursday, we had a trip to San Salvador. This trip started at 6:30 AM, and involved 4 different buses to get from Tecoluca to our ultimate destination, the David Guzman Museum of National Anthropology (or something like that). The museum was fairly interesting, much better than the museums I’ve been to in other third world countries, which surprised me. They had tons of indigenous artifacts, which I enjoyed looking at. After the museum we went to PIZZA HUT! Pizza Hut is a big deal here – it is a sit down restaurant with a huge menu. I had salad, pasta, and iced coffee!!! It was amazing. Much to my dismay, though, I discovered on paying that the salad bar (not listed in the menu) was $10 – double the price of all other food items. So my bill ended up being $20, while everyone else’s was about $7. It was worth it, though. After lunch we went to the Peace Corps main office in El Salvador. It’s a really nice office, and they have a huge lending library of books for volunteers, which we all took advantage of happily. We then went to a shopping center downtown. Apparently there was a store there that had American food (such as Kraft Mac and Cheese), but I didn’t find it unfortunately.

All in all, I was disappointed in San Sal. It was definitely functional in that it had tons of stores that I could visit frequently for supplies and such, but there was no charm, interesting architecture, or culture that I could detect. It definitely did not feel like the heart of the country the way some capitals do. However, I will be happy to travel back there to get iced coffee, salad, and go to El Salvador’s only movie theaters!