El Salvador

A brief few days in El Salvador but long enough to have the weirdest day of conversations in my travels and to realise that I much prefer mountan villages and small towns to the dirty, unsafe, noisy and unnegotiatable cities like San Salvador. For once I was travelling with other people for a few days in a row!

We used Juaguay (the way it is pronounced sounds Japanese) a mountain village as a base for the region. The weird day was as follows:
* watched the france v. spain football match with some locals who were on neat vodka at midday * wandered around town. At the post office I ended up explaining the english political and voting system, our currency and why the UK is not part of the US and does not use US Dollars as well.
* at a school church I was being asked, by the children this time and not by their fathers(!) was I was unmarried and did not have children!
* at the post office I was asked to give an impromptu english lesson - numbers, greetings and the usual correction that sheep was not pronounced ship, shit, sheet, or chip. They cannot understand the slight differences in the way this is said in english!
* on the way back from the wander I treated myself to a US$2.50 manicure and discussed men, mosquitos, San Salvador, television, raising kids, men etc.

Its only at the end of the day that you realise how weird it was to have all the conversations in one go!

Pictures: Juaguay (me in the main square, a street scene with a dormant volcano in the background), Ahuachapan (a street market, paper colourful dolls sold in shops (these are used at childrens parties - the dolls are filled with paper and sweets and the kids basically dig into the doll with they fingers through the paper to find the sweets), Emiliano (my Argentinian fellow traveller) in a normal El Salvadorian central town street scene), the decorated inside of a public bus - imagine driving on bumpy roads in a decrepid bus with the dolls bouncing up and down and off each other!