summer in the city

We´re in San Salvador, the big capitol city, about 2.5 million inhabitants. Chris and I had heard from other travellers and read in books that this city was dirty, over-polluted and ugly. When we arrived we found that those sources couldn´t have been more wrong. It´s actually quite a pleasant city, even for U.S. standards; it´s full of trees and lots of foliage and is situated right in the midst of picturesque mountains and volcanos. In regards to the polution, sure, it´s there. But no more than in any other U.S. city of comparable size.

Culture of San Salvador: very modern and metropolitan in areas near the city center, again, not too different to what I´m used to in Seattle. There are a lot of fashionistas and many educated people who appreciate art and literature. Malls are very popular here. Big time. It´s where middle class and upper class people go. And they´re very similar to those in the U.S.

San Salvador is also split into classes like any other large city: as one gets farther away from the city center, one encounters more lower-class neighborhoods.

We are staying with Karla, the intelligent, amiable, beautiful friend of my family. Her apartment is an anomaly simply because the only people that live there are her and her sister. Yes, it´s in Central America! Normally one encounters families of 14 living together. It´s very comfortable and she treats us like family. We have been yakking and yakking for the past three days and Chris and I have been going to bed with bulging brains because of so much Spanish. We´ve ended up talking to her more often than we talked to our host family during Spanish school. I think that if we had another month with Karla we´d be completely fluent. All in all, we´ve been going to bed very exhausted and sleeping very well. And to think that all this time Chris only needed to speak Spanish all day in order to sleep soundly...

Unfortunately I re-injured my ankle a few days ago (I sprained it last February). So we´ve been limiting our activity in order for the sucker to heal sufficiently. Hopefully next week we´ll be able to do some hiking. Anyways, because of laying off the ol´ ankle as much as possible, we went to see the new Harry Potter movie(for those who didn´t know, I´m a guilty fanatic), subtitled. I´ve never been able to understand why anyone would want to see any movie dubbed, aside from comic relief. I definitely will always prefer to watch films with the original language and subtitles in order to understand the intent of the acting and to hear the original voices of the actors. We also visited the Museum of Modern Art yesterday and found that the art of El Salvador is very cool, very well done. There was an exhibit featuring a Mexican artist (can´t remember the name) whose images were all of monkeys. Each image was paired with excerpts of Kafka´s. All in all the pieces were very, very interesting.

In the next few days I´m going to read my new copy of Harry Potter (yay!) and we´re going to try to find some local music and maybe visit another museum.

Con mucho amor...