Day 5: San Salvador

Wednesday September 2, 2009

Vocabulary:

chinear: to carry (a child)

calcamonías: stickers

Photos:

San Salvador
Family Portraits (all the family I've met here)

Today we left bright and early for the three hour drive to San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador.  Both the country and the capital are often referred to simply as "Salvador," which confused me at first, since in English the names decidedly include both words.  But it makes sense, since "el" just means "the" in Spanish and "san" means "saint."  You still understand what someone is talking about if they leave off those words.  And once you're in a country, it's not confusing to call the capital city by the same name as the country itself.

The highway signs here are interesting.  Instead of route or exit numbers, the signs just say where the road leads to.  I guess there are few enough highways that this works okay, and it does make it easy to get around (at least on the main roads) without a map.

We didn't actually go to, or even see, the city center.  Manuel's Aunt Rosa lives on the outskirts of town, and we went straight to her house.  I met many more relatives, took lots of photos (see today's albums), and gave away more New York tee shirts.  Manuel lived with his Aunt Rosa and cousins Jocelyn and Brigit for several years.  The cousins were too little to remember him, but he has fond memories of taking care of them and how he "les chineaba" (used to carry them around), so it was cool to meet them.

Towards the afternoon, Ester and Ana Ruth started talking about going to a "Plaza Internacional," which I thought might be a good place to get some local flavor and maybe pick up a few souvenirs.  Turns out it's a very modern mall (the photo to the right is of the very nice courtyard in the middle of the mall).  Not exactly my idea of local flavor, but it was air conditioned and I did find one souvenir, a soccer shirt for Manuel of his favorite team, Barcelona.  Ana Ruth's little boy, Jorgito (of "yo hablo tambien" fame) was playing with stickers, so I also got to learn a word in Spanish that I've been looking for for years (Spanish-speakers here just say "sticker," and it's never in any dictionary).  On the way back we took a microbus just like that ones we used to use to get around in Bolivia, so that was cool.

We left with several new passengers, including twin cousins of Luis who are the same age as him.  Luis is surrounded by little girls at home, which can be tough on him, and he's happy to spend some time with his cousins.  He actually has a brother who's just four years younger than him, but unfortunately he lives in the Bronx and they've only met once.

On the way back we stopped at the Pupusadroma at Olocuilta, which is basically a pupusa rest stop.  There are about 20 little restaurants all in a row, all selling pupusas.  I actually liked the ones we bought a few days ago from the neighbor lady better, but apparently these are supposed to be famously good.  It would make sense that they should be, since if any one of the stalls were inferior, it'd be an easy thing to just take your business to the next one over.  I also tried some fresh roasted cashews, which may have ruined me forever for the cashews available in the US.  They are so much better fresh!

When we were about 10 minutes from home (after six hours of driving during the day), the engine overheated.  The consensus seems to be that we were going too slow, which doesn't make a lot of sense to me (any car experts in the audience?), except that we had already driven six hours without a problem, and it was only once we slowed down that it overheated.  We all piled out of the car into the dark night in the middle of the fields of sugar cane, and the thirteen year old boys pretended they were on "la migra" (the journey to the US).  The "migra" situation permeates everything here.  There are billboards that say "tell your family in the US to send you money for ________."  I have not found a single family that does not have relatives in the US, and many families are split significantly.  The most common is a father from his children, but there are also mothers separated from children and siblings from siblings, as well as more distant relatives.  And most of the adults of Manuel's generation that I meet have either spent time in the US or tried to migrate and didn't make it all the way.  In San Salvador I met a 21-year-old who arrived in the US at the age of 7 months and had just been deported back to El Salvador.  He was happy to find someone else who spoke English, but in general seemed surprisingly at peace with his situation.  Thankfully he speaks Spanish a lot better than most of the Hispanic kids I know who grew up in the US, so that helps a lot, but it's still a totally new country and culture for him.

Much to the disappointment of the boys, the engine cooled down with copious addition of water and we didn't end up having to sleep in the sugar cane fields.  We made it home without further incident and found places for all the extra people to sleep.