Observations

Since I´ve come to El Salvador I´ve noticed some things and I would like to share them with you.

First, the birds. There are a variety here. When I sleep in the room at the dormitory I am usually awakened by two distinct bird calls. The first sounds like someone talking slowly into a fan. I can´t discern what is being said, but I´ll try to figure that out when I move back to that room at the end of February. The other bird sounds like the horn off of a child´s bike. Both are a little odd to wake up to and I can´t sleep through either.

Of course, if the birds don´t wake me up the traffic does. Horns are a hot commodity here and every vehicle has one. And the motto in El Salavodor is If you have it, use it. And everyone does, in a variety of ways, from short staccotto beeps to indicate a person can walk or a vehicle can enter, to long, held our horns indicating much frustration and anger, to the random combination of beeps which could indicate boredom or happiness or a need to pee, hard to say. Horns are a whole other language here.

Busses are particularly fond of the horn. There are roughly 10 million busses in San Salvador. I think they have the most extensive bussing system I´ve ever seen. And they´re exciting. Busses in El Salvador don´t just take you where you need to go, they race each other to get there first! Perhaps the final destinations of each bus are not the same, but stopping points along the way are the same(which can be pretty random), and it´s a game to see who can collect the most people and get them to their destination first. What this means is that the more people on the bus the better - no matter the number of seats. It also means that you have to hang on as soon as you put one foot on the bus because you don´t know when the bus driver will hit the gas. Same goes for exiting, get off quick or the bus might take off with one of your feet.

Oh, and don´t get me started on passing! I first thought every street in San Salvador was one way because busses pass all the time - and so close sometimes I wouldn´t be able to stick my fist between them. This is not true, some streets are one way, but not all. And just like in the States, you don´t want to ride the short bus. These are the scariest and for heaven´s sake, don´t sit in the front! Yeah, learned my lesson there. The drivers take more risks and hit the brakes faster and are just angrier in general which is obvious by their use of the long, drawn out horn.

At any rate, more observations. People don´t really travel in El Salvador. At least, it´s not the norm here in the city. They don´t go to the beach for the weekend, or anywhere else. From what I can determine, they just can´t afford to. Most that I´ve talked to don´t like to swim and are afraid of the sea. But who can blame them since they have the most dangerous coast of Central America with very strong currents and the Red Tide 2x a year. I´m scared of it too.

There are not a lot of tourists to San Salvador, and quite frankly there isn´t a lot to see here. It is a rather ugly city. I´ve only seen one park where they actually had grass and lamp posts and people! It looked so much like a park from back home that I wanted to jump right off the bus and run down and around the park leaping with joy in the dappled sunlight streaming through the palm trees. I´m pretty sure no one would have been surprised if I jumped off a bus while it was still moving.

Oh, and one last observation: yesterday their were clouds in teh sky of an odd dappled nature and one of our students told us this meant there would be a strong earthquake soon. I don´t know if it´s true, but I´ll let you know if happens. How exciting!