Photos of Camille, Daniel (and family and friends)

For the last night we chose to be in San Salvador, the capital. It’s noisy, crowded and polluted. Despite staying at the Hotel Villa Florencia in the supposedly tranquil and safe Zona Rosa neighborhood, we woke to two gunshots; it sounded like a shotgun to me. That was followed by two more.

Last night we struggled to find a place for dinner. The kids saw a Pizza Hut with a play area and begged us for some play time. We hadn’t had much luck finding play structures or parks for the kids to run around in, so we obliged them. Molly and I had a beer while we mulled over our dinner options. We had a strong recommendation for A Lo Nuestro. Since the Pizza Hut had wifi we scoped out the reviews. We ultimately decided it was too expensive and too nice for what we wanted.

We returned to the hotel and asked the clerk for recommendations. She didn’t have any but said that we could walk along the nearby road and find dinner. It was busy and not pedestrian friendly. We soon discovered that we were in a nightclub zone. The choices ere expensive, pulsing with music and filled with fashionable youth (anything under 30 is youth to we middle age folks).

When threatened with a return to Pizza Hut, we settled on a return to the “Princess Sheraton”. The dinner was $105 with a bottle of wine, the service excellent and the food tasty. The one exception was Molly’s chicken breast which she called “wedding chicken” for its blandness and rubber consistency. That’s why I never order chicken breast when eating out.

We sat outside on a veranda overlooking the pool which our hotel lacked. The kids were sorry we picked the Villa Florencia which paled in comparison with no pool and the dinky room with anemic air conditioning.

As I write this, we are hurtling toward the airport in a micro-taxi that strains to get our American sized bulk and luggage up the hills. Not that we’re so big, but the Salvadorans are shorter and not quite so big. I shouldn’t be too surprised but the people here are going to have to face an obesity epidemic soon. There are lots of sugars in the diet and white bread is popular. Cocoa Cola has a huge presence here; sugary sodas are everywhere. In the whole trip I saw perhaps 3 people (all men) who looked as if they exercised. It’s so bloody hot here I could see why exercise is hard. It’s also likely that while we export our bad habits and unhealthy overprocessed foods, Salvadorans aren’t learning our public health lessons.