For the last four days I’ve been in San Salvador, El Salvador with two of my girlfriends from Pana. On Wednesday we went to the city by shuttle to catch our coach bus. It was the equivalent to a tour bus, but with two levels. The ground floor was first class. We tried to buy first class tickets a few days before we left, but they were sold out. We were told the difference between first class and economy was the champagne when you leave, the baileys when you arrive, and in between drinks you get bigger seats and friendlier service (that last one we figured out on our own). We settled for climbing the stairs, a dry run, and unfriendly service.
En route we saw two movies and were served a meal, much like a cold lunch you would get on the plane (the kind that still serves food). Who needs friendly guys–I just need them to hand over my food. What do you call the flight attendant equivalents on a bus–road attendants, bus boys, coach dudes? Whatever they are called, I was happy to be fed, even if the subs only came with a smile in first class.
On arriving in San Salvador, we went to our host’s house, and from there had a great three days. Really they were perfect. El Salvador doesn’t have the same indigenous presence that there is in Guatemala. The part of San Salvador that we were staying in could have been plopped into the suburbs of any North American city. The cars, houses, restaurants, all similar or the same to those at home. Many of the North American chains are present and accounted for. People just look more tan.
The next morning we left our rather swanky apartment building, to forage for coffee. We asked the security gate dude where we could get some and he said next door at the Shell station. We dismissed his silly suggestion, knew we could do better than that. Come on, we are in Central America where they grow the stuff, surely we can find a good cup-o-jo. We walked around for a couple of blocks, then a couple more. But it’s a residential neighborhood, houses only. Sheepishly we end up right back where we started, the Shell gas station. We went there every morning for coffee and renamed it Cafe Shelle. Ya gotta be flexible and go with what you can find. I actually enjoyed the machine Vanilla Latte, but as Paul will tell you, my coffee standards are so low they aren’t even on the chart. So be it, but those low standards sure come in handy when you are drinking coffee at Shellbucks. I was feeling no pain.
I already knew my friends were hard-core shoppers, but we had never been to a real mall together. Let me tell you, those women have shopping stamina that is unrivaled. I’m not a big shopper, but have been in a mall drought for five months. Even I was enjoying going from store to store. We did a five-hour stretch that flew by.
When we weren’t shopping we spent time by the pool at the apartment. We battled large tropical-sized cockroaches. Needless to say they often win. The reason they grow to be the size of small rodents is because they outwit humans during most confrontations. My friend tried to kill one and when it charged her, she ended up tripping, flipping upside down, and hitting a column. Let that be a lesson to all of us.
We went for lunch at a fantastic seafood restaurant. It wasn’t expensive but the food was oh so delicious. We had ceviche, octopus, salmon, conch, oysters. I tried black rice for the first time. It was tasty even though it was made with squid ink, which sounds less than appetizing. My friend ordered the mountain medly of misc. fried seafood goodness–thought I’d died and gone to heaven. It was one of the best seafood meals I’ve ever had.
Like any good girls-getaway, we stayed up talking until the wee hours of the morning. We continued eating and being outwitted by cockroaches.
Part of me was feeling like I should be seeking out other aspects of the culture in El Salvador. But when you are with a group, you need to go with the flow of what the group wants to do, and not go all crazy demanding. I’ve seen that happen on girl’s getaways before, when one of the women doesn’t know how to be a member of the pack and wants to go all alpha-male on the group. Our little threesome had the perfect getaway gel-factor. We got along famously.
The three days passed quickly. A good girl”s getaway always travel at warp speed because you’re having such a good time. We left Saturday to go back to Guatemala. We drove back in a car, so we could drive up the coast to see the beaches. Beautiful beaches, lots of people out surfing. We stopped for lunch at a little restaurant hanging off the cliff, faceing the ocean. There were 30-40 surfers in the water. Not many people were actually catching waves, it looked more like speed-dating on surfboards.
The ride home was crazy. My friend’s husband clearly has a secret Nascar driver fantasy or do all Italians have no fear on the road? Good news was that we were in a Land/Range Rover (the bigger one) and not a Smart Car. Bad news was that my seat belt wasn’t working. My only hope was that I would be thrown clear if the vehicle clipped an oncoming chicken bus and did a death spiral off the cliff into oblivion. The friend I was sitting with in the backseat kept motioning that we should keep praying to god. Don’t know if she was joking, but I think not.
We did pass something I’ve never seen before. A chicken bus was stopped by the road next to the side of a mountain. There were more than 20 men leaning up against the mountain, facing it in a long row, somewhat evenly spaced. Where they holding something up like wire for a fence? Couldn’t figure out what they were doing, such an odd scene, until one man turned around while zipping up. They were having a bathroom break. We laughed about the group pee for a couple of miles, which temporarily got my mind off of my impending death.
At the Guatemalan border we got out of the car to get our passports stamped. Funny thing is, there wasn’t anything to let you know you should get out of your car and do this. Had I been on my own I wouldn’t have known it was a border and would have kept driving through the little complex of buildings, there were no instructions and no signage. (We North Americans like our signage, but down here you just have to get over it.) There was, however, a dude giving us clear instructions that if we wanted to use the bathroom, we had to pay him a couple of Q. I gave him points for his entrepreneurial spirit, and reminded myself that it costs a lot more to pee in Europe. Then, in good Guatemalan fashion, we waited in a long slow-moving line. When it was my turn the guy looked at my passport and ran it through his machine, but it system was offline. He kept running it through the machine and said I’d have to wait until the machine came back online. At some point he got tired of waiting for the system to come back online and stamped me through.
Eventually we stopped for a supper break. Thank you sweet Jesus. My friend and I were feeling just a tad carsick from the Daytona 500 a la Central America, so we opted for a quiet soup, which happend to be the house specialty. Perfect. This would calm our stomachs and our nerves. When the soup arrived, it was pureed carrots with large orange shrimp hanging over the edge staring at us. I almost hurled just looking at it, and you know how I love seafood. There was an extra large one which looked more like a small lobster and my friend named big daddy. She kept saying, even if you can’t eat the soup, at least finish off big daddy.
The girls getaway was deemed a success because it combined the perfect combination of quintessential rejuvinating elements–an interesting and different location, sufficient shopping venues, great food quality and quantity, late night conversation, a few good-natured opportunities to make fun of the opposite sex, and sufficient time for reading shallow mindless magazines by a pool. To my two friends I want to say thank you for the most unique girl’s getaway I’ve ever experienced. Next time, Nicaragua??