Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

We got up early to get to the airport, anticipating random road delays. Sure enough, we saw a sign saying "damaged bridge" along the road from La Libertad. It turns out that by "damaged", they meant "completely destroyed". We had to detour along a causeway. But that only delayed us a few minutes, so we ended up being about an hour early at the airport.

Bahman somehow managed to get off of his plane before it had officially arrived. I'm still a bit confused about how that happened. Luckily Mona spotted him.

After some circuitous driving (lots of roads in San Salvador are one-way, street names frequently change, and among our two street maps and one GPS device, we can usually find only about half of the minor street names), we checked in to a hotel, had breakfast, and went sightseeing.

The first stop was the Museum of Popular Art, which has two exhibitions at the moment, one about miniature clay sculptures, and one about vernacular architecture. It was pretty neat, though I would have liked to see some of the other arts from their collection represented as well.

Next we went to a pretty botanical garden. It was a little tricky to find, both because of the mazelike layout of the city and because, while the store for the garden is obvious from the street, there's no way to get from the store to the garden without leaving the store and walking around the block, past several random businesses. It's fun to see things growing outdoors that I normally see inside the Conservatory of Flowers back home.

Finally, we went to the Anthropological Museum that turned out to be about 100 yards from the hotel that we stayed at the first night here. It's interesting to see how much a few crops have shaped this country (corn, coffee, and indigo, in particular).