Where are my shoes? El Salvador edition…

Remember when I said it all started to go wrong my last morning in Antigua? Well I didn’t realize it until I woke up in Metapan, El Salvador the following morning. Preparing for an ice cold shower, I went to my bag to find my havainanas and found that I had not packed them.

In contrast to Japan, where any individual would have done anything short of murdering a delivery driver and stealing the delivery truck to drive across the country to return an item, I’m rather certain that the innkeep, still somewhat miffed at being caught lying and trying to cheat me out of money, quite rapidly threw them in the trash can.

Following yesterday’s robbery and intensely expensive taxi raping, this is really the icing on a towering turd cake. Putting my pack down, I just go back to bed. Brilliantly, the overly vocal dogs decide this is a terrible idea and summon the chicken army to roust me from anything that may have turned into slumber.

I stayed up late last night after drinking a cup of coffee and watched some movies on the ipod, which doesn’t help my sleeping matter any. Rolling out of bed again, I fish a clean shirt out of my pack and slip some socks n shoes on before heading out into the courtyard. Next step, find a café and get some breakfast and coffee.

The grandmother of the house starts talking to me and I catch about every third word of the barrage. Apparently she has some coffee. Sounds like a plan. I hope there is less dirt in it than the cup I had last night.

Nope. There is, however, a heaping plate of fresh eggs intended as an apology from the chickens for their behavior. Apology accepted, just don’t do it again. Unless you plan on following it up with more fresh eggs!

Grandmother and I chill out, exchanging some broken Spanish and we decide to roll out for the post office to go kick off a package and some postcards. She makes good time and plenty of conversation. We swing by one of the local’s places so grandmother can give a high five to one of her elderly peeps. They have a great laugh, though I have no idea what about, and we continue on our quest for the mail.

The post office is pretty empty at this point with only one person in line and that person is promptly finished and is on her way out. Next comes the fun part. Grandmother lets me do my own talking, which is cool and works out pretty well. Soon, I have stamps on the postcards and am writing on a box. That’s about where the cool ends.

Grandmother gives me a few words, which I think mean, “Cool out. I’m gonna roll out to see my homies and I’ll be back to get down wit’ cho ass in a few, Player.”

What it actually meant was something like, “Foo, I gots betta stuff to do than sit around and watch you make an ass out of yourself with a mailman, foreigner. Are you still considered retarded even in your own country?”

Next comes the fun part, filling out the paperwork for international packages. The mailman points at the To and From sections on the box and I fill them in. By the time I am finished with the box, he turns, looks at me, looks at the box, and bids me to continue with the second box. When I finish with that one, he looks at me like I am crazy, then makes me go back and fix the ‘from’ address because it is not a local address. So, I just pull what I assume will look like a local address to him out of my head and he is cool with it.

This sort of thing continues many more times with each piece of paper. He tells me what to write, I confirm that I understood him, he confirms, then after he watches me write it a couple times, he tells me I did it wrong and we do it all over again.

Lesson learned: ask at least three times with increasingly large or detailed sign language, receiving the same answer every time, before you proceed.

After what seems like an hour with still no sign of Grandmother, we get to the fun part: The Money. Post office workers are ok by me. One of my friends is a mailman. I think they get a bad rap because a few of them came to work with guns and had a bad day. However, there are exceptions.

By the time the postal worker is done with the maths I am about to strangle him. I require almost $5 USD in change. He hands me 55 cents and says have a good day. When I ask him to do the math again, he comes up with all new maths. Soon he is creating numbers, charging me for imaginary items, and explaining that he is so totally right. It isn’t until I take out pen and paper, write it all down in order and hold it up to his face that he finally materializes the missing money.

Honestly, do I have a huge sign on my face that says, RIP ME OFF? The border crossing bandits, I can expect it from, but government employees? Well, maybe I should have expected that even more.

Still no Grandmother. By this point, I assume she has gone off to somewhere cooler than the post office, and I go on my way.

Downtown Metapan looks almost exactly like every other town I have seen these last few weeks. Narrow roads, deadly sidewalks, people selling all manner of godless items and a thousand tiny shops that don’t provide any service or sell any item that you would actually want sandwiched around the one shop that you are actually looking for.

We have a million pairs of weird shoes, though no good sandals in my size, dead fish in baskets and no ice, a mobile phone repair guy on a towel on the sidewalk with a boy who entertains you with a Jesus and Mary pictograph slideshow while you wait, among others.

I need to fix a seam in my shorts and would like to get the water out of my watch from Semuk Champey. Unfortunately, I don’t know the word for tailor or seamstress in Spanish and folks in El Salvador speak even faster than folks in Guatemala and have less inclination toward humoring a hapless Anglo traveler. After a few good misadventures, I land myself in an internet café long enough to look up the words for tailor and seamstress and realize that this particular internet café doubles as the largest mosquito breeding ground I have seen yet; more than rivers, streams, or lakes. It is startling and I get the hell out of there.

Armed with new words in my arsenal, I head bravely out into the market to take on the world. Over the next hour I get a myriad of responses. Listed below:

1. Left, then right, and it will be on your left hand side.
2. There are none is the market, but my sister on the edge of town will do it.
3. 4 blocks down.
4. There are none in town.
5. Yes, right next door.

The final answer came courtesy of a watch repairman after I handed him my watch to clean up. On my way into the store, “What are you looking for?” blasts me in the face. After a long couple days of no English, you’ll understand why I jumped backwards .

After I got over the initial shock and said Hi back, I realized that the watchman was absolutely correct, there was a sewing machine inside… and a rather large cache of fireworks. Luis, the El Salvadoran who learned English in New York, is here for the fireworks. Apparently, his grandmother is 86 and he plans to invite all their friends and neighbors over to the house at 4 a.m. on his grandmothers birthday and LIGHT OFF AN ASSLOAD OF FIREWORKS WHILE SCREAMING AT HER!!! Wouldn’t we call this “homicide” in the USA?

I was waiting for an invite from him, mostly because I’ve never seen someone die of shock before, but it never comes. My shorts are fixed in no time for $1, and I have to wait a  bit to get my watch back. There is an internet café across the street and I figure I can chill out for a few.

No dice. The place is film noir dark but there is a door in the back that leads into a courtyard that looks a lot like the one at Grandmothers place minus the chickens. With no open computers and no sign of coffee or water, I turn around to leave when a face fills my vision, “What You Want!?”

Heart attack #2 for the day.

The face is early 20’s,  pale for the common El Salvadoran, wearing trendy glasses which are rare around here, has a mouth full of braces, and is connected to a not fat body with a blaring yellow t-shirt that doesn’t disguise her large breasts are packed into a bra that is a size too small.

“Coffee?”

She answers in the negative, but asks me if I know Ban Ban. Obviously, I don’t so she walks me a couple blocks over to a deli-like building with air conditioning and a security guard. It’s a great place and I pull up a seat next to the window to await my coffee, water, and pan chocolat! I am so excited that they actually have pan chocolat that I don’t bother fact checking until he rolls up with a big slice of chocolate cake.

Doh.

Regardless, I get caught up on some writing and chill out for a couple hours. My watch is returned to me with warnings that if I get any water on it the watch will fog up again like it did before. Fine fine fine.

One thing I may have neglected to mention, Breastfeeding is a national sport in El Salvador. I don’t mean that it happens occasionally, I mean that in one morning I have seen no less than a dozen bare breasted women  doing everything from catching taxi cabs, to shopping, to just walking or talking to friends. Just because baby hungry is no reason to sit down or cover up, you just pop out a titty and put the hose to that fire.

Wandering back to the house around 2 p.m. I figure granddaughter will get out of school in an hour or so and I’ll have someone to talk to after I chill out for a while.

She is already home. Yesterday, she had promised to take me to an internet café so I could shoot some emails off and as I walk in the door, she asks me if I am ready to leave. She grants me a 10 minute recess before we take off for, surprise, surprise, the mosquito breeding grounds internet café.

An interesting thing happens here, granddaughter speaks the first English I have heard her speak. “I’ll be back.” I give her a high five and say I’ll wait. In the meantime my battery runs out on the laptop, so I go outside and take a picture of a very strange tree and write in my notebook a bit.

Granddaughter comes back in a few pages and shows me the football stadium and one of the worst smelling alleyways I have ever been exposed to. All in a day’s work, I suppose. It is during this walk that I truly realize that I am adequate at Spanish for doing some things, primarily point of sale transactions and getting food, but I really can’t hold down my end of a conversation. As opposed to Japan, where many people wanted to help teach me the words and help me learn their language even if they didn’t want to learn English, Central Americans really do not seem to care.

Maybe tonight I’ll find out where the bus terminal is and get a bus schedule for heading to Honduras tomorrow to see Arai. I think El Salvador just started out on the wrong foot and I am just not up to turning it around.

Walking out of my room after typing this, the dogs immediately begin their barking, but now they charge, the one I was petting earlier stops short barking at me, the other one comes full bore and takes a chunk out of me knee with his teeth and catches my fist in his eye before running away yelping. The family is, for lack of a better word, unconcerned. Yeah, I’d say that just about spells out, Time To Leave. Not that I didn’t meet some colorful people here.

Luckily, Copan in Honduras isn’t far away and San Pedro Sula isn’t far from there. I could be to either within a day. I’ll try to head out and do that in the morning. For tonight, some comfort food: Pupusas!