El Salvador, Day 6 – La Libertad and Playa El Tunco

Lucy booked us a trip to the coast cities of La Libertad and Playa El Tunco for yesterday (Sat.) – my first time outside San Salvador.  So here’s a little tour of those areas.

1 – La Libertad (“Freedom”) is a fishing community.  Sorry I can’t convey the smell along with the sights, but here’s the main pier with all the boats lined up after returning with their fish.

We saw some unusual sealife-for-food here.  This is a stingray, but we also saw eel esophagus’ hanging in the tent-market.

The actual market part is the entrance end of the dock and has booth after booth of fish and seafood for sale.

2 – The Roca Sunzal resort on the beach at Playa El Tunco (Pig Beach … they think the rock out in the water looks like one – we didn’t see it):

3 – The highlight of Lucy’s day – we saw a gang member in real live person (she never had before).  It’s pretty common for the gangs to tattoo their heads and faces as well as their chests, arms and backs with their affiliations.  It’s a way to weed out the “wannabe”s (who are not committed enough to mar their faces) - and it makes it perfectly apparent where your allegiance lies.  Oh, and it makes you scarier looking.  This fellow is from NH13, which I thoroughly Google-stalked upon arriving back at the house in order to satisfy Lucy that he was in fact “real.”  It’s a gang in Santa Clarita, California, named for one of the streets (Newhall).  The fact that he was with us at Playa El Tunco means he probably got deported.  (See how much a tattoo tells you?  And no, we didn’t go up and talk to him because we knew our hubbies wouldn’t love that.)

4- … back in San Salvador – Cathedral of Guadeloupe

5 – Sometimes you get held up in traffic because of a spontaneous parade.  We asked one of the guys we know here, and he thought it was a bar-run beauty pageant … and the winner is on the float in the second picture.  But of course no pageant celebration would be complete without tall weird-looking stilts-walkers!

And we ended our day with a dinner out with the Ackermann family who have been missionaries working with orphans, ex-gang members, and whatever other area of need they’ve found for the past 6 years.  Kurt’s been driving me around all week and is the one who set me up with my placements.  His wife Susan and his kids, son-in-law and granddaughter came, too!  Just as we were finishing up, there were fireworks outside the windows… for no particular reason.  That’s just something they do in San Salvador (they’re doing them right outside my window in the street again tonight as I write!).