@ Mysth

Background : Family of 4, including 2 children under 10, coming to El Salvador for a 15 days holiday trip. Instead of telling our story to family and friends as we usually do, we’ll instead write a (very, very long) thread about it, so it’ll help organize our thoughts, and have place to discuss them.

It might also help you decide if you’d like to come and spend some time in El Salvador or not.

For clarity’s sake, I'll try to put a tag before each post with it's main theme

[QUICK BACKGROUND 👨‍👩‍👦‍👦] For additional background, we are currently living in what people usually call a First-World country in Europe, where basic human rights like free speech and individual liberty reign supreme... which is a bit odd to say in the light of recent news like mass censorship laws, civil unrest, arrest of @durov...

Our youngest child being finally old enough to travel long distance without causing trouble, we wanted to see something new (first time to central America), and also check if the turnaround since @nayibbukele was elected was real, and all the hype we read often about El Salvador was justified.

So we flew nearly a whole day hours (stops included) to have a look at it for ourselves.

[FIRST IMPRESSIONS] First thing we noticed out of the plane is the security. Not bullshit security like endless queues with body and luggage scanners (which we already went into several time before boarding the planes…), but useful security with armed guards patrolling with sniffer dogs. Reassuring.

Passing customs was also quick and easy, and the officers there were nice and patient despite our poor Spanish. You’ll get mugshotted and fully KYC’ed (what’s your business in El Salvador, where you’ll stay etc…), annoying but usual from customs screening foreigners coming into their country.

The airport was overall very clean, simple to navigate, and looked like any modern airport we’ve been to in Europe. There was also some construction being done around it, so it’s probably getting bigger soon.

Picking-up and dropping back our rental car was very smooth, better than what we are used to when going through the big rental companies, and at a lower cost. Shoutout to @bitdriver about that, whom was recommended to us by a friend. If you go to El Salvador, rent through this man, it’s easy and you support local entrepreneurs.

We left the airport (after having to present an ID to the parking guard, which is a recurring theme, as they even you to left an ID as deposit when you rent a lockbox in amusement park…) and headed to our rental flat located in a condo in El Escalon, a colonia (district) on the outskirts of San Salvador.

There, we were greeted by armed guards (also a recurring theme), who did a full ID/KYC check again about our business here… and then escorted to our flat by one of the guard.

It might be odd for me to point this out, but in Europe, basically only policemen (and not even in all countries), trained and licensed security personnel like bodyguards (very rare) or military are allowed to carry firearms in public.

[SAFETY 👮] So to get this out of the way regarding security : nearly anywhere we went (national parks, amusement parks, restaurants, malls, parking lots…) you’ll be greeted with armed guards wearing mostly revolvers and coach guns. The Salvadoran Police (PNC - Policía Nacional Civil) is also very present, especially in very touristic areas like the historical center of San Salvador or national parks. This dissipated right away any doubt we might have regarding our security in the country. Not once during our whole trip we felt insecure or even bothered about that, and we just forgot about it.

[MOVING AROUND/ROADS 🚗🛣️] During our 15 days, we travelled around 1.3k kilometers around the country, exclusively with our rental car. As I’ll mention several time in the thread, I’ll use Western Europe for reference, so all I say might seem funny for Southern, Middle and North Americans…

Driving in El Salvador is very different than in the EU. While most road rules are the same (then even measure speed and distance with Kilometers/hour, not Miles/hour…) people usually pick a lane and stick to it. You can pass cars left or right equally, people don’t care, while in the EU it’s illegal to pass someone to the right (unless in the UK, obviously…) and people will road rage at you if you do that.

Also, the road signs are much rarer, and you better use Waze or Google Maps to navigate (Apple Plans can’t even give you walking directions in El Salvador…).

The road from the Airport to San Salvador was very nice, smooth, and well lit with the Salvadoran flag colors (Blue/White/Blue) lit all along the way. Looks very cool and gives a welcoming feeling to foreigner (and I can imagine a prideful feeling for locals)… all that with just some leds.

It’s a bit different once you reach the city, were you’ll be greeted with your first Túmulo (basically very steep speed bumps located at the cities’ entrance and some residential/school areas) that you better not ignore if you value your car.

The roads were very smooth and well painted, but I was sometimes met with the biggest pot holes I’ve seen in my life. It’s a pity because 80% of the Salvadoran roads we travelled were in very good condition, about similar to what we have in the EU, but 20% is either unfinished (no asphalt) or poorly maintained (potholes of various size).

The Carretera Panamericana (Central American Highway, crossing El Salvador) is speed limited to 90 km/h is was nearly perfectly maintened. I think this situation (Speed Túmulos at the city entrances + some harsh roads) is what is leading Salvadorans to use mainly SUV’s/Pickups as their car of choice.

From what we've seen on the road, Salvadorans drive mostly Japanese and Korean SUVs and pickups (think like Nissan Rogue SUVs, called Nissan X-trails in the EU, or Mitsubishis L200/Toyota Hylux style pickups), and have a lot of tallers (garages) everywhere. We saw 40 year old cars that would have been sent to the scrap heaps 30 years ago in the EU still going here, and where a car with 100k km on the odometer is considered old and borderline scrap heap-able in the EU, here they are still looking good and working good. For reference, our rental had 200k KM on the odometer, and everything worked perfectly fine.

Weirdly enough, it seems pedestrians have no right of way in El Salvador. Even though there are plenty of crosswalks, even on the highway, we learned pretty fast that the custom here is to not stop to let pedestrians cross, and we saw several time people chilling on the median, waiting for the traffic to abate before crossing to the other side of the road. Total opposite of were we live, where any pedestrian waiting at a crosswalk (without traffic lights) has the right of way.

Lastly, while I mentioned before the official distance and speed unit is based on the kilometer, the gas is always priced in $/gallon (1 liter of super premium is about $1.11, while in the EU it’s usually between €1.80 to €2.20), but the drinks/food are sometime sold in oz/lbs, and sometimes in liter/gram. Odd but manageable.

[TRAFFIC/PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION 🚌🚥] As with all big cities we’ve been to, traffic is really bad in and around San Salvador. Better be patient and do not get lost because it could add tons of time to your trips due to traffic.

We didn’t use buses because we had our car, but there are plenty of Salvadoran public buses going from anywhere to everywhere, for apparently not even $1 per ride. 80% of the buses we’ve seen are literally old repurposed American school buses, that are painted and tuned by locals. You can see buses with flashing leds, custom rims, custom spring where the front axle is lifted twice as high as the back one, shark-tails spoilers, and graffiti-style city names. They basically pick you up and drop you anywhere you like.

It’s a bit of the same with trucking : a lot of “old” big rigs from the US are used here to transport freight and construction material. I’ve also seen some of the best customised trucks with led designs, custom rims and paint here. Same goes for car tuning : a lot of Salvadoran apparently like to customise their car, even with stuff that should be illegal in the EU (flashing, coloued headlights, big exhaust, custom rims with protruding spikes…) We didn’t see many luxury cars, besides a few US luxury pickups and huge SUVs. Nearly 0 German cars, overall way less than 1% of the cars we crossed on the road. A handful of BMWs, 3 Porsches, 2 Mercedes. And 0 Tesla, nor EVs in general, except maybe an electric DHL Van and a hybrid or two cars (and we’re not even sure about these being fully electrical or even hybrid). It’s a big contrast since EVs (especially Teslas) are now everywhere in the big European cities. We didn’t see any EV charging point anywhere, too. As we mentioned before, keeping older car road worthy is big here, and with gas at around $1 per liter, I can understand why there’s zero EV in El Salvador (yet).

We also saw plenty of locals using small trucks as buses (where 15+ people are standing up next to each other on an open-ended truck), big dump-trucks where 5+ people were chilling on the dirt, and kids and teens sitting in the back of pickup trucks… Again, this might seem normal here, and I’m not judging if it’s good or bad (people are free to travel however they like as long as they do not endanger other road users if you ask me), but coming from Europe, you’d get arrested and fined within 10 minutes of travelling like this.

I’ve also come across old railways track, and the only time I heard about trains in El Salvador was from a tour guide than explained to us that people tried to flee from a small village near San Salvador by train during the last San Salvador Volcano Eruption in 1917… but the train tracks were cut off by a lava trail. So I’ve looked it up and indeed there are no more railways operating in El Salvador since 2002 (due to no rentability and damage from the civil war, and reset plans were unsuccessful so far). Apparently there are new big plans to rebuild a new railway called the Pacific Train. If successful, that would be a very good development to alleviate traffic and allow people to travel the country more quickly, but we’ll have to wait and see how it goes.

[SAN SALVADOR HISTORICAL CENTER ⛪️] We visited the historical center of San Salvador, where ultra modern edifices like the BINAES (Biblioteca Nacional de El Salvador) are standing across older gems like the Palacio Nacional (built in the late 1800’s, destroyed by fire, rebuild in the early 1900’s (you can have a look at the older foundations during your tour)) which is still hosting speeches from @nayib according to our tour guide and the Catedral Metropolitana de San Salvador, a beautiful cathedral facing the BINAES.

Speaking of the BINAES, it is a library open 24/7 which is as much an amusement park for babies, kids, teens and adults (think playgrounds, video games, themed areas about Star Wars, Harry Potter and LOTR) than a library for readers and learners (plenty of brand new books and reading areas). I wish we had something like this at home because you have to spend some time there to see how cool it is, whatever your age and your book taste are.

Next to these very touristic areas, you also have local markets and shops, where you can get a haircut for $2.5, and buy anything (food, clothes, and all kind of stuff) for a few dollars or even cents.

The contrast is very strong between the local areas and the tourist areas ; you can see very clean and modern streets, parks, fountains, on par or better than what you’ll see in Europe, and one block away you are back 30 years in the past, with people having stands on the street flea-market style, street vendors waving at you to sell you stuff (can’t hide you’re a tourist here), and overall a very organized-chaos feeling there. Even in these areas, we were never bothered by Salvadorans.

[RURAL CITIES 🏘️] We went to visit a few typical Salvadoran cities in the back country, notably a few on the route of flowers (even though there are no flowers here during the winter) : Nahuizalco, Apaneca, Concepción de Atacó… They have in common to have usually busy marketplaces around the city center, nice parks to chill for a bit with kids playground, often some very nice hand-painted murals, and always some churches/cathedrals that are very well tended to. The life of these cities look to be organised around the town center, as there are plenty of vendors, shops and place to eat in this area. We also went to visit Suchitoto, where you can spend the day as there are many things to do, places and museums to visit. One of the most intriguing part of this city was that it was full of little car looking like golf carts. After doing a bit of research, apparently these are Indian-made and called Bajaj Cute. The city's roads and roads to the lake were even arranged with narrow bands of concrete as large as these cars' size to help them navigate the cobblestone roads and steep roads in the area.

And of course, there are also plenty of natural wonders around these cities to discover.

[VOLCANOES/RUINS/BEACHES/PARKS 🌋🏖️🏞️] We also visited as many of the natural and archeological wonders as we could, such as the San Salvador volcano, with its stunning views over San Salvador city and the craters… yes, there is a crater (El Boqueroncito) inside a crater ! (El Boquerón). We also spotted the Torogoz here, which is the official animal of El Salvador and which has a very cool backstory told by our guide.

We also saw very well preserved Mayan Ruins (El Tazumal), and stunning beaches (El Zonte, aka Bitcoin Beach, awesome surf spot, where we met mostly foreigners) and San Diego Beach, which looked like and endless tropical sand beach where we met about as many people enjoying the beach than lifeguards (actually one “official“ life guard, and a local guy patrolling the beach on a donkey, both warned us about the tide and currents, which as very appreciable especially with young kids). Looks aside, the big difference with Europe regarding beaches is the fact that houses and ranchs are built very close to the shoreline basically everywhere we went. It might be nice if you live there, or are willing to rent a ranch for the day where you can enjoy a swimming-pool, hammocks, and fresh drink and food along with having the beach a few meters away, but we thought it took away from the natural charm of these areas. There were dozen of other recommended beaches we didn’t went to, so it might be different elsewhere.

Everywhere we went to visit or have a tour, we were met by local licensed guides that offered to walk us around the places while telling us the sorties and anecdotes about them. Most of the guides could speak English, all of them were ultra nice and patient with our kids and our broken Spanish, and it’s free. But if you have manners, you leave them a nice tip after the tour. This was a very appreciable. The only paid visits were for historical monuments, but there you always have a guide with you, usually English speaking (that you can also tip since they are very nice and knowledgeable about their heritage) This and the previous paragraph are amongst the shortest we'll write about, not for their importance since the views are stunning and the places to visit are beautiful, but because speaking about these experiences don’t do them justice, and are best lived and seen rather than read and looked at.

[KIDS ACTIVITIES 👦👧🛝] Now my kids have been bothering me for a while about mentioning amusement parks.

As mentioned above, even though we visited a volcano and an old Mayan temple, there were several more volcanoes on our list (Santa Ana, Izalco…) and ruins (Joya de Ceren, Cihualtan…) than we could have visited… but kids have a very short patience gauge that you have to regularly refill with trips to local parks. We visited about 10 of them, and I’d say 2/3 were very well tended, with playgrounds areas for kids, and 1/3 were not as well tended as the rest, with muds and puddles … still praticable but not ideal if you want to keep your car clean.

But what our kids liked the most was their trip to a water park called Termos Del Rio, where we spent the day watching them playing with water games and slides. We ate there, and the food was very good for a fraction for half the price of what we paid in Europe. Our only regret is that our oldest child wasn’t tall enough to do the “big” slides, and that only half of them were open for us. Compared to Europe, I’d say it’s about 75% cheaper for entry + food, people there are way more polite and disciplined (keeping in mind it’s an amusement park, so rowdy teenager are expected and tolerated, but people were never agressive or impolite as you can see in some amusement parks in Europe).

We also went to a few other amusement parks, and they were nice and well maintained, with generally a lower price than what is charged in the EU for equivalent activities (but still a bit pricey compared to the rest of the activities we did in El Salvador).

[SHOPPING / GROCERIES🛍️🛒] We also visited the MultiPlaza mall in Santa Tecla. It’s a very modern mall, again on par on better than what is done in Europe. You have plenty of shopping options for everyone and in all price range, except the very high end luxury (think french luxury brands) that we did not see but that are usually present in such malls in Europe. They might be someplace else in El Salvador, but we didn’t cross any during our trip.

Again, you can eat and drink very well for half, even a third of the price of what you’d pay for similar quality in Europe, but more on food later because it’s far from perfect. Non-food items and activity are about the same price than in the EU.

We had the surprise to come across a Chuck E Cheese, which do not exist in the EU (it’s like a huge arcade area where you buy credits or time, and play games for fun and for points, which you can redeem for small prizes)… so of course we had to bring our kids there.

It was a close second to Termos del Rio for them, probably because we spent less time in there while we spend a full day at the water park, because spending time playing in Chuck E Cheese is much pricier than local amusement parks…

For our groceries, we mostly bought them in 2 big chunks (one for each week) from the local supermarket that was closest to us, (SuperSelectos). You can buy anything that you can usually buy in any EU supermarket, with the standard travel quirks of local products being cheap and available, and imports (especially from outside America) being scarce and expensive.

[FOOD 🍔🥤🚫 / 🥩🥛✅] Which bring us to our first issue (not a deal breaker, but could become major if not checked) drawback regarding El Salvador : Fast-food chains prominence.

You can feel the US influence regarding food in El Salvador in General, and in San Salvador particularly : there are huge advertisement billboards everywhere, and I’d say half of them are about fast-food chains. (such huge billboards and dense billboards are not common in Europe)

There are fast-food chains everywhere, A LOT of them. It’s very different than Europe because while fast-food chains are also present in the EU, the ads are much less visible and they are competing with a lot more traditional restaurants.

But in San Salvador and other big cities, your default option when eating out is going to a fast-food. This is clearly not good because eating that food regularly is very bad for your health, which is visible on the population. We saw a lot of overweight people, including kids (not US Overweight, aka obese), but our rough estimate was that 40% of the people we came across were visibly overweight.

This is not aided by the drinks selection, were sodas are pushed into your throat at every corner, and sparkling water is not very easy to find, usually "hidden" in the Soda section in supermarkets… The mineral water and Sparkling water is usually 1/4 of the size of what it is in the EU, where you have big aisle usually dedicated to that. The south American drinks (agua de Jamaica, horchata…) while sugary, are nice refresher and taste very good when homemade with little sugar.

It’s a real shame because the Salvadoran food tastes awesome and is way healthier than fast-food. Everywhere we went to eat, we were able to order very healthy and perfectly cooked foods (mostly parilladas composed meat, seafood and vegetables) in any of the local restaurants.

We also obviously ate Pupusas, the local salvadoran dish, and they are indeed very good and cheap, and still a vastly superior option over fast-food.

This food selection is not an El Salvador only problem (most “first world countries” suffer from it, too), but I think @nayibbukele should look into this issue because if left unchecked, it’s only get worse the more affluent El Salvador will become (like in the US), and this is a real plague on a country population's general well being. Not my place to tell him or Salvadoran what to do, but with such great local options, it's a shame this kind of healthy food isn't promoted more heavily over imported poison.

[BEERS/COFFEE 🍻☕️] I tried local beers brewed in El Salvador like the Pilsener and the Regia, both blonde beers with the Regia being a bit stronger and the Pilsener a bit softer, which I liked more.

I’m a Guinness Guy, and you won’t mistake these beers for the well known European beers, but they were a completely acceptable replacement for a holiday refresher, especially in this weather, and you could easily develop a taste for it.

We bought and tried Salvadoran coffee, both from the local markets and the supermarket. The Salvadoran coffee is very good, and produced locally. We planned to visit a local coffee factory, but we didn’t have the time, so that’ll be for another time. We brought back a few packs for our families and friends, along with other souvenirs.

While I said the Salvadoran coffee was very good, the main "issue" we encountered is that unlike Europe, where the standard coffee is the Espresso (short coffee, usually sort of strong), most places we went to usually served only American-style coffee (rather long and filled with water). Sometimes we could barter with the waiters and get a “sort-of espresso”, but sometimes we had to drink American-style coffee because their machines somehow couldn't manage to make espressos...

[WEATHER 🌤️] We were warned about intense rain and bad weather, since this time of the year is considered “Winter” in El Salvador.

We basically never had rain during the day. It was often lightly overcast, and we got a couple of showers maybe thrice. While we bought waterproof ponchos before leaving, they never left our backpack. It usually rained late in the day (from 7 pm and at night), but since we never were out too late, this wasn’t a problem at all.

Also, the sewer system seems to work perfectly fine, since everywhere we went, there was no smell, not we never met any overflowing sewage pipes.

We also were warned about mosquitoes, because there was (maybe still is) a Dengue surge in the country. We didn’t see many mosquitoes, except in the less well maintained parks, and since we used repellant sprays, we had no bites during our stay. It’s probably a bigger issue outside the cities though, as they were ads warning about that in the streets.

But overall, what is “Winter” here is a much nicer climate than any kind of summer in Northern Europe, and on par with the Southern Europe summers, with just more nightly rains.

[CLEANLINESS 🗑️] I won’t beat around the bush : with fixing the fast-food diet, I think this will have to be one of the biggest issue to tackle in the future for El Salvador. As beautiful as all the places we visited could be, there was trash and rubbish basically everywhere along the way : on the roads, on the side of the roads, on the highway, in the lakes and rivers, in the cities and outside.

I wish it was an exaggeration but this is really everywhere except the very modern areas inside San Salvador and Santa Tecla (a very rich looking region/suburb next to San Salvador). Like the chicken and egg paradox, the surroundings here are so littered with trash that I can for some extent understand why people throw rubbish away anywhere : “What? There’s already tons of trash on the floor, another bottle or another paper thrown in there won’t change anything.”

Again, it’s not my place to give advice to anybody on how to fix their issues, but I firmly believe there will need to be a huge cleanup of the country needed (psychology tells you it’s much harder for people to throw the 1st piece of trash on the floor than the 100000th), along with some form of general education first + punishment second if the general behavior doesn’t improve. Also, things like open-air bins like I saw in some parts of San Salvador don’t help ; western-style closed trash bins are much better for general hygiene, and much less subject to elements scattering your trash around.

On the bright-side, unlike some famous city which recently hosted the Olympic Games, I didn’t see any rodent milling around anywhere. Doesn’t mean there are none, just that I didn’t see any. Also, no smell and the sewers system seem to work very well as we mentioned previously.

[No pictures of trash for obvious reasons.]

[NATURE/CITIES 🌴🏡] El Salvador is a very lush and green country. There are trees and plants everywhere, even in the city Centers with plenty of parks and median planted with trees. With the country growing (and urbanizing) at the speed it currently is, I really hope El Salvador will stay green and embracing nature, as it helps a lot with dissipating heat in the cities, and finding nice, quiet and natural places to take mindful breaks during the day.

Their rural cities are also built very flat, where living is usually done in small neighboring houses rather than tall buildings, which is a welcome sight coming from Europe.

San Salvador is built a bit more like a “modern” cities, with taller buildings, but from what on of our guide told us, there are no skyscrapers due to the potential volcano eruptions and seismic activity (bigger tower is apparently around 30 floors max). There is basically one earthquake every other day in, or around San Salvador, but we only felt one of them as most happened either too far from were we stayed or too weak to be felt.

There were Japan-style "evacuation meeting points" outside of several places we went to. And if anything is to be learnt from Japan, living in a very seismic area in nothing that can’t be fixed by good engineering.

[LOS SALVADOREÑOS] The biggest of the many highlights of our trip was meeting the Salvadoran people, called Los Salvadoreños. I would describe Salvadorans as humble, polite, friendly, warm, patient and helpful people. Anywhere we went, not once were we greeted by annoyed/bored people while we spoke broken Spanish and had two young kids with us. Whether or not it was for a commercial transaction, we were treated equally nicely by any of the people we met there. If you travel a lot in the EU and do not stick to high-end places (and weirdly enough, low-end places), you’ll discover that being nice and helpful isn’t always the norm here.

All guides were very cultivated and proud about their Salvadoran heritage, and all workers professional and efficient. As mentioned before, even when wandering in the very local areas of San Salvador, where you barely see any tourists (if at all), we were never bothered or felt threatened. I understand this changed a lot since @nayibbukele put gangs in jail, but this is still a very welcome feeling, because you cannot say the same of some districts inside cities we call “civilized” in Europe. The only thing is that next time we’ll come back, we’ll have learnt a lot more Spanish, which is a must here since I’d say maybe 20% of the people we met could speak English.

It’s also worth nothing that during our trip, I’ve spoken with 3 Salvadorans whom have left the country for the USA (2) and Canada (1), all between 20 and 30 years ago. Two of them were coming back in El Salvador for the first time since a while. One person was coming back with his 4 teenage children, and it was the children’s first time in El Salvador. All of 3 of these Salvadoran told me the same thing : they didn’t recognize the country they remembered when they left, as it had drastically changed for the better.

[WHERE IS EL SALVADOR AND WHERE IT MIGHT HEADED 🇸🇻✨] Take it with a pinch or a handful of salt, since this is written by a tourist whom stayed a grand total of 15 days in the country, but what I feel regarding “El Salvador the country” is that this is a country which elected a visionary leader, whom is trying to propel his El Salvador at a level of quality of life on par, and maybe better than what is done in what we “First-Worlders” call a “developed country”.

This shows by his very strict policies regarding violence, which are often denounced in first-world countries, but these policies brought his country from one known as one of the most violent in the world, that from Europe we only heard horror stories about, from the one in which we felt the safest we’ve ever been.

This shows in the speed at which the country is building at : I’ve spoken about bad traffic before, but I also need to mention I’ve seen a lot of workers and heavy duty equipment working to enlarge the roads going in and out of San Salvador. And when I say “a lot”, I mean that I’ve seen more workers doing actual work on the roads in a single one-hour road trip than what I usually see in Europe over the course of a full month.

This also shows by the contrast between the standard of living in San Salvador, where in some areas you can have towering condos with 24/7 armed security, 24/7 concierge, aircons, big elevators, backup electricity generators, and all the modern appliances and amenities you can usually find in the “First-World”, and just one block away you’ll find typical one-floor, Salvadoran houses with no aircons, barred windows with barbed-wire of the roofs.

Lastly, I’ve felt being in a country heading to somewhere better, with its people working hard to create a better tomorrow by improving their country.

From what I’ve seen, if they are able to bring all their people up together (not just the city dwellers/white collar class), and manage to avoid the usual traps of fast growing economies (things get so good so fast that officials start to get corrupt by rich investors/companies, and put their personal interests over the people's…) my bet is that in 20 years maximum they should reach a standard of quality of life on par, or even better than what exists in the most developed EU countries.

We’ll surely come back before that time to see how it goes, and discover more of this intriguing country, so we might give you an update or two along the way.

[CLOSING REMARKS 📙] : As mentioned in the intro, we're just a random family of 4 who've just been travelling 15 days to El Salvador in August 2024, and are sharing our thoughts about the trip, citizen journalism style, and so we don’t have to repeat ourselves too much to family and friends. If any Salvadoreños are reading this and want to add context/correct stuff I didn’t understand or got wrong, all comments and critic are welcome ! If this thread was helpful to you, and want more info regarding anything mentioned here, good and bad, feel free to ask in the replies and we’ll try to answer to the best of our abilities.

(I do not know if this might be worth mentioning, but better be safe than sorry : we did not receive nor ask for any money, favors or gifts from whoever was mentioned (or not) in the thread. All our expenses were 100% covered by ourselves. We remain purposely vague about ourselves because we value our privacy, but we would be called a standard family living in the EU by anyone knowing us.)

TL:DR : Ask your favorite AI assistant to sum it up for you.