Monday, February 3, 2014

Last night after Marcia went to bed, I came out to our balcony and watched some local boys play soccer on the beach. This hotel has big floodlights that light the beach in our hotel area for security, so they had lots of light to play.

I woke up early this morning about 6 AM and came out to our balcony again as it was just turning light.  There were several people already surfing on the ocean. What a beautiful view.

My 6 a.m. view

We can eat breakfast at the pool bar which is about a hundred steps away from our room. So this morning we ate breakfast there.  We had scrambled eggs and sausage and plantains.  (Every morning, every place we went served fried plantains.) We were very blessed to meet two other Americans at breakfast.  Actually there are very few people here right now.  We're just a little ahead of the season.  I think there are 20 rooms here, and from what I can tell only about 4 of them are being used.  So we met Jamie and Shane from L.A.  Shane is a surfer and Jamie loves the pool!  They've been coming here for several years and assured us that this is the greatest place to stay.  So far, we would have to agree.  We felt God really blessed us to have them here too.  We enjoyed talking to them about El Salvador and life in general.

Our breakfast was included and we could order off the menu

Marcia enjoying the pool

The pool bar

We floated in the pool for a while after breakfast and then took a walk along the beach to the town of El Tunco.

The beach we walked to town on.

A few rocks 

The town was very quiet because it turns out that the day after election day they still do not sell liquor.  This is a little town of bars and restaurants, so we had a quiet walk around the town.

When I read about El Salvador before coming, one thing I read was to not  carry a purse (so it wouldn't get snatched). So I only brought my neck wallet. But now I was carrying around my Spanish-English dictionary, a notebook, a cell phone, a camera, a Kindle, and my neck wallet. So I decided I needed to buy a bag.

We stopped at this little shop and I bought a bag and a hat for $5.  We also stopped and bought some minutes for the cell phone Omar had lent us.  It was helpful to have a phone he could reach us on.

Oh yeah, I forgot to say that there is no phone in our hotel room.  At first, this made me a little nervous because it's so different from an American hotel.  There were also no instructions anywhere on how to use the TV or who to call, etc.  But after a while, you begin to realize that you just walk out your door, and there is always at least one employee of the hotel there, even at night when someone is there for security.  You just ask for whatever you need.

We toured the town and then walked back along the beach. We bought some jewelry from some very good young salesman along the way.

A fisherman

Walking back from El Tunco

So pretty

View from the beach.  I think this was trying out my panoramic photo from my Iphone.

Another view from the beach

Then we had lunch at the pool bar, this time a hamburger, and then went to sit on our balcony and catch up on blogs, e-mails, reading about El Salvador, etc.  As you can see, it seems to be sleep, get up, eat, relax, repeat.

The pool bar is not open for supper, but there is a restaurant attached to the hotel, which from what I understand is staffed by some of the same folks that work at the hotel.  It is available for hotel guests to eat there.  So you walk through this gate and climb about 50 (?) stairs, basically back up to the street level to the restaurant.  It again is beautiful because you can see the sunset from there. All I got photos of was our food!

Perhaps you can see to the left of the plate the flatware is tightly wrapped.  This was true of every restaurant we went to!

From what I remember, we tried to watch some TV in Spanish and decided to go to bed instead.  We again slept great!