El Salvador
July 10th - 21st, 2009
The landscape of El Salvador is quite beautiful in many ways, but travelling to a developing country is always eye-opening for me. 
It is pretty amazing the slopes they can grow corn on (compared to the flat cornfields of South Dakota). A lot of the physical landscape but more so the cultural landscape is shaped by the country's recent history but a lot of that is not visible to someone like me who doesn't know the history very well. The food was good. It is interesting to me how we have the new hip notion in the USA to eat locally when in countries like El Salvador, most people have no choice but to eat locally. The use of space in the towns is also different - it is not at all uncommon to see chickens, cattle, and pigs roaming the streets utilizing the vegetation that is available. That stands in contrast to the US where the number 1 irrigated crop is not corn or wheat or soy, but rather Kentucky bluegrass (in the form of urban lawns) which gets watered so it stays green and grows, only to get mowed every two weeks so it does't grow too much.
Departing somewhat from my usual chronological narrative style, for these El Salvador pictures I've split off a few groups of pictures into seperate galleries. I figure those who are interested will go to the galleries and those who want the usual style will find it starting with the thumbnails below (with one or two example pictures from each extra gallery). There is a flower gallery with pretty flowers from Stephanie's garden and elsewhere. The town of La Palma has a bunch of really neat murals and I wanted to take pictures of each of them. The fast food is an experience in El Salvador, if only for its similarity to fast food in the USA. And finally, the power poles are often painted with the colors of political parties. I envisioned some sort of collage with the power pole pictures, but probably won't follow through with that idea, so thought I'd post them anyway.
Departing somewhat from my usual chronological narrative style, for these El Salvador pictures I've split off a few groups of pictures into seperate galleries. I figure those who are interested will go to the galleries and those who want the usual style will find it starting with the thumbnails below (with one or two example pictures from each extra gallery). There is a flower gallery with pretty flowers from Stephanie's garden and elsewhere. The town of La Palma has a bunch of really neat murals and I wanted to take pictures of each of them. The fast food is an experience in El Salvador, if only for its similarity to fast food in the USA. And finally, the power poles are often painted with the colors of political parties. I envisioned some sort of collage with the power pole pictures, but probably won't follow through with that idea, so thought I'd post them anyway.
