Day 3: Juayua back to San Salvador

     Today we woke up early, packed up the rest of our things, ate some of our sausage-rice for breakfast and then headed down to the bus stop. Walking down there, we saw what I thought was an incredible statue of a man chiseling himself out of rock (picture below). We were heading back to San Salvador to hopefully book our tickets to Guatemala City for tomorrow. But the Tica bus website said they were closed, so we weren’t sure if it would work out. But, worst case scenario, we would spend one extra day in San Salvador. So we hopped on the bus to Sonsonate and crossed our fingers the Tica office would be open.

     When we arrived at the bus terminal in Sonsonate we saw a sign that said 205 SAN SALVADOR. We figured that was where we needed to be so we sat down on a curb and waited. After about twenty minutes with no bus 205, we wondered if we were really in the right spot. Austin walked over to a young woman sitting on a bench near us to find out. As it turns out, behind us across a parking lot and across a street was a separate terminal just for the 205 bus to San Salvador. So we headed over there and waited for a good looking bus. We found an especial and jumped on. My plan was to sleep on the bus but they started playing a movie (and we had great seats for it) and even though it was in Spanish, it drew both of us in. So I’ll definitely need to look up that movie in English and watch it sometime. Well, eventually our bus pulled into the terminal in San Salvador. We knew that we needed to get a taxi and get to the Tika bus station, but we didn’t know how to get a taxi without a phone. Thankfully, we saw a few parked across the street. So we started walking over there. We got into a taxi with the first man who asked us if we needed one. It was definitely the dingiest taxi I’ve been in yet but he took us to the terminal no problem and we paid the price that we agreed on beforehand. We decided to just try the door to the Tica Bus office in the hopes that maybe it was open. And it was! We went in and talked to a man at the counter and reserved our seats for the bus the next day. Leaving San Salvador at 5 and arriving in Guatemala City at 2. We then walked upstairs to see if the hotel had any rooms left. They did. It was a little more than we wanted to pay, but we decided it was worth it to be right at the station and if you consider the cost of taxi rides, we weren’t really paying anything extra. Plus, the room had air conditioning.

     We still had a little bit of sunlight so we decided to walk around El Salvador. We knew we weren’t in a bad part of it and we asked a security guard how to get to the Art Museum. He directed us but we didn’t see it. However we happened to stumble upon the Anthropological Museum. Having already seen the Art Museum, this was an even better find. We went in and looked all through it until closing time. It was very interesting. There was so much information all about the history of El Salvador starting way back with the Mayans and Aztecs. Also each sign was written in both English and Spanish so we were really able to enjoy the museum fully. (And enjoy some of the worse translations). We were still walking and when a guard politely informed us that the museum was closed. We had no idea. So we left and thought about what we were going to do for food on the bus the next day. Our hotel was right next to a few fast food places so we eventually decided to grab a couple overpriced Wendy’s hamburgers and just be done with it. It was starting to get dark anyway.

     The Wendy’s was weird, as most of the American restaurants are in El Salvador. It had a foosball table and a playland. They were also playing American hip-hop dance music. It looked much more like a sit-down restaurant than other Wendy’s and that’s how the customers seemed to be using it. We got our food and went back to our hotel, packed our bags, and tried to get to bed early.