News from my son in El Salvador...

Spencer's Dad asks: Send me some pictures for my blog to show folks...

Spencer says:

Um, sure, I guess. If you want to. Are you sure that I'm not the only person that reads your blog...? hahaha...The war museum is more than just weapons. It has a lot of pictures of both sides of the war. Our tour guide was an ex-guerrilla and he gave us detailed descriptions of the equipment, too. It was strange to see the wreckage of the Monterrosa's helicopter and 5 minutes later to seethe transmitter that set off the bomb in the helicopter.

Sure, here are a few pics:

The first pic is from that march I went to in Sansuntepeque against the Canadian mining company.

The second is from Perquin, which is up in the mountains. They have a really famous war museum that shows a lot of the weapons. They also have the destroyed bodies of the helicopters that blew up the Commander responsible for the Massacre at El Mozote (in which about 1000 people were killed...). Powerful place.

The third is from Santa Ana, which is the second biggest city in San Salvador. The town is pretty calm compared to other big cities (I think it only has about 300,000 people), but they have a huge gothic cathedral. If you look closely, they had colored flags on strings leading up to the cathedral.

The fourth is from Lago de Coatepeque. I was driving back from Santa Ana with my friends Phil and Pierre. Pierre was driving and saw a sign that said "Lago de Coatepeque" and decided that we should go. So we ended up on this dirt road bouncing around in the trees, wondering if we’d ever get to the lake or if it was going to start raining first. And then the trees opened up and we got there right in time. The picture doesn’t quite do it justice, but it was a good moment. And the last one is from the National University about 5 minutes walk from where I'm staying. They have all of these murals on the entrance, which detail things from massacres to revolutionary leaders to sprawling "hombres de maiz" paintings. Hope those send out and look okay. The Internet is really slow today, and I had a hard time shrinking them down. My roommate has a really nice SLR camera, but it means that his pics are impossible to shrink and look weird when they aren't huge. And my cheapo camera that I bought here is even worse than I was expecting, so I try to use his when I can... Spencer