Surprise! We’re skipping a few days. It’s a long story but essentially, yesterday, my phone completely stopped working and refuses to turn on or respond to any recovery attempts. We’re currently in San Salvador (a big city, thank goodness) and were able to get to an apple store today to try to figure out what to do. I now have a new phone, but have lost all my pictures from the beginning of the trip. I’m going to try to get them off my old phone when I get home, but for now I think the best thing will be to blog the present. For those of you who don’t know, I’m currently travelling with my cousin Kara.
We woke up this morning in our lovely airbnb and headed downstairs to make breakfast. Kara made coffee, and I prepared us an omelette. We then walked to Galerias Mall (which we visited on our first day here) to sort out my phone issue. We knew the mall had an apple store so we headed straight there and I explained the situation as best as I could. The store didn’t do battery replacements and I don’t even know if that would fix my problem so I’m just going to have to buy a new phone. They told me they could try to extract data from my old one, it would just take around 45 minutes.
I stayed for a little bit to research what phone I’d want to buy, then we headed to a cafe called The Coffee Cup on the top floor.
I had a frappe thing, which was pretty good, and then we headed back to the apple store around noon. Unfortunately, they couldn’t retrieve any data from my old phone. I ended up buying an iPhone 15 and began setting it up inside. We then walked around the mall looking for a cheap case, which we eventually found at Pull & Bear.
Once my phone was functional, we took an Uber to the Parque Recreativo Los Chorros, which was the actual plan for today before my phone mission derailed everything. The drive was around 20 mins and we were dropped off at the front gate.
We knew it was some kind of spring and thought it would be pretty natural, but it sure wasn’t what we were expecting. It was basically like a spring-fed version of Lilac. Three pools, one for children, one natural one which was empty and undergoing some kind of repairs, and one more. Although they were spring-fed, the area felt very much like a water park. We paid $3 USD each to enter, I changed into my bathing suit and we headed up to check out the pools. There were a bunch of fish swimming in inches of water at the bottom of the drained pool, and a bunch of people crowded around the functional pool one level above.
We headed up to the topmost pool and took a dip, swimming around and hanging out until we were cold (not very long since today is the ONLY semi-cloudy day we’ve had all week and the water was pretty cool).
After the dip, we headed down to the kiddie pool. There was another, bigger pool attached to it and we sat on a stone bench beside it. There wasn’t a lot of seating around the pools at all. Kara went down the water slide, we shared a tuna sandwich Kara made this morning, and I read a bit of my book. Eventually we decided we were both ready to go, so we ordered an Uber back to our place (which does not have an address at all since the road doesn’t have a name). The ride was now 45 minutes because of the traffic in the city.
When we got back, I was pretty overwhelmed by all the things I have to do and organize and think about. I called Keith (my boyfriend) and Soph (my sister). Kara made us a smoothie and my parents eventually joined the call so I went downstairs and we all chatted for a bit. Maman helped me rebook flights and do some of the things that were stressing me out, which made me feel a lot better.
We made pasta for supper with tomato sauce, veggies, cottage cheese and egg. I’ve been loving being able to cook in this place lately, it was very good.
After supper, Kara raided the games cupboard and found battle ship. She beat me by a single guess, so really we tied. She also did a small puzzle she found (it was the Mona Lisa).
After games I went upstairs to call Keith before bed. It was a long day, but productive after all. See you in the next one!