The Top of El Salvador

Thursday's class featured a short lecture and demonstration by René Aguilar from UDB's Metrology department.   René is an expert in thermal imaging and gave the students a good idea of how this technology can be used to detect flaws in a building's thermal envelope.

René Aguilar demonstrates thermal imaging using a mug of hot water

Friday Nelson and a few others from UDB invited me and Basilia to join them in a memorial gathering for my father. I told them a little about my father, and I shared some photos of him as a child and late in life when Basilia and I last saw him. It felt good to share memories of him with the people I see here every day.

Basilia and I spent the weekend up in the mountains, almost as far up in the mountains as you can go in this country. We accompanied Nelson to the weekend house of his friend Luis in Miramundo, near the Honduran border in Chalatenango department at about 2200 meters above sea level and refreshingly cool. Basi, Nelson and I actually walked all the way to Honduras from Luis's house, which only took about an hour. The countries are separated at this spot by the Sumpul River, which is small enough in the dry season that you can hop across a few rocks to get into Honduras. On the way to Miramundo we stopped at Cihuatan, a precolumbian archaeological site that was bigger and more interesting than Basi and I had expected it to be. We had the whole place to ourselves aside from a few site staff, surprising on a Saturday afternoon.

Basilia in the Río Sumpul between El Salvador (left) and Honduras (right)