Day 2! It's Sunday, and San Benito is very quiet. Many places are closed, but the shopping centers are full of people.

Merchant experiences: 🍔 I'm following BTCMap's recommendations now and come across a good burger place for lunch, where I can pay with sats without a problem. First time coming across somebody using DitoBanx. 🛒 At Super Selectos, one of the largest supermarket chains in the country, there is a special belt for those wanting to pay with Bitcoin. Like using cash in Scandinavia! To pay with sats, the manager has to be called, a computer mouse has to be plugged into the PoS device (the mouse barely works). The manager has to log into a Chivo web interface, enter the payment amount, select Bitcoin, then Lightning. The process takes quite a while, and people behind me quickly change lanes. After my payment succeeds, it still takes a while to show up as received in the web browser, and the staff have to do some manual accounting. They are far from amused and don't say good bye. 🏧 I come across a Chivo ATM and try my luck. My home SIM does not have reception, so I can't receive the verification SMS. At this point I should have given up, but I pay 4000 sats for a temporary number through SMS4Sats. Luckily the SMS from Chivo never arrives, because if I had successfully made the onchain transaction to Chivo, I wouldn't have been able to re-verify myself using the same number after two onchain confirmations and claim my cash. There are two (2!) Chivo staff present who are friendly, but of course can't do anything. 🍟 I'm back at WcDonald's (yes, the sign has a W instead of a M, some kind of Japan promotion?). I notice that the Lightning invoice shows up very briefly when selecting 'paying with Bitcoin' before the screen goes blank, and I manage to scan and pay it, but the system is still frozen. Staff "trust" me I paid and hand me my order. They also tell me I can pay with Bitcoin at the counter! Why didn't I think of that! So I make another order, go to the counter only to find out that this option is limited to Chivo users. 🥩 For dinner I choose a Peruvian restaurant nearby. The food is pretty good, and I ask to settle the bill with Bitcoin. They are very confident in being able to do it, but the manager still has to receive instructions over the phone on how to process payments. 🏪 I go back to a convenience store where I paid with Bitcoin successfully yesterday. This time staff knows exactly what they are doing and the 85c transaction goes through quickly, without any sighs, awkward silence or me holding up the line. It's clear that if only people regularly used it, staff were naturally trained to handle it smoothly. 🍸 The local brewery, which takes sats, is sadly closed tonight, so I walk over to the Sheraton as it's marked on BTCMap, and am being laughed out through the door.

San Salvador: I take the public bus for 25c to the old town, passing crowded shopping malls and otherwise empty streets. The old town is quite nice, and it's clear from the construction around that it will be even nicer in a year. There are many people around, including foreign tourists and tour groups. I enter the newly constructed library, complete with Chinese flag out front. Much of El Salvador's recent infrastructure development is completed by Chinese companies and subsidized by various Chinese government-linked development funds. This trend precedes Bukele and is also a reward for El Salvador officially recognizing the People's Republic of China in 2018 (and ditching diplomatic relations with Taiwan). Other examples that I saw where the indoor sports stadium, the outdoor sports stadium and the airport. Quality seems to be relatively okay, and I hope these buildings last. What immediately sticks out upon entering the library: There are almost no books. Instead, there are video games, children's games, a Star Wars exhibition and Japanese comic book figures. I'm very curious how the old town will look like in a year or three, because it has a lot of potential. For now, there are almost no cafes or restaurants around, and those that do exist don't look inviting. There's nothing of interest to buy at the local market, but it's easy to see how this can be a major tourist spot eventually. Wherever I go, San Salvador feels save and is surprisingly walkable (although nobody walks). There is little police presence, but you never have the impression that you are in a police state. In San Benito, this feeling of safety extends well into the night, although the area just doesn't feel welcoming with its high walls and barbed wire.

The Lightning Network: Compared to my previous trips, and apart from the Chivo ATM, Lightning payments are very much the standard now, and everybody handling a wallet seems to know that. It's also noteworthy how none of my payments took more than a few seconds or had to be re-attempted. For those using Lightning for a while, it's really remarkable how reliable payments have become, and it seems services operating in El Salvador know how to manager their inbound liquidity. My LND node is running on a small VPS with 2GB RAM, it only has two channels, both of which are over 1.5 years old. Go run your own node! Yesterday I had this node connected to Zeus wallet over Lightning Node Connect (LNC), but for today I switched over a vanilla REST connection, and given the relative poor connectivity of my eSIM, this was a huge improvement. LNC is a huge improvement over connecting to your node over Tor, and on a fast and stable internet connection it's comparable with vanilla REST, while being far easier to set up.