This morning we venture out into the Black Market. This market is full of everything you can
imagine from clothes, homeware, food, the list goes on! We wander around this
market for a couple of hours and it is very interesting. The market goes for about 8 blocks so it is
massive. One thing we did notice was the
amount of cakes that are made. I’m
talking about cakes like birthday cakes which are very well decorated. There seems to be numerous amounts of
these. I don’t know who would buy them
but someone must!!!
After lunch we go for a walk to another part of the
city. The city is a bustling one because
it is so compact. 1.5 million people live here and it is like being in a basin
with hills on either side of the city which are strewn with houses. We are close to the San Pedro prison so we
decide to take a look at that. This
prison is famous as it features in the novel Marching Powder, which is a story about an English drug smuggler
who got caught and spent about 7 years in this prison. I have not read the book but Ann has, and she
was saying how corrupt the prison is and how you pay for your cells and the
maintenance. This English prisoner
needed to make money while in prison to pay for his cell so he decided to do
tours of the prison. When he was
released the tours officially stopped, but there were some “under the table”
tours until about a year ago when they completely stopped because two girls
were attacked whilst on the tour. We
were outside the prison for about half an hour just watching the events going
on. Prisoners are allowed out to work
and earn some money and we were watching them all get back into prison. Ann also informs me that some prisoner’s
families live in the prison, and apparently early in the morning there is a
large release of prisoner’s children so they can attend school for the
day. Crazy.
We then went back to the hostel and were finally
able to get access to the internet.
Although it was very slow and brief but I managed to get a couple of
emails away and do some chatting which was good. We then went out for dinner to round off the
day.San Pedro Prison - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Pedro_prison
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