San Juan, Puerto Rico

Hey Everybody,
I spent last weekend in San Juan, Puerto Rico and now I am on my way to Salvador, Brazil. Puerto Rico was a very beautiful place. The weather was great, always above 80 degrees (even at night) and the landscape was a collection of various shades of green. I spent most of my short time there in Old San Juan, which is the historic district of town. The buildings in the city are beautiful, they are a variety of pastel colors and every building looks different because it is unlawful to color one building the same shade as the one next to it. The streets are paved with cobblestone brought over by ships from Spain, giving the city a European feel. I started the weekend off with a guided walking tour learning about the vast history of Puerto Rico. My favorite part of the tour was the fort at the end of the peninsula called El Morro. It was built when Puerto Rico was under Spanish rule and the way it was structured was brilliant because they could shoot at enemy ships from any angle with the walls and cannons that they had. It was also surrounded by a fifteen-foot moat so enemies on land could not climb the walls. The only reason that the U.S. was eventually able to take over was because the Spanish cannons couldn’t fire as far as the American ships could. That night I went kayaking with a group of students in the dark through a mangrove swamp and then into a lagoon that contained bioluminescence. Bioluminescence is a hard phenomenon to describe, but essentially it is the activation of millions or organisms in the water that light up like fireflies when you put your hand or your paddle in the water. The best description I can come up with is that they look a lot like the glowing seeds that create the giant fruit from James and the Giant Peach. I know it’s a bit obscure, but considering the fact that I couldn’t get any good pictures to come out it is the best that I can do to describe it. During our return to the beach where we had started, a fish jumped in the front seat of the kayak and scared my kayak-mate half to death so she jumped backwards and wouldn’t move until someone else took the fish out of the boat. I thought it must have been a good-sized fish to scare her that badly but it wasn’t much more than a guppy. I suppose things get a little scarier when you are paddling through the pitch-blackness of a mangrove swamp. The second day some friends and I tried to go and see a cockfight, which was a popular attraction for many of the students, but when we got there it was closed so we settled for dinner at a local Puerto Rican restaurant. I ate some local fare called a Mofongo, which is meat mixed with fried plantains and covered in hot sauce. It was a good start to my worldwide food experimentation. That night we went searching for a salsa club, and on the way into town we found a group of at least a hundred people circled around a small band and some salsa dancers. It was one of the first things that I encountered and thought to myself that there was no way I would see something quite like this in America. We found a good place for salsa dancing but it is a lot harder than it looks and all of us were put to shame by the locals. On my final day in port I went into town to try and upload some of my pictures on the blog page, but I still couldn’t get them to work and I settled with putting some of them on facebook. After that I spent a little over an hour talking to Luis, a manager at an art shop, about the politics of Puerto Rico. I had no idea that the people were so passionate about the issue of statehood. It was nice to talk for a while with a local person and hear about something like local politics from their perspective. Before the trip I was overlooking Puerto Rico because of the other countries we will visit, but it was a great place with friendly people and overall a very worthwhile experience for me and the other students on the ship. I am sure it is just a tiny bit colder at home than it is here, but I hope this finds everyone happy and healthy nonetheless. I miss everyone at home and I will write again after my travels in Brazil.

Conor