last days in Puerto Rico...

Yes my dear readers.... My days in Puerto Rico have already come to an end...


On one of my last lunches, my colleagues took my out to get some typical Puerto Rican food: That is, we went to a hamburger place where you could choose the amount of meat you want: 1/3 pound, 1/2 pound, 2/3 pound or a pound. I went for 1/3 (hey believe me, it's already big...) most went for 1/2 pound and 1 brave chilene guy went for 2/3 pound of meat.

I made a little before/after video shoot. Gregorio was very brave, took it step by step, piece by piece, first went fully for the meat and only finished his fries afterwards. RESPECT!

After that, we went for ice cream! At this place they actally 'prepared" you your ice cream in a whole process, adding I don't know which kind of flavours and goodies. Anyway, a popular venue, I made a video but it's a bit long(!!) to put on here. I once again ordered the smallest possible but had to throw half of it away!!! And believe me, this hurt since it was really good and we all know I'm quite the ice cream girl...

Before I get some hate mail sent over, this is not really the typical Puerto Rican food which is actually really good. It just kinda illustrates the amount of fast food you can find here and it was just a very funny lunch we had.

During the last weeks I hadn't been feeling very well and unfortunately, last weekend the illness completely kicked in! I got a very high fever, my roomie got scared when he saw how terrible I looked (yes, thank you) and took me to the hospital. After a - "you don't have a social security number? Ok, that's $300 in advance"- i got to see my first doctor and after her many followed as I had an explainable fever. Anyway, I spent the night, it wasn't extremely funny so I'll spare you the details but it kept me from making any interesting trips lately so I'll just give you some pictures that I have been made over the last weeks. For me all of them are very funny. Maybe some of them are of the "you should have been there" type but in that case I put them here just for the people who "have been there" with me!


Ok, maybe not the funniest to start with.... Me in the hospital, No worries, it's not that people were mocking me, I just had a lucid moment and we were making fun of the situation.

In every parking lot there's a guy or a woman, sitting like a bird in a cage to watch our dear vehicles...


Every day we would pass this sign: Zona de Prueba (Test Zone). To me it only seemed as a forest we would drive by, but then again, you never know...

Remember me complaining about stupid signs.? This ons actually tells me no to pie in our swimming pool as it's unhealthy. And not only for me but also for others!
Next to our home... Even though I'm a bingo-fan, I never got there...
The soda machine at work. Has been broken since I got here and never got fixed: Messages are:

*09/03/08 12:40 $1,00 Luis D Rama - Supervisor 383-4967
*09/03/08 9:40 $0,75 Mista Claudio - Guardia
* Me debes un dolar (you owe me a dollar)
...
Little ice cream umbrella I planted in our car. The security guards at work recognized us by it so we wouldn't have to stop to do the obligatory dumb entrance paper work.

The 100 different tastes of orange juice. Going from "no pulp", to "some pulp" to a "little pulp" to a "lot of pulp" to Vitamine D added, Vitamine E added, Vitamine K added, Light, and , yes, Natural!

Yes! We had an FM - 200 extinguishing system at work!! Talk about feeling safe..

And this is what it looks like...
And we also has a chewing gum machine!

And a huge fan in the hallway...

The door that was supposed to be always closed but that then again was on our shortest path to the coffee machine...

Police parking on a no-parking sign

Today was my last day in Isla Verde, so I decided to make the most out of my beautifully situated appartment and we organised a BBQ for some of the colleagues. Lovely day, good food, first day actually I was feeling better after a week of lying in bed. My colleagues in Puerto Rico were actually really good fun. As In Santo Domingo it's quite a mixed group. Spain, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, Argentina, Chili and well Belgium :)


Next post will be from Santo Domingo as tomorrow I'm flying back to La Jungla! And I'm actually very excited to go back!

Time for an update by now. I guess you guys haven't seen a lot of pictures of Puerto Rico so there we go for another joyful ride. 

San Juan is actually a really beautiful colonial city. San Juan is the second city that has been founded by the Spanish colonists after, right, Santo Domingo. It's really nice walking around in the colonial zone as it's very well preserved and the houses are all lively coloured. The colonial zone in Santo Domingo is nice as well but you can definitely see the difference in the countries' welfares. (ok, might get mugged now when I head back to Santo Domingo)

The fountain is not colonial but it's just the best idea a city with an average temperature of about 30 degrees can have. I almost joined the children. 

Two of the main attractions are the city's former defensive fortalezas (squeeking in some spanish lessons here). I visited both fortaleza San Cristobal and fortaleza San Felipe del Morro with a couchsurfing friend and my colleague/roommate. I forgot that ervery now and then a camera's batteries, no matter how good they are, actually need to be recharged so all pictures are taken with manuel's cell... You'll have to take my word for it that they're woth the visit. This beautiful shot I found online but don't tell them.  

The Spanish conquistadores (Spanish lesson #2) started building el Morro in 1539 to defend San Juan. In 1595 Francis Drake attacked El Morro but, as simple as effective, the Spanish shot a cannon ball through the ship's main cabin. 

A few years later, the English attacked again and they succeeded. This time they were smart enough to go over land but then again not smart enough to not let all of their troops be weakened by dysenterie so they had to leave Puerto Rico again after 6 weeks. Quite an embarassing event for the English, I guess. 

30 years laters our lovely friends, the Dutch, gave it a go. El Morro didn't fall but the Dutch did burn down the city. The Spanish remained master of the island untill in 1898 the Americans kicked them out, making Puerto Rico US Commonwealth. The US used the fort as a military base untill 1961 and that's when it became a Historic site. 

I'm also getting remarks that I'm never in my own pictures so there we go. The proof that I actually do visit these places. 

We parked our car in the first fort we visited and walked (once again,this is seen as an unnatural act in the carribean) to the other one where they threw us out at closing time. Walking back to our parking we found this.... Yep, that's our car way back there... Luckily there was still someone there and a "we're sorry, we're stupid tourists but we love your city so much" made everything ok. 

Good news, I'm no longer a holiday inn-resident! Instead they finally gave us an appartment. I'm still living in Isla Verde, a neigbourhood close to the sea and quite close to the city center.

And I've accomplished one of my 10 ultimate goals in life: to live on the beach. Yep, I hit the jackpot! For the first and probably last time in my life I'm living on a beach! The appartment is not amazingly beautiful nor big but we have a great ocean view and we don't even have to cross a street to go there. In case we can't stand the salt water anymore, we have a swimming pool and if we want to sweat without just walking outside, we have a gymnasium as well.

What we also have is lots of old, retired americans and an "activity room" I'm hoping for a weekly Bingo, but no luck so far... Maybe it's only biweekly? Fingers crossed!

In the end, human resources did decide that there could be no harm seen in me living with my male colleague. They couldn't be more wrong, since we already started fighting over who would get the main bedroom...

But I tend to have my little ways of winning...

Puerto Rico then, I'll give an update on where I've been hanging out lately.

We visited Ponce, the second largest city on the island. To get there, we needed to cross the island entirely which took us less than 1,5 hour. Puerto Rico is chiquito... Ponce was not very impressing, it has 1 very nice main square with a ver cool old firemen park

and a Burger King in colonial style (who gets them...)

We drove to Cabo Rojo, the utter south-east point of the island. (and I almost fell off!). They hav e a great beach and called it Playa Sucia (dirty beach). I guess to scare people off?

Unable to hide our telecom calling, we went to check out the world's largest reflex telescope!

Since holidaywise, Puerto Rico is smart enough to benefit from it's special relationship with the States, I had Labour Day off and we went to Vieques, a small island to the east of Isla Grande (the, ehm, mainland of Puerto Rico). For over 60 years Vieques has been occupied by the US marine. They used it for trainings, bombed half of the island down and it was also strategically seen as interesting given its location not so far from Fidel. There has always been a lot of protest from the locals and after an incident where a local got killed by a test bombing, George W Bush removed the basis from the island in 2003. At the moment a large part of the island is being cleaned upfrom the bombings but what I've been able to see is beautiful, even though you find a bunker every now and then. A lot of horses run freely and peacefully around, the marine's beaches are amazing and in the center of the island there is tropical rainforest.

The main city, Esperanza, is still full of Americans who opened restaurants, bars and guesthouses. I was a bit annoyed by the fact everybody spoke english instead of spanish by default, even though most of them surely speak spanish.

No cars are allowed on the ferry (only on the 4am ferry which we ofcourse didn't take, I didn't change that much yet) so we were without transport. Local transport got us to one of the marine's beaches, red beach, but it seemed to be a party-beach.

It's always amazing to see how well prepared people go to the beach, They bring small refrigerators, BBQ's, loooots of drinks and food, large soundsystems, cooking utilities. We went walking to discover another beach which was actually nicer even though we almost got eaten alive by mosquitos on our way. As walking is seen as an unnatural act in the tropicals, some nice puerto riquenos gave us a ride back.

At night we went to a bioluminescent bay, called bahia de los mosquitos (yep, they really make it sound appealing,no?). A bioluminiscent bay, is a bay where you have large concentrations of dinoflagella. These are microorganisms, remember, the ones that just exist out of 1 cell. They're not considered plants nor animals. They float freely around in all tropical waters but in some places, you can find the in very large concentrations, the bioluminiscent bays. If you disturb them, they send out a small ray of light, like a little star. These bays are not profound, only have a small opening to the sea, have mangrove around them and it's best if there's little light pollution. I already went to 1 in Puerto Rico, but the one in Vieques was far more amazing. We went with kayaks to the middle of the bay. Around the paddles and under the boats you could see rays of light. And swimming in the water was even more amazing. It's very hard to describe, it's like swimming in the stars and I was really amazed by the amount of light we could produce just shaking our arms and legs. I don't have pictures but you can see some long exposure shots at http://www.biobay.com/. Anyway, who ever gets the chance, go see this!!!! It's in the top 5 of amazing things I've seen or done.

The next day, we managed to rent some scooters (not easy on this island) to go explore some more. Since it was hot, we decided to go for a little swim, but these babies immediately came out to greet us... Since both of us already got stung once, we decided not to repeat just for the adventure of swimming between jellyfish and we continued.

We drove to the complete west of the island over a dirt track between red mangroves. Not so easy with the scooters and especially not since we signed a - I will stay on the tracks - paper. But definitely worth wile as we found what I think has been the clearest water I've seen so far.

Another funny thing about Puerto Rico, are the signs. While they are very ungenerous with placing them on the roads to make sure I wouldn't get lost which I do now, you can find all kind of funny signs. A little collection:

These tsunami signs are new even though the last hurricane passed over 10 years ago. You find them all over, sometimes just saying: if a tsunami comes, get out of here. I don't think the guy on the sign will survive though...

When puertoricans fall on a wet floor they do it with more enthousiasm as we do in Europe, no?

Really makes you wanna continue,no?