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?