« Vacation and the Best of 2006 | Main | It isn't a one way march to tyrany »
December 31, 2006
Puerto Rico
just go back from Puerto Rico. Highlights of this trip included reading the Red Mars 
This was especially cool. What a place of cultural fusion. You could buy beer, peanuts and cracker jacks, but you could also empanadas, grilled dark meat chicken skewers, and plates of pork, rice and beans. If a ball went into the stands an adult would often catch it. Then the crowd would work it itself into a terrible fury, demanding that the ball be given to a kid. Only once did this not work, and they started a chant to demand that that particular fan be ejected. Tired from a long day of doing nothing we got up to go home in the sixth inning and we mannaged to almost catch a ball on the way out. Using our newly discovered local social norm we were able to extract the baseball from the fan who caught it, and one of my younger brothers had a souvenir of a lifetime.
Puerto Rico is a place where it is posible to spend a huge amount of money on interesting, good food (Baru), interesting bad food (Lemongrass), and great local food, which we had at The Spanglish Cafe, El Jibarito, and a beach shack with no name that blasted salsa the whole time we were there. This combined with the proprietor's terrible English and our comperable spanish made it so surreal when the ice cold beer and amzing scalding hot food finally made its way from the kitchen. Yum. The steaks were also great, but that experience wasn't different from a Morton's anywhere else. My general advice is that food is mostly a crap shoot, but look for guidebook-recomended places, Puerto Rican food seemed to be universally good, and that expensive food was no more likely to be good than cheap food. hell, it is good general chowhound-traveler advice to get recomendations from people who know, eat local food when possible (ask them, they love to recomend even if it embarrasses M), and all other things equal go for the cheaper meal.
In walking around, even with my camera equipment out, I always felt safe, and never encountered any anti-USA sentiment, despite warnings to the countrary. The ocean was in the mid to high 80's, and you could walk right in. That was just amazing, especially compared with the freezing waters off my new home of San Diego. As far as we could tell, you can walk around drinking in public. The local beer, Medalla, is the most temperature depended beer I've ever had. At 50 degrees it tastes like nasty puddle water from a ditch in old San Juan, at 30 degrees one of the most delicious beverages known to man.
A great trip, all and all.
Posted by OneEyedMan at December 31, 2006 7:09 AM
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)