Not really, though. In the morning Janneke trooped off to do some work, and I cleaned the apartment, as I think I mentioned in the post I wrote earlier today. Not completely, mind you - no bathrooms, no linen changes, no ceiling waxing. But I got the major areas, including the desk I use as my little office, which was just coated in dust. And I changed the kitty litter and cleaned the box, rearranged and condensed the trash / recycling / poop bag area, swept pretty thoroughly around the -
Hey! Wake up!
Man, your attention span is for shyte. So while I cleaned, T and Q played and played and played, either on the computer (limited time for that) or with each other. They just get on so dang well, those two. It's a real joy. And it gave me time to finish up the dishes. There's no dishwasher here, see, so the system I've come up with is the following: The right-hand sink, I use or the washing, while the left-hand sink -
Hellooooo!? Eyes front! Heads off the desks!
Jeepers. Anyway, Janneke came home near noon time, and we switched off: I took off on a run, and following that, had the lunch that everybody else had already finished. And then I was out the door to go do project stuff.
Got some good stuff. Met some nice people.
Back to meet the fam at the beach, where I took a soothing dip in the waves. And home again, for an afternoon snack.
Not supper, though. For I had learned in my foray to the market that there would be music there this evening. (I had already kind of known it.) And my friend Basilisa suggested that I bring the family so they could see the festivities. So I did. We had supper there, at a restaurant called El Popular, amid the teeming crowds listening to from two different stages and getting drinks from any number of night-time juke joints that either operate out of outward-facing kiosks in the market place, or surround the marketplace. (The vegetable vending area was closed for the evening.) The whole block becomes an open bar in the evenings on weekends, and from what we saw, it is a beautiful, lively scene, purely Puerto Rican (I personally saw no gringos there) and fairly family-oriented. As family-oriented as a bar scene can be, I guess - there were a few kids in strollers and holding hands with parents there. Check it out:
So we settled in at El Popular. Here we are:
Here they are, I should say. The kid in the background with the earphones was there with his parents. He said nothing to them the entire time, and they said nothing to him, and they said almost nothing to each other. Lovely scene. Hey, I guess, at least they were together. (I mean that sincerely, by the way. It's like the guy we saw at the recycling center the other day who just dropped off his bag of cans and didn't bother to put them into the bin like everybody else, just dropped them and drove off, hardly even stopped. I thought, "Jerk!" And then I added, sheepishly, "...who drives all the way to the recycling center with his sorted recycleables rather than just toss them in the trash.")
And here's our food:
Good stuff. They were out of fish, unfortunately, so Janneke just had the rice and beans. (She had suspected as much, so had loaded up on veggies before we left the house.)
My only real complaint is that the music was so friggin' loud. In between acts, they piped dance beats at ridiculous levels through the amps. Here, let me show you:
I mean, holy canole. But our evening ended with a nice stroll home, and dessert in the house. (We had tried to find a guy selling piraguas whom we'd seen before dinner, but he'd called it a night or otherwise disappeared before we got done with supper.) T wanted to troop to the top of the building we're staying in to check out the skyline view, so she, Q and I did that while Janneke dashed back to the apartment to enjoy the air conditioning. The view was nice, and Q had the idea that we could take the elevator back down to the ground floor and then up to 2, which would be less walking than going down the 6 floors from the roof to 2. I agreed to it.
But I should have realized that once we got out of the elevator on G, we would have no access to the stairwell without the keys, which Janneke had back in the apartment. So we had to buzz her to come let us in to the stairwell. She came down, in her pajamas. You should have seen the look on her face.
I did not take a picture.
And here endeth the blog post. Its nearly 11:00, and I have a 7:00 AM appointment for project stuff, so I'll be hitting the hay. Keep the porch light on for us, folks. Won't be long now.
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