Corn Ice Cream

Howdy, folks - Quick post here, as there's not too much to tell regarding yesterday. The most exciting part came in the mid afternoon, when we trooped out to Rio Piedras, the "Manhattan" section of San Juan. It's got the "Golden Mile", as it's called, of all the bank headquarters and skyscrapers, followed by the University of Puerto Rico campus. Which might be beautiful - hard to say: it's all sealed off behind walls and gates. The area surrounding it, though, is immediately evident as a university town, what with the cafes, restaurants, bars, and bookstores. But it's also very urban, in the euphemism sense: tagging everywhere, and I mean everywhere, and a fair number of vacant buildings, some trash on the street. It's kind of exciting and depressing to be there, all at the same time.

Still, there is a nice plaza area in Rio Piedras, where we spent some time after hitting the bookstores. Q got a youth adventure-type mini-novel in Spanish, written by a Puerto Rican woman, and T got a book of poems written by a Puerto Rican poet when she was a little girl. She's reading it as I write this, out loud, asking for no help. Very cool. I got a couple that I thought the kids might be into at a later date, and / or might be useful for me in the classroom.

Once at the plaza, we found an ice cream shop that has all the great local flavors - parcha, banana, pineapple, guayava, etc. And one that I would not have thought of: Corn. Plain-ol' maíz. I tried that one, and it was my favorite of the three we got. You could taste the corn flavor in there, but there was plenty of sugar involved as well to keep it ice-creamy. Learn something new every day.

The tropical storm has been a bit of a disappointment. It rained steady and hard in the morning yesterday, and the gutters overflowed on a few streets nearby. But around noon it stopped raining completely, and it's just been overcast since. So the island breathes a sigh of relief, even if osme of its tourists are mildly disappointed. I'd rather have an exciting storm than cloudy skies and cool temperatures. How much fun is that?

Clarabelle is happy with it, though, because now her quick walks are on the beach instead of on the street. Nobody goes to the beach when it's cloudy, so we walk her up and down with impunity. It's helping me a lot with my sea glass collecting. Got a few fistfuls yesterday.

And that's it - a lot of domesticity otherwise. We didn't go anywhere until the rain abated because the street flooding can actually be quite bad, as we learned last time. It did give us time to decide that we pretty much do want to get out to Culebra next week, though. So that should make for some more exciting blog posts.

Trying to get in to see the vet. You call, and they say, "The person who knows how to run the system isn't in yet" or "She went to lunch" or "She's about to go to lunch" or "The doctor is in surgery, so call back around 2:30" or "Call back around 4:30", on and on. And in the end they said, "We don't really make appointments - people just come in, and we treat their pets if we have an opening." So I guess we'll head there to do that come the 6th, which will be 9 days before we leave.

Off to clean the apartment. I know: I live on the edge.