Haven’t been in touch for a while – a direct effect of the lack of real news these days. Let’s go backward in time:
Right now the kids are watching the second half of “The Real Macaw”, easily the best Australian film ever made. About a parrot. That stars Jason Robards. And involves pirates. They started watching it yesterday in the evening, and continue tonight. Janneke and I have mercifully let the kids plug in the headphones, and are doing a little “Mystery Science Theater” action over the silent progress of the film.
It’s even less fun than it sounds.
Earlier today, I drove to Fajardo, a little over an hour away, to try to buy tickets for the ferry to Culebra in the morning. We plan to go there and do some beach-hopping and snorkeling. Turns out, though, they only sell 50 advance tickets on the 400-person ferry; we’ll have to get there tomorrow at 7:00 AM and wait in line for tickets on the 9:00 ferry. What's that you say? I should have called first? I did. Probably twenty times. No one ever answered the phone. I finally called the station in Culebra, who said "You can try to call Fajardo, but I'm warning you: They never answer. The phone bites and is poisonous, apparently, in the Fajardo office." I pointed out to the dude in the ticket window there - that it could have saved me damn near three hours of driving. "They know," he said. "I tell them all the time. But I can't answer the phone and sell tickets." "Seems you need another person, then," I pointed out, helpfully. "Don't I know it," he replied.
Ah well. It let me listen to the radio a while. And I also discovered a shortcut to Fajardo – it’s the third time this trip I make that drive. You’ll recall we went there for the bioluminescent bay trip. The directions we had from the kayak company were almost incredibly bad, and they skipped entirely the much quicker and simpler route that avoids any number of towns and stops on a four-lane highway designed specifically for the purpose. Well tomorrow we get our revenge for all the time we’ve wasted up to now.
In the morning, Janneke was at the coffee shop, “working” again, and the kids and I tried to go to the San Juan municipal natatorium. Turns out, though, you need to get an ID and a doctor’s note and permission from the Pope before you can use it. So screw them. Didn’t go in. Hit the beach instead.
That was today. Yesterday? Um…Well, the cat’s been a bit sick. We took her to the vet because she’s had some loose stool action lately. That’s the reason we didn’t go to Culebra today; Janneke wasn’t comfortable leaving her at home with the loose stool action going on. This vet was a lot better – got an appointment and didn’t have to wait 4 hours at all. Couldn’t find anything wrong with the cat, and got some immodium-type medicine for her. All should be well.
On her way to the vet’s, Janneke noticed a municipal dog park, well-maintained, with a bunch of agility structures and all. So after lunch and an afternoon at the beach, we all trooped there to let Clarabelle have a run with some new friends. Many of whom were intent on humping her.
There are jokes to be made there, but I will resist.
Woops – They appear to have killed off the bird in the climactic final scene fo the movie, here, and I have two crying kids. We’ll have to see - I may need to intervene here…Wait – Now the father has jumped from the helicopter and they’re having a come-together moment in the sea, and the talking parrot is still floating on a piece of wreckage from the exploded boat where the evil archaeologist met his deserved end –
Believe me, I WISH I were kidding.
-OK, all appears to be well. They didn’t kill off the bird. What was I saying…?
So that was pretty much yesterday. It’s been a slow couple of days, to be perfectly frank. But come tomorrow night, I’ll have pictures and anecdotes that’ll put hair back on your head.
Besides, the kid and the macaw are now in South America returning the artifacts to the pyramid in the jungle whence they originally came, to the strains of an Andean folk band.
Still wish I were kidding.
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Playing Catch-Up
Well, let's begin with yesterday, shall we?
The morning appears to have gone by uneventfully, because I do not recall anything from it. So we'll just leave that there. Although I do recall this: I did project stuff, and Janneke went off to meet up with a Williams student of hers who is from Puerto Rico. And who says her family wants to have us over for dinner. I'll believe it when I see it.
Post-lunch, we loaded up the car and headed to Piñones, a spot up the coast toward the East from here that all the Puerto Ricans tell us we have to get to, but which appears to go unmentioned in most of the guide-book-type material we have or have seen. The idea is that it's home to a large population of Puerto Ricans of African descent, that they sell food in lots of kiosks, that the beaches are protected and lovely, and that there's some sort of walkway that you ride bicycles on. So off we went.
Zoomed there in under twenty minutes via the highway. Unbelievable, how fast the Kia Sol can get one around a place.
We found this funny:
"Postal police"? Do they really need a car?
Following directions I got from a guy on the beach a couple weeks ago, we drove until we saw a school, then found a spot to park on the right hand side of the road; the left hand side, where there were bushes, would lead to the beach. So we pulled into the parking lot of a roadside eatery, where two elderly men were sitting at the rear of the parking lot. I approached them and asked if they allowed people to use their lot.
"We do," one of them said, "but we ask for three dollars in return."
"Fair and reasonable," I proclaimed, handed him $3, and gave him a firm handshake.
He smiled broadly. "Con toda confianza," he said. "Lo estaremos vigilando desde acá." Don't worry, we'll be watching it from here.
Both men were black, as was everyone working in or lounging in front of the restaurant. So far, the rumors were true.
Across the road there were stairs that led over the bushy dune and onto the beach. (There was also a dead cat and a lot of garbage.) And once we topped the dune, we could see that the beach was very different from Condado - Thundering surf, and strewn with all kinds of (mostly natural) ocean flotsam. (Or is it jetsam?) Coconuts, logs, leaves, shells, sea glass galore. And quite a bit of garbage. And, like I said, a thundering, pounding surf, with a number of surfers bobbing off shore.
Less true, that bit about the protected beach. Here it is:
Very pretty, but very far from calm. Still, we had passed a beach where there was a natural stone wall that divided an area, thirty yards across and four hundred long, from the pounding surf; we'd kept driving because it was so crowded. So maybe I had misheard the directions slightly. This beach had going for it the fact that apart from the surfers, who stayed out to sea a bit, we had the place to ourselves. And which also made us regret not bringing Clarabelle.
Though getting past the dead cat without the kids noticing would probably have been a lot trickier.
So we all frolicked in the heavy waves, which was a lot of fun. Like a carnival ride, throwing you up and then down. Kids enjoyed it, as you can see:
I was enjoying myself all the more with the strange thrill that one (apparently) gets when running around in public in one's underwear, as I had somehow neglected to bring along my bathing suit. We were probably there an hour, and then decided to head back to the restaurant for some grub before comparing and contrasting this beach with the protected one. Had some chicken pinchos:
Good stuff. And cheap. Off, then, to the proteced beach. Pulled in to the parking lot, off into the grass a bit, and Janneke opened her door, exactly over the corpse of a dead dog, reeking and boiling with maggots.
You've never seen anyone close a door so fast in your life. Nor anyone shift so quickly into reverse. Luckily, no one had stepped behind the car - although, to be honest, maybe they did, I don't think I would have noticed, it was all kind o a blur - and we rocketed to the opposite end of the parking lot. And walked from there over to the beach, where Q and T swam out to the rock shelf that protected them and explored it. Behold!
The glory of the zoom. They found a few parrot fish beaks, and brought them back (no pics, sorry), as well as a number of shells and washed-up, broken-off bits of coral. Janneke and I were content to stay on shore this time. We passed the time quietly, tenderly berating each other for our failings and muttering over a series of long-standing grievances. It was nice.
On to supper, where we ordered far too much food, for which we paid far too much, at a restaurant called...Well, read the menu:
Some of the food was done over a wood fire:
And some of which was served in coconuts, freshly macheted open:
It was OK stuff. Better be, for what we paid for it. Then into the car (some locals had parked us in, forcing me to back out and come within millimeters of scratching their car. Millimeters. Though it could have been centimeters - I wanted to make a point. They had parked frickin' perpendicular to the obvious orientation of the lot and of the people (us) already parked there. Bastards.
I then missed an exit, forcing us to go across a bay we'd never crossed before, into a region of the city we knew well, whence we were able to easily find our way home again. Probably 25 minutes all told in the car getting back. Not bad. To bed! To rest for the coming day!
Today. Which began in the morning, with a trip to the Children's Museum, where a cupcake-decorating workshop was to be held. The museum would open at nine or ten, so we were into the old city pretty quickly - and it turns out, you can park aaaaaaaanywhere at 9:20 AM down there. That's the key. We parked and strolled in a leisurely fashion to the children's museum, located, some of you will recall, on the world's most beautiful street.
The museum opens on Saturdays, turns out, at noon.
No matter! Off to explore a bit of Old San Juan! Snapped some potential Christmas Card photos, found a little public park with a public basketball court and tennis court, and a little pink building with volunteers working inside, and two dozen cats lounging about in the grass and among the trees outside. A big sign there said that they were a charitable organization, run by volunteers, that dedicates itself solely to (1) trapping, (2) sterilizing, and (3) caring for, in ways both alimentary and veterinary, the feral cats of Old San Juan. Many of which, it appears from our chin-scratching survey, have now become very far from feral. Some great, beautiul cats prowling around down there - and they adopt them out to good homes, if any of you are interested:
There was also a mango tree dropping ripe fruit in that park. I ate some. Great, great stuff.
And there was a pelican:
And a tunnel:
And a guy selling piraguas (Puerto Rican snow cones):
And a bench upon which to sit while eating piraguas:
On to do some souvenir shopping. Q, interestingly, really wants a large, detailed map of Puerto Rico for his room. (BY THE WAY: Q is about 50 pages into an adventure novel for young people set in Puerto Rico and written by a Puerto Rican author and he's reading it IN SPANISH! We are so excited we can't breathe!) We didn't find a decent map, but we did find a gift, which T sneaked over to me and whispered that she wanted to secretly buy for Mami. So Q distracted her while we bought it, and then we presented it to her as we sat at the table outside of a place where we had a nearly-noon snack:
The owner of which has adopted one or two of the formerly feral cats, and accepts donations for the care of the yet-to-be-adopted:
And on to the dang children's museum, where the cupcake workshop had been postponed. Why? "Porque la persona que iba a liderar el taller, está de viaje." (Because the person who was going to lead the workshop, is on a trip.) Veeeeery weak. But we went in anyway, to learn that the men's bathroom wasn't working, and the kids' favorite display / manipulative learning area was out of order. Much less enamored of that museum are we right now. Still, they did some crafty stuff and had fun.
Home again, where we divided & conquered: I took Clarabelle for her travel health certificate, and Janneke took the kids shopping and to the beach, where we would meet up.
Except that it took me four hours to get the certificate.
FOUR HOURS! THey don't accept appointments at this place, they just have you come in and you're attended to in the order of your appearance. Four friggin' hours! Long story short, we have the certificate, and I was home in time for supper and a movie. And now the kids are in bed and tomorrow's friggin' Sunday and I am going to rest myself heavily and well. It has been a long day. A good one, to be sure, but a long one.
Sleep well, gentle reader. I hope I do.
The morning appears to have gone by uneventfully, because I do not recall anything from it. So we'll just leave that there. Although I do recall this: I did project stuff, and Janneke went off to meet up with a Williams student of hers who is from Puerto Rico. And who says her family wants to have us over for dinner. I'll believe it when I see it.
Post-lunch, we loaded up the car and headed to Piñones, a spot up the coast toward the East from here that all the Puerto Ricans tell us we have to get to, but which appears to go unmentioned in most of the guide-book-type material we have or have seen. The idea is that it's home to a large population of Puerto Ricans of African descent, that they sell food in lots of kiosks, that the beaches are protected and lovely, and that there's some sort of walkway that you ride bicycles on. So off we went.
Zoomed there in under twenty minutes via the highway. Unbelievable, how fast the Kia Sol can get one around a place.
We found this funny:
"Postal police"? Do they really need a car?
Following directions I got from a guy on the beach a couple weeks ago, we drove until we saw a school, then found a spot to park on the right hand side of the road; the left hand side, where there were bushes, would lead to the beach. So we pulled into the parking lot of a roadside eatery, where two elderly men were sitting at the rear of the parking lot. I approached them and asked if they allowed people to use their lot.
"We do," one of them said, "but we ask for three dollars in return."
"Fair and reasonable," I proclaimed, handed him $3, and gave him a firm handshake.
He smiled broadly. "Con toda confianza," he said. "Lo estaremos vigilando desde acá." Don't worry, we'll be watching it from here.
Both men were black, as was everyone working in or lounging in front of the restaurant. So far, the rumors were true.
Across the road there were stairs that led over the bushy dune and onto the beach. (There was also a dead cat and a lot of garbage.) And once we topped the dune, we could see that the beach was very different from Condado - Thundering surf, and strewn with all kinds of (mostly natural) ocean flotsam. (Or is it jetsam?) Coconuts, logs, leaves, shells, sea glass galore. And quite a bit of garbage. And, like I said, a thundering, pounding surf, with a number of surfers bobbing off shore.
Less true, that bit about the protected beach. Here it is:
Very pretty, but very far from calm. Still, we had passed a beach where there was a natural stone wall that divided an area, thirty yards across and four hundred long, from the pounding surf; we'd kept driving because it was so crowded. So maybe I had misheard the directions slightly. This beach had going for it the fact that apart from the surfers, who stayed out to sea a bit, we had the place to ourselves. And which also made us regret not bringing Clarabelle.
Though getting past the dead cat without the kids noticing would probably have been a lot trickier.
So we all frolicked in the heavy waves, which was a lot of fun. Like a carnival ride, throwing you up and then down. Kids enjoyed it, as you can see:
I was enjoying myself all the more with the strange thrill that one (apparently) gets when running around in public in one's underwear, as I had somehow neglected to bring along my bathing suit. We were probably there an hour, and then decided to head back to the restaurant for some grub before comparing and contrasting this beach with the protected one. Had some chicken pinchos:
Good stuff. And cheap. Off, then, to the proteced beach. Pulled in to the parking lot, off into the grass a bit, and Janneke opened her door, exactly over the corpse of a dead dog, reeking and boiling with maggots.
You've never seen anyone close a door so fast in your life. Nor anyone shift so quickly into reverse. Luckily, no one had stepped behind the car - although, to be honest, maybe they did, I don't think I would have noticed, it was all kind o a blur - and we rocketed to the opposite end of the parking lot. And walked from there over to the beach, where Q and T swam out to the rock shelf that protected them and explored it. Behold!
The glory of the zoom. They found a few parrot fish beaks, and brought them back (no pics, sorry), as well as a number of shells and washed-up, broken-off bits of coral. Janneke and I were content to stay on shore this time. We passed the time quietly, tenderly berating each other for our failings and muttering over a series of long-standing grievances. It was nice.
On to supper, where we ordered far too much food, for which we paid far too much, at a restaurant called...Well, read the menu:
Some of the food was done over a wood fire:
And some of which was served in coconuts, freshly macheted open:
It was OK stuff. Better be, for what we paid for it. Then into the car (some locals had parked us in, forcing me to back out and come within millimeters of scratching their car. Millimeters. Though it could have been centimeters - I wanted to make a point. They had parked frickin' perpendicular to the obvious orientation of the lot and of the people (us) already parked there. Bastards.
I then missed an exit, forcing us to go across a bay we'd never crossed before, into a region of the city we knew well, whence we were able to easily find our way home again. Probably 25 minutes all told in the car getting back. Not bad. To bed! To rest for the coming day!
Today. Which began in the morning, with a trip to the Children's Museum, where a cupcake-decorating workshop was to be held. The museum would open at nine or ten, so we were into the old city pretty quickly - and it turns out, you can park aaaaaaaanywhere at 9:20 AM down there. That's the key. We parked and strolled in a leisurely fashion to the children's museum, located, some of you will recall, on the world's most beautiful street.
The museum opens on Saturdays, turns out, at noon.
No matter! Off to explore a bit of Old San Juan! Snapped some potential Christmas Card photos, found a little public park with a public basketball court and tennis court, and a little pink building with volunteers working inside, and two dozen cats lounging about in the grass and among the trees outside. A big sign there said that they were a charitable organization, run by volunteers, that dedicates itself solely to (1) trapping, (2) sterilizing, and (3) caring for, in ways both alimentary and veterinary, the feral cats of Old San Juan. Many of which, it appears from our chin-scratching survey, have now become very far from feral. Some great, beautiul cats prowling around down there - and they adopt them out to good homes, if any of you are interested:
There was also a mango tree dropping ripe fruit in that park. I ate some. Great, great stuff.
And there was a pelican:
And a tunnel:
And a guy selling piraguas (Puerto Rican snow cones):
And a bench upon which to sit while eating piraguas:
On to do some souvenir shopping. Q, interestingly, really wants a large, detailed map of Puerto Rico for his room. (BY THE WAY: Q is about 50 pages into an adventure novel for young people set in Puerto Rico and written by a Puerto Rican author and he's reading it IN SPANISH! We are so excited we can't breathe!) We didn't find a decent map, but we did find a gift, which T sneaked over to me and whispered that she wanted to secretly buy for Mami. So Q distracted her while we bought it, and then we presented it to her as we sat at the table outside of a place where we had a nearly-noon snack:
The owner of which has adopted one or two of the formerly feral cats, and accepts donations for the care of the yet-to-be-adopted:
And on to the dang children's museum, where the cupcake workshop had been postponed. Why? "Porque la persona que iba a liderar el taller, está de viaje." (Because the person who was going to lead the workshop, is on a trip.) Veeeeery weak. But we went in anyway, to learn that the men's bathroom wasn't working, and the kids' favorite display / manipulative learning area was out of order. Much less enamored of that museum are we right now. Still, they did some crafty stuff and had fun.
Home again, where we divided & conquered: I took Clarabelle for her travel health certificate, and Janneke took the kids shopping and to the beach, where we would meet up.
Except that it took me four hours to get the certificate.
FOUR HOURS! THey don't accept appointments at this place, they just have you come in and you're attended to in the order of your appearance. Four friggin' hours! Long story short, we have the certificate, and I was home in time for supper and a movie. And now the kids are in bed and tomorrow's friggin' Sunday and I am going to rest myself heavily and well. It has been a long day. A good one, to be sure, but a long one.
Sleep well, gentle reader. I hope I do.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Night-Life. With Children.
Another dreary day in boring-ol' San Juan for us downtrodden, travel-weary hoboes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
At Least There Are Pictures
Well, 9:42 PM and it's still not raining, or wind-whipped, or under water. But I still hold out hope.
Up in the mornin', for some fairly extended lounging and puzzle-completing. T, who took the late night on the chin more than the rest of us, slept in quite late. We sneaked in and took a picture of her in repose, and I posted it here earlier, but I had mercy on future T and took it down. A bit much perhaps. I mean, you could still see the beer cans and cigar butts lying around her. It wouldn't have done her political career any favors.
Lunch at noon; Janneke took off with the kids to do grocery shopping in the early afternoon, and I set out with Clarabelle to reconnoiter a bit and see where the vet's office up the street is. We'll have to get a health certificate for Clarabelle in a few days - they want it to be from within 10 days of travel. So we walked up and found it.
There's really no more to that particular anecdote.
The fam came back from shopping, and I hit the market, where I spent some serious quality time with Basilisa in her botánica - no filming or anything, just shootin' the breeze - and we really enjoyed each other's company. Long chat about life and happiness and what makes people valuable to each other. Nice.
I also met someone who agreed to let me include him in the project, starting tomorrow at 7:00. very exciting.
Back home, where we all worked the puzzle, ate supper, and then settled in to watch the tail end of "Booky's Crush", which the kids and Janneke had begun in my absence the night I went to see "Harry Potter". I slept through it, honestly - it's one of those odd, low-budget Canadian productions that are just so...I don't know, Canadian. Wholesome and predictable and dull, filled with actors who aren't THAT good-looking or talented or interesting. I'll give you a list of films to watch and you'll probably see what I mean about this Canadian cardboard-colored film universe.
And that's friggin' it, man. That's the day it was. I wish there were more to tell you. But actually, I don't, because then I'd be even more sleepy than I already am. And I still have to walk the dog. Remember her?
Right, that's the one. Lucky I don't have to walk the cat. Remember her?
Right. Trying to place the lady holding her, though. I know I've seen her somewhere before.
Up in the mornin', for some fairly extended lounging and puzzle-completing. T, who took the late night on the chin more than the rest of us, slept in quite late. We sneaked in and took a picture of her in repose, and I posted it here earlier, but I had mercy on future T and took it down. A bit much perhaps. I mean, you could still see the beer cans and cigar butts lying around her. It wouldn't have done her political career any favors.
Lunch at noon; Janneke took off with the kids to do grocery shopping in the early afternoon, and I set out with Clarabelle to reconnoiter a bit and see where the vet's office up the street is. We'll have to get a health certificate for Clarabelle in a few days - they want it to be from within 10 days of travel. So we walked up and found it.
There's really no more to that particular anecdote.
The fam came back from shopping, and I hit the market, where I spent some serious quality time with Basilisa in her botánica - no filming or anything, just shootin' the breeze - and we really enjoyed each other's company. Long chat about life and happiness and what makes people valuable to each other. Nice.
I also met someone who agreed to let me include him in the project, starting tomorrow at 7:00. very exciting.
Back home, where we all worked the puzzle, ate supper, and then settled in to watch the tail end of "Booky's Crush", which the kids and Janneke had begun in my absence the night I went to see "Harry Potter". I slept through it, honestly - it's one of those odd, low-budget Canadian productions that are just so...I don't know, Canadian. Wholesome and predictable and dull, filled with actors who aren't THAT good-looking or talented or interesting. I'll give you a list of films to watch and you'll probably see what I mean about this Canadian cardboard-colored film universe.
And that's friggin' it, man. That's the day it was. I wish there were more to tell you. But actually, I don't, because then I'd be even more sleepy than I already am. And I still have to walk the dog. Remember her?
Right, that's the one. Lucky I don't have to walk the cat. Remember her?
Right. Trying to place the lady holding her, though. I know I've seen her somewhere before.
Midnight Kayaks in the Moonless Mangrove Forest
Another day, another tropical adventure.
Yesterday we all got up, as you know, since I blogged about it a bit, and worked the jigsaw puzzle while Janneke worked the academic system. Thence to the beach, where the kids found a log, sixteen inches in diameter and six feet long, bobbing in the waves, and waded out to push it to shore so they could play with it. Which quickly turned into Q rolling it T-ward, over a leg; T howled, I scrambled over and rolled it back.
Onto Q's leg.
What a barrel of monkeys that was. No one seriously hurt, thankfully, and we got to talk about why floating things are so much easier to manipulate than non-floating things. Didn't go the Erie Canal direction with the discussion. Though I could have.
Also read the paper there, where I learned that a tropical storm was bearing down on Puerto Rico, due to arrive Tuesday night. Very exciting stuff - it wasn't a named storm yet, but had a shot at becoming one. I got kind of excited about the prospect, though I'm quite sure it would mean hunkering down in the apartment for a good long while afterward. These power lines in Puerto Rico look like they might just collapse onto the street with no wind at all, let alone if there's a doozy on the way. Saw one hissing and sputtering and spitting sparks just the other night; when I walked past there with the kids yesterday, they had strung some police tape around the area. But the sparks continued to sputter.
Home for lunch, and then I trooped off to work on my project at the market for a while. Got some good stuff. I'll let you know.
Back to the homestead. Did some cleanin', Janneke warmed up dinner (leftove Bebo's food), and we all then set out for Fajardo and the bioluminescent bay.
What's that? It's a mangrove swamp, shallow bay, where microscopic organisms in the top several inches of the water glow when they're moved. So if you stick your arm or your paddle in the water and move it, it sends up shimmering light. We hadn't made it there on our last trip, so we determined to get there this time.
It took a little over an hour from San Juan. Shockingly, there was a bit of a traffic problem at 7:00 PM on a Monday night, so we were a titch concerned we wouldn't make it for our 8:30 scheduled arrival time. But it cleared up just past Carolina and we made great time the rest of the way, where we followed somewhat cryptic directions through Fajardo itself to the municipal park where the tour companies set up shop.
It's on the shore, and seems like it probably commands a nice view during the day. The hills above the bay are covered in houses, and the park itself is crawling at that time of night with at least three different kiosks or tents set up by different companies that lead kayak tours. We parked, found our company, and checked in; then at 9:00, we all assembled - probably 20 of us - to get our sea kayak instructions. T and I would be in one, Q and Janneke in another.
T was very excited about the whole prospect. She got a tiny life jacket with an amber light affixed to it - the only tourist with a light affixed; the rest of us had whistles stuck to our life jackets in case we got separated, but T got the light. And she and I were assigned the position at the front of the column, so the guide at the front, who had a blue light affixed to his back, would always be close to her. Pretty good system. Another guide was permanently at the middle of the column, and another at the back.
We were all assisted into the kayaks, and paddled out to the middle of the bay, where our guide latched onto a parked sailboat and we all held onto each other's kayaks via a short rope at the front, end-to-end like a a string of elephants, until the whole crew was assembled. And then the guide let go of our rope, said "Follow me!" (in English), and we were off.
I was immediately sea sick. The bay where you start is deep enough for sailboats, and unprotected enough to get some wave action, so between the darkness, the rocking, and the need to constantly focus on the sickly-glowing blue light twenty feet in front of me, I was pretty durned uncomfortable to start. But soon we crossed through the sailboats and glided through an opening in the tree-shrubs that surround the interior of the bay, and snaked through a tunnel of vegetation.
Total darkness, almost. I said to T that I was amazed the guide could find his way without a light; she said he's probably done this many times, and can see landmarks (though she didn't use that word) that the rest of us wouldn't even know to look for. Smart kid.
Ten, fifteen twenty minutes? Hard to say. But it passed pleasantly, going with the current through tunnels of mangrove, until we came into a large, circular (appeared so, anyway, in the moonless, starlit dark), almost-perfectly-flat bay. The water was amazingly warm; as we made our way to the center, I noticed that the glowing was happening with my kayak paddles.
It's very, very cool: it looks a lot like the trails of bubbles you sometimes see coming from your canoe paddle, that same formation, but it's all over the paddle, and it sparkles around it in a diminishing way the farther you get out form whatever moved the water. I informed T, who dipped her hand over the side and wiggled it, and giggled at the glow.
They called us together in the middle of the bay and tied us all into a floating pod, whereupon we got a fairly interesting talk on what the organisms are and how / why they do what they do. One theory is that if they all glow when the water moves, this will make other, more delicious bits of food in the water (apart from the microorganisms themselves) more obvious to predators, who will then choose to eat whatever made the motion rather than the organisms that pointed the motion out. Or that they blind a moving fish by glowing all around it, rendering it an ineffective predator. Could be. Then they turned us loose to paddle about for five minutes or so.
We'd drifted close to the edge by this time, and there, the effect is almost zero. So we paddled back to the center and splashed about for a very short time, it seemed, before being summoned together again by a long note on a conch shell. We formed up again and slid back through the tunnel toward the bay.
Right up at the front of the column, I got a great view of some incredibly incompetent paddling by the rear pair in the tour group ahead of ours - it is so, so frustrating to watch people flounder, with al kinds of energy, trying to get in one direction, and almost making it, but then not quite catching on to the way in which the kayak is a moving target, its motion affected continually by whatever you do, needing anticipation and variation in the sort of the placement of your strokes...It's something you can catch on to right away, but can also just utterly escape you. And that's what happened with these two, apparently teenagers. Poor kids - they really looked like they were suffering. But they were stoic and never whined or complained.
Thus did we wend our way back; T, incredibly, was asleep at her end of the kayak when we arrived. They bundled us all into a group again and talked at us for a while before helping us, boat by boat, to the shore; this last gab session was particularly frustrating to me, because I was again bobbing in the boat harbor waves, and was thus again sea sick. But because T was my partner, we got off first, and the quease gradually waned.
They had a litle machine available for us to squeeze our own orange juice, which is a neat, but terrible, idea, because with 20 people, and the time it takes to squeeze each orange half, there's just no way everybody's going to get some. Luckily, though, again, we were with kids, so we went first. The kids drank it (we didn't think it prudent to make everybody wait for Janneke and me), and soon we were changing into dry clothes and sorting through our directions to get back home.
In bed by 1:30 AM. Wow. Fun, great evening, but we're paying for it now. And when I try to, I can still call up some sea sickness; it hangs around in my skin and seeps back down to affect my stomach for some time after the initial bob, it seems. Wonderful.
No pictures - they just don't turn out with the low-level glow. You'll have to trust us.
Yesterday we all got up, as you know, since I blogged about it a bit, and worked the jigsaw puzzle while Janneke worked the academic system. Thence to the beach, where the kids found a log, sixteen inches in diameter and six feet long, bobbing in the waves, and waded out to push it to shore so they could play with it. Which quickly turned into Q rolling it T-ward, over a leg; T howled, I scrambled over and rolled it back.
Onto Q's leg.
What a barrel of monkeys that was. No one seriously hurt, thankfully, and we got to talk about why floating things are so much easier to manipulate than non-floating things. Didn't go the Erie Canal direction with the discussion. Though I could have.
Also read the paper there, where I learned that a tropical storm was bearing down on Puerto Rico, due to arrive Tuesday night. Very exciting stuff - it wasn't a named storm yet, but had a shot at becoming one. I got kind of excited about the prospect, though I'm quite sure it would mean hunkering down in the apartment for a good long while afterward. These power lines in Puerto Rico look like they might just collapse onto the street with no wind at all, let alone if there's a doozy on the way. Saw one hissing and sputtering and spitting sparks just the other night; when I walked past there with the kids yesterday, they had strung some police tape around the area. But the sparks continued to sputter.
Home for lunch, and then I trooped off to work on my project at the market for a while. Got some good stuff. I'll let you know.
Back to the homestead. Did some cleanin', Janneke warmed up dinner (leftove Bebo's food), and we all then set out for Fajardo and the bioluminescent bay.
What's that? It's a mangrove swamp, shallow bay, where microscopic organisms in the top several inches of the water glow when they're moved. So if you stick your arm or your paddle in the water and move it, it sends up shimmering light. We hadn't made it there on our last trip, so we determined to get there this time.
It took a little over an hour from San Juan. Shockingly, there was a bit of a traffic problem at 7:00 PM on a Monday night, so we were a titch concerned we wouldn't make it for our 8:30 scheduled arrival time. But it cleared up just past Carolina and we made great time the rest of the way, where we followed somewhat cryptic directions through Fajardo itself to the municipal park where the tour companies set up shop.
It's on the shore, and seems like it probably commands a nice view during the day. The hills above the bay are covered in houses, and the park itself is crawling at that time of night with at least three different kiosks or tents set up by different companies that lead kayak tours. We parked, found our company, and checked in; then at 9:00, we all assembled - probably 20 of us - to get our sea kayak instructions. T and I would be in one, Q and Janneke in another.
T was very excited about the whole prospect. She got a tiny life jacket with an amber light affixed to it - the only tourist with a light affixed; the rest of us had whistles stuck to our life jackets in case we got separated, but T got the light. And she and I were assigned the position at the front of the column, so the guide at the front, who had a blue light affixed to his back, would always be close to her. Pretty good system. Another guide was permanently at the middle of the column, and another at the back.
We were all assisted into the kayaks, and paddled out to the middle of the bay, where our guide latched onto a parked sailboat and we all held onto each other's kayaks via a short rope at the front, end-to-end like a a string of elephants, until the whole crew was assembled. And then the guide let go of our rope, said "Follow me!" (in English), and we were off.
I was immediately sea sick. The bay where you start is deep enough for sailboats, and unprotected enough to get some wave action, so between the darkness, the rocking, and the need to constantly focus on the sickly-glowing blue light twenty feet in front of me, I was pretty durned uncomfortable to start. But soon we crossed through the sailboats and glided through an opening in the tree-shrubs that surround the interior of the bay, and snaked through a tunnel of vegetation.
Total darkness, almost. I said to T that I was amazed the guide could find his way without a light; she said he's probably done this many times, and can see landmarks (though she didn't use that word) that the rest of us wouldn't even know to look for. Smart kid.
Ten, fifteen twenty minutes? Hard to say. But it passed pleasantly, going with the current through tunnels of mangrove, until we came into a large, circular (appeared so, anyway, in the moonless, starlit dark), almost-perfectly-flat bay. The water was amazingly warm; as we made our way to the center, I noticed that the glowing was happening with my kayak paddles.
It's very, very cool: it looks a lot like the trails of bubbles you sometimes see coming from your canoe paddle, that same formation, but it's all over the paddle, and it sparkles around it in a diminishing way the farther you get out form whatever moved the water. I informed T, who dipped her hand over the side and wiggled it, and giggled at the glow.
They called us together in the middle of the bay and tied us all into a floating pod, whereupon we got a fairly interesting talk on what the organisms are and how / why they do what they do. One theory is that if they all glow when the water moves, this will make other, more delicious bits of food in the water (apart from the microorganisms themselves) more obvious to predators, who will then choose to eat whatever made the motion rather than the organisms that pointed the motion out. Or that they blind a moving fish by glowing all around it, rendering it an ineffective predator. Could be. Then they turned us loose to paddle about for five minutes or so.
We'd drifted close to the edge by this time, and there, the effect is almost zero. So we paddled back to the center and splashed about for a very short time, it seemed, before being summoned together again by a long note on a conch shell. We formed up again and slid back through the tunnel toward the bay.
Right up at the front of the column, I got a great view of some incredibly incompetent paddling by the rear pair in the tour group ahead of ours - it is so, so frustrating to watch people flounder, with al kinds of energy, trying to get in one direction, and almost making it, but then not quite catching on to the way in which the kayak is a moving target, its motion affected continually by whatever you do, needing anticipation and variation in the sort of the placement of your strokes...It's something you can catch on to right away, but can also just utterly escape you. And that's what happened with these two, apparently teenagers. Poor kids - they really looked like they were suffering. But they were stoic and never whined or complained.
Thus did we wend our way back; T, incredibly, was asleep at her end of the kayak when we arrived. They bundled us all into a group again and talked at us for a while before helping us, boat by boat, to the shore; this last gab session was particularly frustrating to me, because I was again bobbing in the boat harbor waves, and was thus again sea sick. But because T was my partner, we got off first, and the quease gradually waned.
They had a litle machine available for us to squeeze our own orange juice, which is a neat, but terrible, idea, because with 20 people, and the time it takes to squeeze each orange half, there's just no way everybody's going to get some. Luckily, though, again, we were with kids, so we went first. The kids drank it (we didn't think it prudent to make everybody wait for Janneke and me), and soon we were changing into dry clothes and sorting through our directions to get back home.
In bed by 1:30 AM. Wow. Fun, great evening, but we're paying for it now. And when I try to, I can still call up some sea sickness; it hangs around in my skin and seeps back down to affect my stomach for some time after the initial bob, it seems. Wonderful.
No pictures - they just don't turn out with the low-level glow. You'll have to trust us.
Monday, August 1, 2011
Working Through the Pieces
It's a fine day for a post. And you deserve it.
Yesterday was the 31st of July, which was the last day of our original car rental. We had planned to have a car for all of July, but then be carless for the two weeks of August that we'll be here. And when I say "we", I mean "Janneke", who had been concerned about the cost of renting a car, back in the planning stages. As well she might be - it ain't cheap. But as we've seen over the course of July, we get so much out of it, that it's absolutely worth it. We have the entire city - Nay! The entire ISLAND! - at our fingertips with a car, whereas without it, we're crippled and hobbled and stranded.
Case in point: I drove out yesterday to Enterprise Rent-a-Car, which is past the airport. It took me probably ten or eleven minutes to get there. Knew exactly where to go: it's in Isla Verde, a sector of town with lots of hotels and casinos and long, sandy beaches. Four years ago, during one of the three out of four weeks when we didn't have a car, we had tried to get to Isla Verde to check out the beaches by using the bus system. You can look up the post if you like (here), and learn just how frustrating it can be to try to get out to where a car can get you as if via Star Trek transporter beam. We may head out there tomorrow - we've bumped into several Puerto Ricans who say that we just must see Piñones, home of a long, protected beach, and a large population of Afro-Puerto Ricans, with lots of food kiosks and hospitality galore. I saw the exact exit with the highway that they told us we should follow. It'll be like taking candy from a baby.
Dropped in to Enterprise, where I'd been told we wouldn't have to change cars; I had a reservation number from the lady on the phone, and would just have to get the new paperwork and drive home again. They didn't tell us that they would inspect the car prior to signing it out again; had they told me that, I'd have had a different attitude about the whole business. Because there is a scratch on the car.
Now, before you faint, hear me out: We have rental car insurance through our credit card. I'm not sure how it works, exactly, but I'm told we have it. The lady at Enterprise said they have to charge the deductible, and then they start haggling with the credit card company. I tried once to get hold of someone at Visa (and I'll try it again today), but after half an hour at $.10/minute, I'd given up. So I wound up having to transfer everything from the old car to the new one (snorkeling gear, Q's scooter, all the recycling we've been saving up). Bother.
But a nice car.
Drove home again, to find he fam making lunch. Partook thereof, and then we worked on the jigsaw puzzle a while. Janneke had purchased a thousand-piece one at Borders the other day, and it has been an absolute hoot. It's some shclocky scene of nighttime parks with fall foliage and city lights glistening through the trees. Hideous. And hard. But we're managing - the kids are very much better at it than I am. More patience, more methodical piece-sorting, I don't know. But they're good.
Janneke decided that with all the laundry she has to do, she won't have time to make supper, so she suggested we hit Bebo's, the kids' favorite restaurant here. We all heartily agreed.
Thence to the beach, which was absolutely jammed. We took Clarabelle, and did our trick of heading left to the rocky portion to avoid the crowds. Worked like a charm, and Q, with his new water shoes, was walking across the rocks (with me, I must admit), when he stumbled and caught himself with his hand - and filled the end of one finger with sea urchin spines. Just can't win, this kid, where sea urchins are concerned. He and I walked back to the apartment to try to get some of them out - we got maybe two of the six or seven out of there. He decreed the rest not to be very painful, and we returned to the beach.
Janneke did a good long walk up and down the beach, then we switched off, and I went home, left Clarabelle (it's a bit of a drag to be on the beach alone with her and the kids; hard to pay enough attention to either), and went out for a run.
Early on, there was a couple coming the opposite direction on the sidewalk, who were portly and stiff and seemed flabbergasted about what to do when faced with a jogger. Fine, I thought: I'm young(er), quick(er), and considerate(r): I'll jump off into this patch of long grass and jog through that so they can continue to waddle along in their current formation. What could possibly go wrong?
"Clang!" The grass is six or eight inches high, and hidden among its blades is a steel post, about four inches high. I caught it with the inside edge of my foot, just where the big toe meets the ball of the foot. No blood, but a lot of soreness. Onward!
I ran my route quickly and happily, and then went back to the beach, where Janneke and the kids had moved. I knew this; when I took Clarabelle home, I'd taken the keys, and then jogged back to find them so I could leave the keys with them, and had found them a hundred and fifty yards farther east, where the water's rock-free and it doesn't matter how many people are around because they no longer had Clarabelle. But when I finished the run, somehow it seemed to me that they would be to the right of the culvert that drains rainwater into the sea. I looked and looked among the bikini-clad hordes, and looked and looked and looked, and looked, but couldn't find them. So I looked some more, and then concluded that they'd gone back to the apartment.
While looking, I'd been soaking in the sea, and my heart beat had been returning to normal, my muscles cooling down, my adrenaline draining out of my system. And when I decided to walk to the apartment and left the water, my right foot, where I'd hit the post, was throbbing. It was along walk - felt that way, with my foot, though it was a block and a half - to the apartment, where I got no answer. So I trudged sorely back to the beach - my foot was purple where I'd hit it - and found them, not twenty yards to the EAST of where the street enters the beach. Duh.
Back to the healing waters, and then me back to the apartment to start the showering process; kids and Janneke followed soon thereafter. Once we'd all gotten tidied up, we headed to Bebo's, a two-minute walk away.
The place was jammed, which we expected, but we did not expect to wait 25 minutes to be served our drinks. It didn't get much better form there, service-wise; she seemed attentive, our waitress did, when she was around, but every one of the tables around us - all four of them - had people arrive after us, get served, pay, and leave before our oddyssey ended. The food was great, but we decided we definitely needed to send a message with the tip. Which got a bit awkward - or could have - when she pesented us with the bill, and asked quite up-front, "Are you going to put in the suggested gratuity?" "No," I said, "we'll take care of that in cash." This seemed to set her aback a bit, which is the point. Lady, we aren't blind. Put a wiggle in it next time.
Home and to bed. The whole family these days piles into our room before bed to read in the air-conditioning. It's a nice time. No pictures, though; considerable percentages of the family usually participate in their underway. And some of us have a love-handle problem we're trying to work through.
And now it's Monday morning. Janneke's taking the morning to do work, and I'm going out in the afternoon to visit the market again; the kids are breakfasted and are currently doing this:
The U-shape in the middle of the pieces is a strategy Q came up with last night: When there's a particularly odd-shaped piece that you can't seem to see, but you know must be in the mess somewhere, you slide them all over one by one, thus sorting them into a "searched" area and a "not yet searched" area. And the piece just can't escape.
T asked me to take one just of her, so here it is:
And, in the interest of fairness:
Yesterday was the 31st of July, which was the last day of our original car rental. We had planned to have a car for all of July, but then be carless for the two weeks of August that we'll be here. And when I say "we", I mean "Janneke", who had been concerned about the cost of renting a car, back in the planning stages. As well she might be - it ain't cheap. But as we've seen over the course of July, we get so much out of it, that it's absolutely worth it. We have the entire city - Nay! The entire ISLAND! - at our fingertips with a car, whereas without it, we're crippled and hobbled and stranded.
Case in point: I drove out yesterday to Enterprise Rent-a-Car, which is past the airport. It took me probably ten or eleven minutes to get there. Knew exactly where to go: it's in Isla Verde, a sector of town with lots of hotels and casinos and long, sandy beaches. Four years ago, during one of the three out of four weeks when we didn't have a car, we had tried to get to Isla Verde to check out the beaches by using the bus system. You can look up the post if you like (here), and learn just how frustrating it can be to try to get out to where a car can get you as if via Star Trek transporter beam. We may head out there tomorrow - we've bumped into several Puerto Ricans who say that we just must see Piñones, home of a long, protected beach, and a large population of Afro-Puerto Ricans, with lots of food kiosks and hospitality galore. I saw the exact exit with the highway that they told us we should follow. It'll be like taking candy from a baby.
Dropped in to Enterprise, where I'd been told we wouldn't have to change cars; I had a reservation number from the lady on the phone, and would just have to get the new paperwork and drive home again. They didn't tell us that they would inspect the car prior to signing it out again; had they told me that, I'd have had a different attitude about the whole business. Because there is a scratch on the car.
Now, before you faint, hear me out: We have rental car insurance through our credit card. I'm not sure how it works, exactly, but I'm told we have it. The lady at Enterprise said they have to charge the deductible, and then they start haggling with the credit card company. I tried once to get hold of someone at Visa (and I'll try it again today), but after half an hour at $.10/minute, I'd given up. So I wound up having to transfer everything from the old car to the new one (snorkeling gear, Q's scooter, all the recycling we've been saving up). Bother.
But a nice car.
Drove home again, to find he fam making lunch. Partook thereof, and then we worked on the jigsaw puzzle a while. Janneke had purchased a thousand-piece one at Borders the other day, and it has been an absolute hoot. It's some shclocky scene of nighttime parks with fall foliage and city lights glistening through the trees. Hideous. And hard. But we're managing - the kids are very much better at it than I am. More patience, more methodical piece-sorting, I don't know. But they're good.
Janneke decided that with all the laundry she has to do, she won't have time to make supper, so she suggested we hit Bebo's, the kids' favorite restaurant here. We all heartily agreed.
Thence to the beach, which was absolutely jammed. We took Clarabelle, and did our trick of heading left to the rocky portion to avoid the crowds. Worked like a charm, and Q, with his new water shoes, was walking across the rocks (with me, I must admit), when he stumbled and caught himself with his hand - and filled the end of one finger with sea urchin spines. Just can't win, this kid, where sea urchins are concerned. He and I walked back to the apartment to try to get some of them out - we got maybe two of the six or seven out of there. He decreed the rest not to be very painful, and we returned to the beach.
Janneke did a good long walk up and down the beach, then we switched off, and I went home, left Clarabelle (it's a bit of a drag to be on the beach alone with her and the kids; hard to pay enough attention to either), and went out for a run.
Early on, there was a couple coming the opposite direction on the sidewalk, who were portly and stiff and seemed flabbergasted about what to do when faced with a jogger. Fine, I thought: I'm young(er), quick(er), and considerate(r): I'll jump off into this patch of long grass and jog through that so they can continue to waddle along in their current formation. What could possibly go wrong?
"Clang!" The grass is six or eight inches high, and hidden among its blades is a steel post, about four inches high. I caught it with the inside edge of my foot, just where the big toe meets the ball of the foot. No blood, but a lot of soreness. Onward!
I ran my route quickly and happily, and then went back to the beach, where Janneke and the kids had moved. I knew this; when I took Clarabelle home, I'd taken the keys, and then jogged back to find them so I could leave the keys with them, and had found them a hundred and fifty yards farther east, where the water's rock-free and it doesn't matter how many people are around because they no longer had Clarabelle. But when I finished the run, somehow it seemed to me that they would be to the right of the culvert that drains rainwater into the sea. I looked and looked among the bikini-clad hordes, and looked and looked and looked, and looked, but couldn't find them. So I looked some more, and then concluded that they'd gone back to the apartment.
While looking, I'd been soaking in the sea, and my heart beat had been returning to normal, my muscles cooling down, my adrenaline draining out of my system. And when I decided to walk to the apartment and left the water, my right foot, where I'd hit the post, was throbbing. It was along walk - felt that way, with my foot, though it was a block and a half - to the apartment, where I got no answer. So I trudged sorely back to the beach - my foot was purple where I'd hit it - and found them, not twenty yards to the EAST of where the street enters the beach. Duh.
Back to the healing waters, and then me back to the apartment to start the showering process; kids and Janneke followed soon thereafter. Once we'd all gotten tidied up, we headed to Bebo's, a two-minute walk away.
The place was jammed, which we expected, but we did not expect to wait 25 minutes to be served our drinks. It didn't get much better form there, service-wise; she seemed attentive, our waitress did, when she was around, but every one of the tables around us - all four of them - had people arrive after us, get served, pay, and leave before our oddyssey ended. The food was great, but we decided we definitely needed to send a message with the tip. Which got a bit awkward - or could have - when she pesented us with the bill, and asked quite up-front, "Are you going to put in the suggested gratuity?" "No," I said, "we'll take care of that in cash." This seemed to set her aback a bit, which is the point. Lady, we aren't blind. Put a wiggle in it next time.
Home and to bed. The whole family these days piles into our room before bed to read in the air-conditioning. It's a nice time. No pictures, though; considerable percentages of the family usually participate in their underway. And some of us have a love-handle problem we're trying to work through.
And now it's Monday morning. Janneke's taking the morning to do work, and I'm going out in the afternoon to visit the market again; the kids are breakfasted and are currently doing this:
The U-shape in the middle of the pieces is a strategy Q came up with last night: When there's a particularly odd-shaped piece that you can't seem to see, but you know must be in the mess somewhere, you slide them all over one by one, thus sorting them into a "searched" area and a "not yet searched" area. And the piece just can't escape.
T asked me to take one just of her, so here it is:
And, in the interest of fairness:
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