danajohnhill.org | Hard Times Come Again No More

This is the story of the most action-packed vacation in history.

We arrived in San Juan in the early afternoon, and took the short taxi ride to our hotel, the Intercontinental San Juan Resort and Casino.  We were shocked when the front desk clerk told us we must pay a $500 deposit “for incidentals”.  We had purchased a vacation package months ago, which included our airfare and hotel.  We knew we’d have to pay for parking and taxes, but didn’t expect to pay such a large sum up front.  It cut into our walkin’ around money quite a bit.  To make matters worse, to pick up the rental car we’d reserved we had to pay a $400 deposit.  At the end of the week, Avis would refund the deposit less the rental fee.  Thankfully, that was the end of our troubles for the entire vacation (save one rainy morning).  The desk clerk gave us a sweet room upgrade on the eleventh floor with a beach view.  Plus, the girl at the Avis desk–conveniently located in the hotel lobby–upgraded us to a Nissan Rogue.  It was quite nice, and made us feel better.

We spent that afternoon hanging out near the hotel, deciding to take it easy.  There were several restaurants across the street, so we ate, and got directions to the nearest supermarket from two police officers.  Pueblo is quite similar to Albertson’s.  I was fascinated by all the exotic products.  Brands we know well in the USA make items for the Latin American market that we never see here.  And items that we do have look different.  Two-liter Pepsi bottles were tall and slender, and Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes are called something else entirely.  Soda was less expensive than in the USA ($1.07 for two liters), but dairy products were much more: milk cost $5.99 per gallon.  The Puerto Rico equivalent of Merita or Hostess is called Holsum, and I bought a package of their little donuts with powdered sugar called “Donitas”.  They were delightful, and over the course of our vacation I must have eaten eighty little donuts.  I even wrote a song about them:

Donitas, me gusta comer Donitas.
Te quiero, mi amor, Donitas.
La comida de Dios, Donitas!

I would like to make a music video for my song in a very Univision style, with lots of blown-back hair, camera zooming, and a scene where I pick my face up out of a pile of powdered sugar, like the scene from Scarface where Al Pacino lays face down in a  mountain of cocaine.  I can’t say enough good things about Donitas.

But, even better than Donitas was a treat I had for the first time ever the day we spent in Old San Juan.  The historic eatery called La Bombonera sells something called Mallorcas, and they are a gift from heaven.  They look like small spirals of dough sprinkled with powdered sugar.  You can get them in this soft form, but I had mine grilled, without the cheese or meat that others prefer.  They were indescribably good, and I wished I had a larger stomach so that I could have eaten more of them.  More about La Bombonera later.

After dinner our first night, we went down to the beach, then swam in the pool after dark.  The constant breeze and cool water was completely refreshing.  The pool, which was huge and had a waterfall and a bridge over it, was open all day and night, but we sometimes went down too late to get towels from the gazebo, and had to feel very cold coming up in the air-conditioned elevator.  Then, back in the room, we opened the sliding glass door to the small balcony, and delighted in the breeze that blew back the curtains.  Most of the time that we spent in our room was with the door open.  Some nights we could see the cruise ships leaving San Juan and heading east, and the sight of their bright lights sailing toward the horizon was enchanting.  So ended our first day in Puerto Rico.

More to come.

Filed under: Food, Travel on August 26th, 2009 | 1 Comment »

ORLANDO – Stepping off the airplane this afternoon and walking into the bright and spacious concourse here was like entering the future.  After a week in Puerto Rico, many aspects of life in the United States which I have heretofore taken for granted seem like wonderful luxuries.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Puerto Rico is, in many respects, the third world.  True, many luxury hotels line the Atlantic coast in San Juan, and while there, Miriam and I could walk around the corner to Pueblo, which felt remarkably like an Albertson’s.  At the same time, however, a level of poverty exists there which is simply unknown in the the USA.  And that poverty is pervasive.  Unlike in America, Puerto Rican slums and projects stand right beside the homes of the wealthy, and slums stand on beachfront property.  Thus, Puerto Rico often felt like a foreign country to me.

As we drove from Orlando International Airport to Miriam’s parents’ home, the wide, safe, well-lit, properly maintained highway seemed to me like a vision from a futuristic utopia.

While I am glad to be home, and enjoy the luxuries of life in the United States, I am aware that I just took a legendary vacation that I will remember fondly for the rest of my life.

Filed under: Musings, Travel on August 21st, 2009 | No Comments »

SAN JUAN – In Puerto Rico, crowds are everywhere.  On every narrow sidewalk, one must step off the curb or duck into a doorway to allow approaching pedestrians to pass.  The traffic jams out of the capital every evening are of a biblical scale.  Smaller towns, too, have bumper-to-bumper traffic through the narrow lanes, and vendors at every corner.

The number of people selling food in Puerto Rico is impossible to exaggerate.  Where ever one stands here, several dining opportunities are within view.  At street corners, men and women sell fruit.  At roadside kiosks, vendors sell all manner of fried and roasted meat.  Restaurants fill every building.  I know that seems like hyperbole, but when I say that you can’t turn your head without finding a place to eat, I mean it.  In people’s homes, from people’s cars, from stand-alone structures and on foot, food is for sale.

Perhaps the most unexpected thing I have found amidst the huddled masses, baking in the heat here is a kind and jovial politeness.  Almost without exception, everyone with whom I have come into contact in Puerto Rico has been very nice.  Even in situations in which one might expect a degree of curtness or even aggression, there is none.  For example, Miriam and I attempted to access the former United States Navy base called Roesevelt Roads on the east side of the island.  At three different checkpoints we were turned away.  But, each guard with whom we spoke was friendly and polite.  In America, security guards are so often complete jerks, that I was taken aback.  And, even when it sounds like Puerto Ricans are angry and shouting at one another–and people here are loud, to be sure–it isn’t what it seems.  On a sidewalk beside a vast expanse of lawn that sits before San Felipe del Morro, as we enjoyed delicious piraguas, we saw a family pass.  The children were shouting as children always do, and the mother seemed to be speaking sternly to them.  But, what they were really saying, in Spanish, of course, was how beautiful the kites were, and how nice the weather was.

Puerto Rico is crowded, dirty, and poor as can be.  But the people here are warm and friendly.  I will miss this.

Filed under: Food, Travel on August 21st, 2009 | No Comments »

SAN JUAN – Where ever it is that you live, you can probably depend upon a certain minimum level of traffic control.  Street signs, traffic lights, medians, dividers, lanes, and so on.  In Puerto Rico, those things are rare luxuries.  Put simply, this place is Thunderdome.

Each morning, we walk across the street in front of our hotel to the lot where our rented Nissan waits for us.  Parking isn’t a problem.  It’s expensive, but spaces are ample.  Depending on where we’re going, we turn either right or left.  Left takes us into Old San Juan, or the highways that lead to the western and southern portions of the island.  Cities like Arecibo and Aguadilla are reached via PR-2, which roughly follows the contours of the Atlantic coast.  Ponce, near the Caribbean coast, requires a journey south, via PR-52.  To reach the eastern portion of the island, we turn right out of the parking lot, travel down some two-lane roads past public beaches and vendors selling all manner of Puerto Rican cuisine, and connect to PR-3, which leads to Fajardo.

Some of these highways are limited-access freeways like the Interstate system.  Elsewhere, they are more like standard American highways, with at least two lanes in each direction, but intersections and direct access from shopping centers and local streets.  Some have tolls, though they are spread far apart, and are inexpensive.  The highest I encountered was $1.50, and most were half that.

Depending on where you’re going, however, these highways may get you only half way there.  The center of the island is rural, rugged and mountainous.  Though the peaks don’t generally exceed a few thousand feet, they do so from sea level and are quite steep.  The two-lane roads that connect the small towns in the interior are unlike anything I’ve ever seen in the USA.  First and foremost, almost none have lane markers.  (That goes for many of the main highways, too, where the first few hundred yards on either side of an intersection have no lines of any kind.)  This means that drivers move freely across the surface of the road.  On a four-lane highway, it’s bad enough to constantly fear that the driver in the lane next to you will try to move over.  On narrow roads high in the mountains, a car in your lane as you round a corner may mean certain death.  Meanwhile, these rural two-lane roads in the mountains are narrower than an average American driveway.  Imagine the door of your two-car garage.  Now, imagine coming around a blind corner fifteen hundred feet above the forest floor, finding a car in what should be your lane–if there was one–and having to pass in the space of that open garage door.  Imagine doing that at speed, where a false move will send you down into a ravine.  That happens a dozen times every kilometer in Puerto Rico.  (Curiously, distances are measured in kilometers, but speed limits in miles per hour.)

Meanwhile, the narrow, lane-less roads are invariably in terrible condition.  Huge potholes dot every street, rural or urban.  In cities, drivers must avoid these, while simultaneously dodging deep-set manhole covers placed in a seemingly random fashion, and wide metal grates which aid in drainage.  One such grate awaits those who exit PR-26 at Isla Verde.  If you know it’s there you can try and slow down, because hitting it at forty-five miles per hour would be devastating to tires.

Making things worse, Puerto Rican drivers do not use turn signals.  Ever.  You never know what anyone is going to do until they do it.  And they practice something Miriam refers to as “nudging”, in which, when leaving a shopping center or trying to change lanes at an intersection, they just push the noses of their cars into traffic, forcing others to either let them in, or crash into them.  Nudging may be so necessary and frequent because the names of streets are seldom indicated with visible signage.  If you’re lucky, you’ll see some faded tiles on the side of a corner building.  But you will frequently go for blocks in a city without seeing anything indicating where in the world you are.  It’s indescribably aggravating.

Add to all of this an innate Puerto Rican recklessness, and you have the recipe for disaster.  And yet, after seven days and almost nine hundred miles of driving, I saw only one accident – on my very last day.  I’ve never made the hour and a half drive from Gainesville to Orlando without passing at least one accident.  This afternoon, after watching a bicyclist charge blindly into traffic on a busy Ponce street, I came to a conclusion: God loves Puerto Ricans and protects them from automotive disaster.  The combination of bad roads and bad driving here made me expect to see corpses piled high beside shredded wreckage, but, no.  Some divine hand is keeping them safe.  May it be ever thus.

Filed under: Geography, Transportation, Travel on August 20th, 2009 | 2 Comments »

SAN JUAN – I feel bad about not writing more about my many adventures since arriving in Puerto Rico a week ago, but the truth is that I have been in a state of almost constant motion.  Each day has brought something new.  Yesterday, for example, we explored the northeast portion of the island, particularly around Fajardo.  I got to see the house that Miriam lived in until she was eighteen years old.  Then, at dusk, we climbed in a kayak and paddled across a small bay, through a natural channel surrounded by mangroves and trees, and into a lagoon unlike any other I have ever seen in my life.  It glowed.

I’ll write about it all, I swear.  But, right now we’re headed south, to Ponce, to see the historic town, and see the Caribbean Sea.

Filed under: Travel on August 20th, 2009 | No Comments »