San Juan, 2nd time.

Dec 6    

Good day today in Puerto Rico.  Had I been paying attention I would probably have tried to get to the rainforest, but I’ll try to make that happen the next time.  Instead I wandered around the old city of San Juan.  First I found that down by the ship terminal, there is free internet just in the air everywhere.  Pretty slick.  Then I wandered for a while and eventually found myself outside an old fort called Castillo San Cristobal, which happens to be a national historic site.  I went in, but I only had 45 minutes to explore.  It was fantastic!  Being a fort, it had great views of the ocean and of the city.  The sun set in spectacular fashion while I was there.  There was a dungeon and long secret passages where it felt like there was just enough oxygen in the air to breathe.

When I left the fort the sun was setting and the streets were all lighting up.  Something about the narrowness or just the way it was lit gave the city a very friendly cozy feel.  I asked a group of arty looking young folks if they knew a good place to grab a bite to eat and they invited me to join them because they were just headed out to a place.  They described it as somewhere that might not even have a sign on it.  I was very excited until the group sort of fell apart in the face of other logistics that needed to be dealt with that were more important that getting food, but they were in fact art people and they had a design space and program called betalocal.  Very clean on the inside.  White.  Design magazines.  Lots of apple products.  I wish I’d gotten to hang out a bit more, but I needed to find my way back to the ship, and food.

 

I looked a little more.  I went into a bar that turned out to be completely terrible.  No Presidente beer, which is a local (Dominican Repub.) that is pretty good.  The bartender said, “Well I’ve got just one more Miller,” in a tone that indicated that I was receiving a secret that I was going to be very excited about.  I asked what else he had.  There was one other local beer that I didn’t know that I was going to try, but just as he was about to open it I saw it said “Light.”  So I stopped him.  And left. 

Found a  place down the street with Presidente and Mofongo, which I had seen on the menus of several places that I’d passed and had no idea what it was.  At this place I gleaned from the menu that it had mashed up plantains in it.  You could order it with meat and stuff in it, or plain.  I got it plain because I could get that in a small portion.  It came in three little almost bite size piles.  Seemed like mostly mashed plaintain, but not whipped or anything, it still had some good texture to it.  It was pretty great.  I’ll try it as a meal sometime if I get the chance instead of just a snack.

And here's the underwater photos from Roatan I promised.

Mmmm.   Brains.