Two weeks ago, Marcia, Kyle, and I drove up to my old home of Portland, Oregon and spent a few days there. Kyle went to a Linux conference and Marcia and I hung out. Here are 10 things we did:

1. Went to Powell’s Bookstore. My favorite bookstore, ever. It is the biggest used-and-new bookstore in the world. I brought some books to sell with me and ended up with $50 in credit for the store, which I was happy to use.

2. Stayed in a very noisy hotel. We stayed at the Ace Hotel. I do not recommend it. While it has a nice atmosphere and good location, the rooms are so stripped down, it feels like you are camping, what with the sink in the main part of the room and the mattress as hard as a rock. More importantly, it is the noisiest hotel I have ever stayed at. Not only can you hear everything your neighbors are doing, every morning at 5 a.m., some men come in front of the hotel and empty garbage for about an hour into their trucks. So you are awakened to engines roaring, bottles crashing, and men shouting. We couldn’t figure out what they were doing every morning, but it was loud!

3. Drank awesome coffee. Stumptown Coffee, man. Why can’t Petaluma have a coffee shop like that?

4. Went wine tasting. Marcia needed to do a little work while we were in Portland, and since she writes for a liquor site, she wanted to check out wine tasting in Oregon. Verdict: Grape vines look pretty anywhere.

5. Went shopping. Three words: No sales tax.

6. Ate fancy food. The best place we ate at was Paley’s Place. Among other things, they introduced me to properly cooked escargot. Turns out the other time I had escargot, it was badly done, i.e. rubbery. It turns out that snail protein is very delicate and turns rubbery when overcooked. In the hands of a good chef, escargot is pretty darn delicious.

7. Saw the tip of Mt Hood.

(I like the shadows in this picture)

8. Ate flaming cheese. We had a big lunch at a Greek place and had lemon-drenched cheese that was lit on fire. Hurrah!

9. Visited Lewis and Clark and Reed Colleges. Marcia had heard a lot about these schools, where I spent a lot of time when I lived in Portland, so I showed them to her. They are very different from Sonoma State University.

10. Went on an awesome hike. After seeing the tip of Mt. Hood, Marcia and I went on a hike to a lake. Along the way, we passed butterflies, berry bushes,

wild rhododendrons, and views of Mt. Hood. The lake at the end was very pretty:

The water was incredibly clear and there were butterflies and dragonflies all over the place. And then we saw a crawdad.

On the way back, we also saw a chipmunk.

It was a good trip.

(More pictures in the gallery.)

I’m back from a trip to Portland. It has been so hot around here this summer that I half-intended to move to Portland so I can remember what rain is like, but I’m over that now. However, we had a great time in my former home. Kyle, Marcia, and I drove up there together, and then Kyle went to a Linux conference while Marcia and I hung out. I will put up a bigger post on the trip later on, but wanted to share this picture of Kyle by Shawn Powers.

That is a maple donut with bacon on top. Yes! Bacon! On a donut! Luckily Kyle had his “Bacon is a Vegetable” shirt on, so he was prepared for the event.

He said the donut was good. I kind of believe him.

The last day in Puerto Rico was jam packed. We went swimming in the ocean, a new one for me, and I could float on my back in it and look at the clouds. Then we drove all the way down the side of the country and had a picnic on another, wilder beach, eating giant grapes and pineapple juice and Puerto Rican pastries. I saw the Caribbean Sea. We went to a lighthouse and saw old sugar plantations. It was a swell time. Pictures!

Typical scenery out the car

I kind of liked this picture

A lagoon off the beach

A local’s car

Bamboo driftwood

What happened to the top of those trees?

Beach from the lighthouse

An incredibly aerodynamic bird.

That’s it! I have officially told you about my trip. Voila!

The next day was the most chill day. We spent a lot of time in Old San Juan where we bought a silkscreen from the poster artist Eduardo Vera and people watched.

Puerto Ricans playing cards

The side of Morro Fort

People strolling on the street

Some buildings

We also went to one of those fancy beaches that celebrities go to, you know, one of those hotel beach fronts where people sit around in bikinis. We sat on chairs underneath some palm trees and looked at the ocean for awhile. Here is our view:

I got quickly bored and took a lot of pictures of the beach people. Here is a lady reading a book:

After that we came back to Old San Juan and spent more time eating food and walking around. More pictures:

Along the water there are literally hundreds of stray cats. Luckily, they feed them and keep them from getting too mangy.

Building right before sunset

Statue on the church by our hotel. We later watched a beautiful wedding go on here, one of those fancy $80,000 weddings where everyone goes on a Caribbean cruise together.

The bride walked right underneath the balcony where we were sitting.

It was a relaxing day.

Oh you’re still here? I know, both you and I thought I was done with Puerto Rico travelogue but I am not!

In fact, I haven’t told you about the best part of the trip, which there are no pictures of: night kayaking through bioluminescence. It is caused by these tiny critters that light up when they are moved. We went through these channels of mangrove trees into water black as ink, and the darker it got around us, the more the water sparkled when it moved. First, it looked like bubbles coming off the oars. When it got darker, you could dip your hand in the water and watch sparkles slide down your arm. Then a fish would dart by, its body outlined by sparkles. By the time we were out into a lagoon, the waves were sparkling and all these fish–tilapia, sting rays, and so on–were swimming around us, glowing as they swam, jumping up and hitting the water. It was like you could see every fish that came up to the surface of the water, including entire schools of sparkling, glowing fish. It was one of the coolest things I have ever done.

All this took place in lagoons surrounded by mangrove trees. Kyle and I had taken a nature hike through the lagoon during the day. Mangroves are fascinating plants. They grown in shallow salty water and have mechanisms for filtering the salt out of the water. We saw a lot of nature, including dozens of crabs, a mongoose, iguanas and their eggs, dark green hummingbirds, and termite nests the size of basketballs. Here’s some pictures from the hike:

Beach

Mangrove trees with their weird roots in the water.

Close up of the roots

A dried up lagoon. I liked the weird pattern of the sand.

Crab

On day four, we had breakfast in the hotel. I had fresh fruit and a Puerto Rican pastry. That was something that surprised me about Puerto Rico–they have good pastries. Maybe even great pastries. Really, this is a country that understands all the important aspects of good cuisine: pastries, fruit, tomatoes, garlic, coffee, peppers, seafood, and lots and lots of fried pork. Can’t beat it.

My favorite dishes were fried pork chunks (that is what it was called on the menu) and also shrimp in a creole sauce that wasn’t really creole–too much lime, not enough Tabasco, but delicious anyway. Kyle had a fillet of an unidentified freshly caught white fish in the same sauce that was awesome. We also ate a loooot of plantains and yucca. A common dish is mofongo, which is deep-fried mashed plantains with pork and tomato sauce. And of course, there are sandwiches like the Cubano to be enjoyed.

So the food in Puerto Rico is great, although A. expensive–it is hard to have dinner for under $50–and B. better when simpler. We ate at a few fancy restaurants and were unimpressed. The food we really got into were the dishes from cafeteria-like places filled with Puerto Ricans and no tourists.

That day we did the Bacardi tour at its headquarters. I have to say: skip it if you ever go to Puerto Rico. Imagine a Disney ride mixed with a liquor advertisement and you’ve pretty much got the idea. They built a fake distillery to give the tour in, so you’re standing among pretend barrels and stills–which for some reason you can’t take a picture of–while they pipe in recordings of steam and hammering sounds. Then they make you watch a video of Latin models dancing and pouring rum over their heads and let you smell chemical approximation of their different rums. Clearly, some PR person ran amok in the making of that tour.

After that we hiked in a rain forest! This was another first for me. It was El Yunque National Rain Forest, filled with hundreds of different plants and birds. (And not much else. There are only four snakes in Puerto Rico, none of which are poisonous, and very few indigenous animals. Lots of lizards though.)

It was misting in the rain forest, but while that obscured the view, it also meant no other tourists were around and we had the whole forest to ourselves. It was really cool. I have never been in a forest like that before. There were so many plants and the birds make the coolest sounds. We stayed there until nearly dark just looking at the plants and listening to birds while the mist blew over us. Pictures:

Giant waterfall with me in front of it.

Leaf on the ground

Lookout tower

Plants

Me hiking in a rain forest

After all that, we went back to the hotel and smoked a cigar. Scandal! Here is Kyle with a cigar. He looks tough.

The next day, we decided to go to a limestone cave because it was raining. Everyone I have talked to about rain in a tropics has said that it’s not a big deal–there’s a little sprinkle and then it clears up. I beg to differ:

Of course, it didn’t rain like that the whole time. The rain came and went with confusing frequency. I am used to clouds pulling in, settling over an area, raining steadily for a long time, and then going away. The clouds in Puerto Rico appear suddenly, pee on you, and then disappear. It’s disconcerting. It would be sunny one moment and then pouring the next. Kyle and I got soaked more than once.

So we went to a cave. To get there, we rented a car and drove. I have never been to Hawaii or any other tropical place–unless Forida counts–so I had never seen a landscape like Puerto Rico before. It is the first place I’ve been that is prettier than Sonoma County. There are giant flowering bushes everywhere you look: trees covered in what look like hibiscus blossoms, orange magnolia-like plants, pale-pink jacarandas, bright yellow crepe myrtles, and so on. This is in the middle of tons of palm trees. I saw coconuts and breadfruit and other weird fruits all over Puerto Rico. It would be impossible to starve there. A typical hillside might have a maga tree, a wild cotton plant, a fruiting plantain, palm trees, and vines. In the middle of all this tangle, a horse may be grazing, or someone might be holding up a land crab for sale at a roadside stand.

I took hundreds of pictures of the countryside, but not many came out because Kyle couldn’t pull over for me to take pictures. That is because Puerto Ricans drive like maniacs. They don’t signal, they cut across lanes, they swerve around you for no reason–they basically do exactly what they want at any given time. It made a sense to me because that is how I would drive if I weren’t oppressed by the possibility of traffic tickets. However, it was a little scary at first. This is the best I could do with pictures on the way to the cave:

Typical countryside that in no way illustrates how pretty it is there. That is a maga tree to the right, I think. Imagine it covered with red flowers.

Pretty girl with her schoolmates

A large, but typical, house

Fruit stand

The cave was closed because the generator was dead and there was no power. I knew this was a possibility, so we went to the largest telescope in the world, which was a few miles away. It’s the Arecibo Observatory, owned by Cornell University. It’s a giant satellite, the kind that takes pictures of galaxies and the close-ups of Mars.

It was humongous. It’s built on a giant sinkhole, and really my pictures don’t get the size of it very well, so here’s an aerial view from Wikipedia:

Imagine if they took the girders and cables off the Golden Gate Bridge, strung them across a crater-sized hole of aluminum grids, and you’ve got the observatory.

I wanted to go up in the satellite, but we weren’t allowed. It made me wish I had gone into sciences.

Morro Fort was begun in 1539. It’s actually the second fort the Spanish built in Puerto Rico. The first one was taken over several times by other countries, so they began this fort to keep better control of this particular Rich Port. And this fort is made for war–even more than they usually are. It’s a very logically laid out place with lots of little staircases and corridors and tiny entryways for soldiers to quickly get to their killing posts. Walking around, you can imagine the life of these soldiers living, breathing, and practicing war. I wonder how many of them had to fight, and if those who didn’t were disappointed?

Pictures:

One of four sentries

Old cannon

Wider part of the fort

No Kyle don’t eat those!

The oldest part of the fort

A gutter, which was also wide enough for a man to crawl through

The inside of the main courtyard

The ocean

(Note: If you know where my gallery is, I have uploaded photos.)

The interesting part of my trip to Puerto Rico started at our layover in Florida with a space shuttle launch that we could see out of the plane window, and continued from there. It was a clear day and I had never seen water like that from a plane before. It was all kinds of colors–turquoise, cerulean, pale green–and kept washing up on little islands, like so:

When we landed, I saw a stray dog and her puppy hopping along by the side of the runway. Truly, Puerto Rico lives up to its cheesy moniker “island of enchantment.” It’s beautiful, the people are great, and there’s lots to do. I was not at all disappointed, even though it rained the first couple of days.

We stayed in Old San Juan. It is the original city that was built off a Spanish fort that sits on the top of the island. The old town reminded me of a cross between New Orleans and Italy, only with brighter colors. In fact, Puerto Rico is the only place where I have seen colors combined that way and not look silly. Houses can be purple and green or peach and navy blue and just blend in with the background, which was a mess of brightly colored plants and a turquoise sea.

(Street scene of Old San Juan)

Plus, the bricks on the street were blue!

We stayed at El Convento in Old San Juan, a former convent that has been converted to a hotel. I was going to write a rave review about the hotel except that at the end of the trip we discovered they are the type of place that adds $80/night in taxes, parking, and “gratuity” onto your bill. So I have mixed feelings about the hotel. It was a charming place and in the end it was worth the extra $80 a night, but I was angry that they were not more upfront about the fees and thought they were a bit scammy.

(For the record, El Convento was the only place to do anything like that. Puerto Rico is an expensive place–there are no $.25 jugs of rum like in Hunter S. Thompson’s novel The Rum Diaries–but there’s no apparent fleecing of the tourists either. People seem upfront and generally honest.)

Anyway, El Convento is a lovely place to stay. It’s a Spanish-style building with a giant Nassau tree growing in the center courtyard, so at night you can hear birds singing and see fruit bats flying around. There’s charming balconies, a tiny pool and hot tub, complimentary wine and cheese tastings every night, and a couple of decent restaurants. Our room had a balcony with a view of the ocean and a red Spanish tiles floor. Oh heck, here’s a picture:

(Kyle in our hotel room)

Despite the fees, I’m glad I stayed away from a soulless resort. While we weren’t right on the beach and didn’t have a giant pool, I later went to one of those resorts and was creeped out by how they keep you in a bubble and disconnected from where you’re staying. To me, the point of travel is to see what a place is like, not to sit by a pool and get a sunburn, but hey, to each his own…

The first day, we explored Old San Juan. Everyone there speaks good English and the people we met were super friendly–and not in a false way either. I like places where people are open and friendly, so I liked seeing Puerto Ricans singing to themselves as they walked along or standing in a big group talking.

Some of the kids were super loud. They would shout and scream as they walk along the street in their Catholic-school uniforms. The loudest group we saw were these kids playing in a fountain near the fort. They reminded me of when birds get together and start chattering in a tree, the way they get so boisterous in their excitement and joy of simply being birds in a tree. That’s what kids were like as they shouted VERY LOUDLY while playing in the fountain.

And then, the fountain went off and the kids started shouting, “La Vida! La Vida!” until the water went on again. I got the sense this went on all the time.

In the afternoon, we went to the fort (coming soon!).

I am back from Puerto Rico. We had a great trip. It was the first time I:

* kayaked at night
* swam in an ocean
* saw the Caribbean sea
* hiked in a rainforest
* sat in a bikini in public (!)
* toured a mangrove nature preserve
* ate tamales made out of plantains
* smoked a Puerto Rican cigar (!!)
* saw glow-in-the-dark fish
* looked at the biggest telescope in the world
* walked on streets made of blue bricks

and so on…

More coming soon after I sift through all my photos.