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 didn’t get to go snowmobiling because the weather didn’t cooperate, but that didn’t stop us from visiting Troy and Krista in Sacramento this weekend. We walked around downtown, ate good food, and visited the Crocker Art Museum.

The Crocker is in an old mansion. Half the pleasure of being in it is walking around the building itself. I took many pictures of tile and woodwork like this one:

They had an exhibit of art from original Warner Bros cartoons. It was interesting to see the evolution of characters like Porky Pig and Bugs Bunny. I never really thought about how many man hours went into one of those cartoons before. It made me respect animation in a new way. My favorite part was the backgrounds of the cartoons, which were tiny, brightly colored paintings. Unfortunately, the security guard wouldn’t let me take pictures of the Warner Bros’ exhibit. Who knows why. However, the contemporary art section had a bunch of Peep-like bunnies in a canoe. Here is a picture of that:

The other thing I liked at the Crocker was this old cigarette machine that had been converted so that you could buy cigarette-carton-sized art with $5 tokens. You buy the tokens in the museum store, put them in the machine, and pull the knob:

Krista and Kyle got their art just fine. Krista got an olive key chain and Kyle got a little painting. But when we tried to buy my art, the knob got stuck and we had to get a museum guy to help us while all these snotty art people looked on. It turned out that the slot my art had been in was empty, but you couldn’t tell because they had put a multi-colored weight in the slot that looked just like the art. The guy got mad at me and told me to pick something, so I pointed to another slot. He gave me a block of wood with brown and green splotches on it. It looked like 1970s kitsch you would find in a thrift store.

I tried to not show how disappointed I was by the lame art and mean people, but Troy and Krista could tell so they gave me their other token. (!) This time, the knob worked and I got a cool painting of safety pins. They are good friends. [ETA: Troy and Krista, not the safety pins.]

Krista and Troy

Kyle in front of a giant piece of aluminum

Me in a house of mirrors

I can’t believe I lived near Sacramento all that time and never went to the Crocker Art Museum. Now I want to go back to Sacramento and see the California History Museum, which I also ignored while I lived there. Another time, I guess.

On Sunday, Kyle and I decided to check out the mission in San Juan Bautista. It’s the Spanish mission that was featured in Hitchcock’s film Vertigo. It is the largest mission in California and still an operating church. I’ve been wanting to visit it for awhile now.

San Juan Bautista is a cute town full of adobe buildings, cacti, and chickens. The first thing we did was eat lunch at the surprisingly good Mission Cafe:

Kyle about to order

Then it was up to see the mission. Along the way, we saw a chicken:

Actually, there were chickens everywhere. I like chickens. We also saw a lot of people, including these boys, who were walking along a fence ala Huckleberry Finn:

When we got to the church I was surprised to see that it didn’t have the bell tower that’s in Vertigo. In fact, the original bell tower was taken down because of dry rot in the period between when Hitchcock decided to film the movie there and when he actually began filming. As such, he had to add in the tower in with sets and effects. In real life, the only bell tower is this one:

We took a tour of the church’s museum. I liked seeing the original walls and choir books. Then we went into the sanctuary itself.

Mass was about to begin, so we didn’t take long in there. People were praying to and paying this doll some money:

Then we wandered around the grounds, which are quaint and lovely. There’s an old graveyard, lots of plants, a carriage house, and statues everywhere:

There’s also part of the original El Camino Real and the San Andreas Fault.

Afterwards, we explored the town and then went to The Garlic Shoppe in Gilroy. That place offended my deep and abiding love of garlic. Garlic blue cheese butter? Garlic ice cream? Pickled garlic? Can I get an ew from choir?

Dear Marcia,

When I got to the conference, the organizers recognized me–California to Kentuckians is like saying you are from Morocco or something–and I realized how small the conference was. It made me self-conscious and I hid behind a column in the library for awhile. After I got over that, I sat through several talks. One was by Ginger Strand, who wrote this travel/memoir/history book on Niagara Falls. Her writing reminded me of my own, which was encouraging. I also listened to the winners of the prize the conference gives out. Most of it was pretty good, but for some reason, they had a slam poet there. She was a cross between Alix Olson, Annie the Orphan, and the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz. Imagine, if you would, this monstrosity performing slam poetry to a boardroom full of polite Kentucky ladies. I hate slam poetry.

That night, Joyce Carol Oates gave the keynote speech. She is extremely well spoken, brilliant, funny, and seems to know everything about literature. She read a short story about this couple who buys an Emily Dickinson robot that has been imbued with Dickinson’s essence. It was strange and hilarious and oddly touching. The next day, I went to a Q&A with Oates. On top of all my other opinions of her, I also think she is adorable. When they were gushing over her, the way they do at these things, she got embarrassed and looked down at the table. Then the moderator complimented this shiny pink blouse she was wearing (circa 1989 or so) and there was this strange emotion on her face I couldn’t quite interpret. Later, someone asked her the question: How do you, Joyce Carol Oates, manage to produce so much? She said, “I really can’t answer that question. I mean, we all have the same 24 hours in a day.” Then she talked about how her work output is more visible because she publishes and how her mother worked so hard and no one noticed. “Actually, I’m wearing a blouse my mother made me,” Oates said, referring to the pink shiny blouse. “So I was really touched that you” –the commentator – “mentioned it.”

After that, I stuck around to hear this first-time novelist tell people that the way to publish a book is to make friends with people you can use to get ahead and to steal ideas. She even advocated lying on her taxes. I walked out of her talk. There are a lot of slimeballs in publishing.

~ Joy

Dear Marcia,

I am in the Houston airport. I have a two-hour layover here. I was a little nervous coming here because of Hurricane Ike–which, by the way, went through Louisville yesterday. By then it was just winds, but it tore up the trees in my mother-in-law’s apartment complex. It knocked one tree over by the roots:

and split one tree in half:

Because of this, the power went out. I was frustrated because I was trying to finish up my article and send it out, but the battery on my laptop kept dying. Finally, we went to Panera Bread and found a place to plug in my laptop so I could finish my work. It’s so hard to write on vacation.

Last night, we hung out with Jeremy and his girlfriend Rachelle. They took us to this seriously cool restaurant called Proof. It is attached to 21c, a hotel with an art gallery in it. They had an exhibit by Kara Walker, the artist who does stereotypical silhouettes of African American slaves. I have been wanting to see her work for a long time.

There was also this projector that dropped letters from the alphabet on you. Your shadow was projected on the wall and you could stop the letters as they dropped on you. It was one of the best things we saw on the trip. I was trying to figure out how I could get one for my house.

(Me with Kyle behind me. Jeremy and Rachelle are on the right.)

(Kyle and me)

(me)

I hope the airline can manage to fly us home without any hassle. I miss my cats. See you tomorrow.

~ Joy