Sunday, November 27, 2016

San Juan, the Walled City of the South

Our snowy front yard on the day we left for Puerto Rico
The Pokies (that’s the Pocono Mountains for all you non-locals) bid us a snowy farewell when we left home. Luckily, once we made it down “Supsic Mountain” there was very little snow. This is awfully early for snow – even for us!

We will be spending the next week in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the oldest walled city in the Americas. Kind of funny that we just got back from another walled city in Quebec a month ago. It is quite a bit warmer here although the rain seems to have followed us. No problem – it’s so warm, a little rain feels good.

Decanter Hotel logo
We are staying at The Decanter Hotel right in the center of Old Town. The “Decanter” Hotel uses a colorful wine decanter as its logo, and since Frank makes wine in his spare time, we felt right at home – like staying for a week in a winery!  We have one of our largest hotel rooms ever with two balconies, a large sitting area, and a kitchenette. Definitely a comfortable stay!

Colorful buildings in Old San Juan





Our first impression of San Juan is how colorful it is. The houses are a palette of pastels: pink, blue, yellow, mint green, and purple. Plus plenty of flowering plants and constant views of the surrounding ocean. Just walking around this town makes you feel “goody goody.”

We found out later that these pastel colors used to paint the houses are regulated by city ordinance.  There are only a handful of pastel colors that you can use to paint your house, and there are no deviations.  And no two adjoining houses can be painted the same color. So if your neighbor’s house is painted the legal blue pastel, you MUST paint your house a different color, something other than blue. 

Looking like Puerto Rican country folk
The Puerto Rican people are definitely friendly and lots of fun: our taxi cab driver who wants to see snow and learn to ski, our waitress Lacy who put goofy straw hats on our heads and took a picture of us looking like Puerto Rican country folk, and the wonderful young attendants here at our hotel who go out of their way to make sure we are well-cared for.

Old city walls along the ocean promenade



We spent our first day wandering the streets of Viejo San Juan (Old San Juan) getting our bearings in this new “old” city. Lots of restaurants and shops for us to explore later. We ended up on a promenade by the ocean where we had excellent views of the old city walls. The oldest parts of the walls date back to the 1500’s, and the rounded guard turrets located at intervals along the walls are a shutterbug’s delight. These atmospheric turrets have become a symbol of San Juan.

Tangled root system of giant banyan tree
We were also impressed with a giant banyan trees that had so many hanging roots it looked like some ragged sea monster had climbed out of the ocean.

On the town with our foodie group
Flavors of San Juan Food Walk

 As you know, we love these foodie walking tours that allow us to take in the local cuisine, and this event was another winner. Our guide Keila guided us through the old streets to a wide variety of culinary delights. She also stopped intermittently in various alcoves and parks along the way, giving us little historical tid-bits about her country. 

Working with the crew in the "Rum Library"


We got a tutorial on rum in a gazebo-like structure that stood in the middle of a popular restaurant.  The inside of the gazebo was lined with shelves containing hundreds of bottles of rum. The bartender referred to his world inside the gazebo bar as his “rum library.” He even had a tall, mobile, rolling-ladder (just like in an old library) within the gazebo that he used to reach his backup liquor supplies located on the out-of-reach upper shelves. He taught us that Puerto Rico is the biggest producer of rum in the world, and that the brand “Don Q” is a very good rum (and also very expensive).  He told us that the best prices for a bottle of this high-quality stuff were in the duty-free shops at the airport.

Mashin' the mofongo with wooden mortar and pestle
One of our favorite stops was a traditional café where we got to make our own mofongo, a famous Puerto Rican dish that came from Africa originally and was modified slightly for Spanish tastes.  Puerto Rican people are a mixture of indigenous Indian, African, and Spanish. We were issued a deep wooden mortar and pestle to mash the sliced toasted plantains that are the main ingredient of mofongo.

Makin' mofongo (check out the serious masher behind Anne)
The flavors are enhanced with a mixture of butter and garlic. We created a little dugout within the mashed plantains inside our mortars and filled it with spicy Creole chicken stew. What a great meal, and a fun experience learning the ingredients and preparation technique for mofongo!








Arecibo log
Day Trip to Arecibo

Frank was especially captivated by our visit to Arecibo, located about 50 miles west of Old San Juan along the northern shore.  About 10 miles south of the town of Arecibo, thru narrow backwoods roads and verdant jungle was a hidden engineering marvel known as the Arecibo Radar-Radio Telescope.

Arecibo Telescope with inground dish and antenna overhead
Built in 1963, the Arecibo Observatory is one of the world’s most powerful instruments, with an inground parabolic reflector that spans 1000 feet in diameter and moveable antennae structures that hang 500 feet above the reflector; these antennae capture radio waves from outer space, and allow scientists to track celestial objects in the sky.  Since the antennae are totally moveable by way of a series of heavy-duty guy wires, the fixed dish can concentrate the signals from any quadrant in the sky to the appropriate antenna needed for reception. 

What a remarkable feat of engineering!
This is one impressive sight tucked away in the forests of Puerto Rico. With sky-high pylons to secure the cables and the massive antenna suspended over the reflector dish, it looks like something from a Sci-Fi movie. And speaking of movies, this site was used in the making of “Golden Eye” (1995) and “Contact” (1997).

Hiking on the picturesque coral cliffs







Our tour guide for this day (Carlos) made several stops along the rural roads to and from Arecibo.  Near the town of Barceloneta, we hiked into the jungle and took a wet, rainy walk to the seaside, where we watched the crashing waves below us as we stood safely on cliffs formed from defunct coral. Sinkholes were everywhere, and one false move would send you plummeting 30 feet down (or more) onto some deadly, razor sharp, rock-lined coral chambers. No room for error here.

Crashing waves against coral cliffs
We watched a group of daredevil kids exploring the same cliff area, climbing down onto some dangerous ledges just to impress their friends. Carlos told us the local kids actually jump off the coral into the churning ocean below. The stupidity of youth, we thought. Although we were well-aware, as we hiked along and silently recalled our own youth, that we too pulled some careless, dumb-assed stunts at that age too!

Enjoying delicious pastalillos at a roadside stand
Carlos treated us to Camarones Pastalillos at a roadside stand. The tasty fried treat was made from half-moon shaped piece of dough stuffed with shrimp.  Yummy!  He said that these sandwiches are called “pastalillos” on the north side of the island of Puerto Rico and “empanillas” on the south side.

Puerto Rico is an earthquake island. Earthquakes happen every day, all day long. They are of  a magnitude mostly of 2.0 or lower so you don't notice them. But there are Richter Scales all over Puerto Rico, and they record these small quakes and quakes of much larger magnitudes. Quakes are always present!

Twin smokestacks identify former sugar processing plant
One last interesting thing.  Carlos told us that all the sugar cane factories have been gone since 1986.  The minimum wage destroyed the sugar industry by making it too expensive to process sugar on the island.  It became cheaper to buy it from other nearby islands.  Consequently, the remnants of those defunct sugar processing plants are still seen all over Puerto Rico. Carlos pointed out two smokestacks in the distance, side by side, that were part of a former sugar processing operation. 

Guavate lechon!
Thanksgiving Puerto Rico Style on the Guavate Pork Highway

Thanksgiving day is celebrated in a similarly conventional fashion here in Puerto Rico with people eating turkey, visiting grandma, and relaxing with family.  But unconventional travelers that we are, we did an unconventional Thanksgiving this year. We booked a tour out to the Guavate, a remote section of the countryside, to visit and eat at a “lechonera.” Are you scratching your head yet?  Good!  “Lechon” is the word for roasted pork in Spanish, but more accurately, it is a ‘suckling pig that is roasted.’  Young tender pigs!

Cook prepares pork with his handy machete
Anyway, there is a main road thru Guavate that is lined with over a dozen lechoneras (open-air restaurants for roasting pork). And it’s not just about pork. You also have a choice of side dishes: sweet plantains, rice with pigeon peas, breadfruit, yucca cooked with garlic and onions, blood sausage, cassava, and of course beer, both local and international.  Plus a fiesta atmosphere with live salsa music, dancing, souvenir sellers, and if you search hard enough, and really want to eat turkey instead of the delicious “lechon” specialty, you can even do that! This is a daytime activity, and people come and leave before sundown.

Pig cooking in the roasting pit
Our tour guide and driver Debbie Ramos drove our tour group of 7 an hour out of San Juan to arrive just in time for lunch at a popular lechonera called “El Ranchero Original,” a larger- than- most restaurant with the ubiquitous browned pig on a 3-inch diameter metal spit behind a glass window for all to see and drool!  The food and roasting smells were making everyone anxious to chow down!
The cafeteria-style food area was very crowded and busy, making it complicated to order our meals, but Debbie made sure everyone got what they wanted. Then we all sauntered to the garden behind the restaurant, and found an open-air but covered pavilion next to a narrow picturesque creek with enough seating for our small group.  Good thing the pavilion had a roof, as it rained a bit on-and-off.

Pigs on spits in the frozen pig locker ready to be cooked
Nobody was disappointed with the food. The roast pork was juicy and perfectly seasoned. In fact, each lechonera has their own closely guarded secret seasoning recipes. After dinner, we got a “backstage” tour to see the frozen pigs in the big freezer locker, the golden-brown pigs cooking on spits in the cement roasting pits, and the final product being chopped (with alarming speed!) by a guy wielding a nasty-looking machete! We even had time to walk along the street, drop by a few different lechoneras, and show off our best salsa moves on the dancefloor. It was a wonderful way to celebrate the holiday. 

Happy Thanksgiving from El Ranchero in Guavate!


At Fort San Cristobal in Old San Juan
Viejo San Juan and San Cristobal Fort

Old Town Juan is very walkable with loads of shops, art galleries, and atmospheric restaurants all situated in the colorful old buildings. A great place to wander! We got our history fix at the San Cristobal Fort, a 16th c. Spanish fort that guards one end of the city. Quite an impressive fortification and a reminder that Spain occupied Puerto Rico for 400 years. In fact, Spain dominated this whole part of the world occupying most of the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. However, by the end of the 1700’s, only Cuba and Puerto Rico remained under Spanish control.  Finally, Spain lost Puerto Rico to the United States during the Spanish American War of 1897.

Tropical flower just loving the rain!
It rained a lot while we were here in Puerto Rico; in fact, every day!  Not continuously, but just enough that it constituted a surprise when it occurred, and a bit of an annoyance. We’d be walking along the streets of San Juan, and the sun would be shining. We would wrongly assume that the rain was done, and the sun was here to stay.

Distinctive blue brick street construction in San Juan
For half an hour or so, we would be lulled into false complacency, presupposing from the strong rays of the sun and the brilliant blue sky that the rain was done. And then, like clockwork, the drizzling would start again. Never heavy rain tho, just enough that you needed some form of protection, like a small umbrella or a large hat. We used both and just kept moving.  This pattern persisted throughout the day, every day that we were here.  I guess this is life in the tropics!

Pelican roosts atop turret in city wall
Puerto Rico Politics

Ask a local what the most popular sport is in Puerto Rico, and they will probably say politics. Puerto Rico’s weird status with the United States leads to endless discussions. Puerto Rico is a commonwealth of the U.S., an Estado Libre Asociado (ELA) or free associated state. No one really seems know what that means. One person told us they came up with the name to avoid calling Puerto Rico a colony of the U.S. The people here are U.S. citizens from birth and are eligible for U.S. passports. They also serve in the U.S. military. They use the U.S. dollar, but they do not pay federal income taxes, although they do pay social security and FICA. And they have a whopping 11% tax on EVERYTHING, including food. In public schools, Spanish is the primary language and English is secondary. In private schools, it is just the opposite with English as primary. English is also the language used exclusively in universities (giving private school kids an obvious advantage!).  That is, unless you are majoring in the Spanish Language!

Tropical paradise on northern shore of the island
Puerto Rico has three main political parties. One that wants to remain a commonwealth, one that wants to become a U.S. state, and one that wants independence. Puerto Rico sends a representative to the U.S. House of Representative, but they have no vote. Strangely, Puerto Ricans can vote in the presidential primaries but not in the general election (does that make any sense?).

Wave eruption at Bishop's Pond
The economy of Puerto Rico has been in free fall since the global economic downturn. One drawback of being associated with the U.S. is that they must pay minimum wage which makes everything here very expensive, especially compared with other low wage Caribbean islands such as the Dominican Republic. Sadly, many people here are becoming desperate as jobs and tourism continue to disappear. On top of the economic woes, the Zika Virus has hurt them badly too (even though Zika has been here for over 20 years).

More pics of Puerto Rico:


More colorful houses of San Juan

Yummy ceviche!

Anne prepares to down a delicious shrimp patalillos

Crashing waves near Barceloneta on north shore

Crazy kids climbing dangerous coral ledges

Traffic & street parking are definitely a problem in Old San Juan!

San Cristobal Fort

Adios San Juan. We are headed for our cruise ship and the high seas!




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