Paris, London, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica -- Oh my!
It has been so long since updating this that I am overwhelmed, simply overwhelmed. The reason for this is that Puerto Rico has some of the worst/most expensive internet access I have come to find.
I left off at Paris, a city that needs absolutely no introduction and, insofar as I know, is the most heavily touristed in the world. It deserves this, of course. And while as Americans we like to pretend that we dislike France or the French (or the French economic model, anyway) I say economics shmeconomics! -- they live well in Paris.
It was only after deciding to go to Paris that I was reminded that a friend of mine from Maple Valley, Washington, Kristen, is living in Paris and working on a Masters Degree at the American University there. She is renting a quintessentially cute, Parisian apartment in the Trocadero area, about a three minute walk from the Eiffel Tower viewing point. In short, she is living something close to the Parisian dream. She has a spare loft-bed where I slept for a few nights, and a kitchen that I was able to use as my own. For the first time since Jerusalem, I felt temporarily "settled." I was very comfortable, Kristen is an excellent hostess, and we prepared spectacular meals together and drank liberal amounts of red wine.
Although I was there for more than week, I will exempt Paris from my blog update right now. If you do not already know about Montmartre, Champs Elysees, or the Notre Dame, etc., etc., etc., then friend, it is time for you to request time off and speak to your travel agent. I had an excellent time in Paris -- a really, really good time -- but here is not the place to talk about it.
From Paris I took a train-ride through the Chunnel to London, where I was to spend one evening before flying to (egad!) Puerto Rico. Fortunately for me, my sister has a good friend living in London, Jen, with whom I was able to stay for the evening. Jen works as a business consultant for Hitachi, contracted for the last two years by the Microsoft Corporation, a quite profitable business based in Redmond, Washington. As a result, she has a very modern, spacious apartment on Portabello street in London, where by morning there is a bustling street market, and by night the bars are crowded. We were able to enjoy both, though Jen had a cold and I was exhausted. She treated me to a delicious (and large) dinner of English/Indian food, acted as an excellent guide while walking the area, and I was sad to have spent just a day with her. London, though, is still outrageously expensive. I was absolutely outraged.
The following morning, on March 3rd, 2007, I embarked upon a flight toward a destination I had no intention of visting: Puerto Rico. Obviously, then, I never resolved the situation with the airlines. I have to admit that part of the reason that I could not settle anything -- that is, could not persuade Expedia, Air India, or American Airlines to do something about switching my ticket -- was out of pride. I had to call each of these companies from a crowded internet cafe in Budapest, where it was quiet enough that everyone, by default, was forced to listen to my end of the conversation. "No, you see, I accidentally booked the ticket for Puerto Rico, but I want to go to Costa Rica." "No, you're right, I did not check it very thoroughly when I confirmed the booking." I sounded pathetic, and had to repeat these lines over and over aain. After making three phone calls to all three companies involved in the transaction -- and explaining to a variety of individuals my unfortunate, self-inflicted predicament -- I gave up and decidedthat I was, in fact, flying to Puerto Rico.
Puerto Rico ho! A brief layover at JFK airport in New York -- my first time back in America in 5 1/2 months -- was the first time I have ever felt any degree of reverse culture shock. (For whatever reason I did not notice this after studying in Spain.) This probably had more to do with the fact that my plane disembarked at the same time that a JetBlue flight arrived from Cancun, Mexico, teeming with newly bronzed Americans wearing "Save Water Drink Beer" and "...all I got was this t-shirt" t-shirts. I cannot be overly critical of American culture, though; if I would have had the time, one of my highest priorities was to eat a hamburger while back in America. I didn't have time, though, so instead I ate a Butterfinger. It was so delicious that afterward I decided to write a poem about it. It is titled, "Lay off my Butterfinger":
You are crispety,
You are crunchety,
You are peanut-buttery in a way I had nearly forgotten,
good friend,
You are more important to me than my real fingers,
My Butterfinger.
In London I had picked up a guidebook for Puerto Rico, and over the course of my flight to Puerto Rico I developed a high level of stress: I came to find that Puerto Rico is not for budget travelers. At all. I should have known this, really. First, and foremost, it's America (or kind of, anyway), so naturally it is expensive. Secondly, it is an island. Third, and highly relevant, is the fact that San Juan's port is the biggest cruise terminal in the Western Hemisphere. Yikes. According to the guidebook, the cheapest accomodation in the city was $40 per night. Yikes again. Rental cars are the method of transport for nearly all tourists.
Knowing this, I landed inPuerto Rico at the lovely hour of 1:35 AM and decided to spend the night in the airport. I slept sitting up, with my head on my backpack. This was the last straw for my travel-weary body, and a sore throat enveloped me over the next 48 hours.
At a bus-stop transfer point during my bus-ride into Old San Juan from the airport, I met 88 year-old Gloria Rodriguez. She is a very interesting woman: she was born in Cuba as the daughter of the chief justice (or equivalent) of the Cuban Supreme Court, and knew Fidel Castro personally from college. She and her husband caught the last plane out of Cuba after the revolution. "Fidel changed so much," she kept repeating, "he was never like that before. He was never violent." Actually, she kept repeating herself a lot. Really, she never stopped repeating herself. Gloria was a very nice woman -- that day she was on her way to the San Francisco Cathedral in Old San Juan -- but there is an indisputable fact about her that I soon came to realize: Gloria Rodriguez was senile.
Once in town Gloria and I made it halfway to the cathedral (the cathedral is roughly 400 yards from the bus-stop), when she decided that we (she) needed something to drink. "Para animarnos," she explained. While walking, I would say that we moved at roughly 1/4 the speed at which I would normally walk. We stopped in a cafe where I ordered a hot chocolate and she a coffee, into which she put more sugar than anyone I have ever seen. This is saying something, as in the Middle East they really put a lot of sugar into tea. She spilled the sugar all over the entire table in the process -- her hands shook quite a bit -- and during our stay in the restaurant she proceeded to tell our waiter five times that I was an American. She did this to quite a few other people in the restaurant, which really put me on the spot; there was a lot of smiling and nodding on my part. Not only was my being an American irrelevant to the waiter -- there is no shortage of American tourists in San Juan -- but the restaurant was slammed, as well. People would ignore her, and she would whisper to me that it was because they were crazy (by implication she was not). Gloria finally finished her coffee, and looked down to find that the entire bottom of the large coffee cup was filled with sugar. She then proceeded to spoon out and eat all of the sugar. "I love sugar!" she exclaimed in Spanish. Finally it was time to leave, and she left our waiter four pennies as a "tip." The waiter, I think, wanted to kill Gloria Rodriguez. Though my time with Gloria was a strange three hours of my life, her intentions were good.
I spent two nights in San Juan, mostly recovering from illness and listening to Salsa/Reggaeton music through the walls of the hotel, before heading to Culebra, a small island off the east coast of Puerto Rico. I did this both to escape the high costs of Old San Juan as well as to literally escape, but it turned out that both of these assumptions were not totally correct. Camping on the island was somewhat expensive ($20 per night), and there were typically anywhere from 30-60 other tents at the campgrounds.
It didn't matter, though. Playa Flamenco, the most popular beach on the island (this is relative, of course), is consistently rated one of the top-ten beaches in the Caribbean, and once in a while one of the top-ten in the world. Regardless of what you think about these sorts of ratings, the point is that it's a really nice beach: white sand, blue/green water, a few palm trees, and most importantly, almost no development. It is a Conde Nast sort of beach. The island very, very well preserved , but it is a type of preservation that puts a conservationist in a predicament: the reason it is not developed is that the U.S. Navy used it as a practice ground for aerial bombing and shelling until 1975, so the island is still littered with unexploded ordnance. How's that for conservation? If you ask me, I think it's fantastic, and as a side note I am considering adopting this as a campaign platform for a future term in public office: it will be called the "Bomb everything" conservationist platform. Under my tutelage, the world's rainforests, rivers, and endangered species will be safely protected by high-grade explosives. Who would go near them? "The people have spoken, and the people want BOMBS!!!" Anyway, in Culebra they are slowly being cleared, and as of a few years ago apparently it was not uncommon for the cleared explosives to be periodically detonated in a remote area of the island; the residents would simply hear the explosion and see the accompanying black mushroom cloud.
I spent seven straight days on this beach and allowed myself to deteriorate as a respectable member of society. I did not shave during this week, nor did I take a shower. I wore the same shirt and swimming trunks all day every day (the shirt was a button-up with a collar, if you're thinking that I don't have any class). For whatever reason, by the end of the week this shirt smelled like a doughnut.
My stay at the beach was idyllic, though. After day two I managed to get the best camping spot on the whole beach. (This was objectively corroborated by the half-dozen or so people who, while walking down the beach, stopped to tell me that I had "the best spot on the beach.") It was the only spot with a direct view of the water, and I had the beach's main attraction right in front of me: a rusting tank half-submerged in the white sand. It was quite a view. I bought a massive load of groceries on my way in, so for the most part I did not have to leave and ate quite well; over the course of two mornings I ate an entire box of Fruity Pebbles cereal, and I also ate four more Butterfingers: "Crocante, Cruciente, Cremosa con Cacahuate!" in Spanish. I read a lot, began running again, did some casual star-gazing, slept like a newborn, and met a group of Spring Breakers who improved my opinion about South Carolina. After breakfast in the mornings, I would pop in my iPod and make the half-mile or so walk to the entrance of the campground to "Joe's Ice Shack," where there was hot black coffee. It was 90 degrees every day. I relaxed.
The point is that this is a very, very good place to unwind, to forget about life, to figure "things" out, or to generally disconnect from the rest of the world. And it is easily accessible from the contintental U.S.
Now I am in San Jose, Costa Rica. This city does not have much to see, and has some pretty nasty areas. (I'm sure that there are other cities in Central America that will top this, though.) On the taxi-ride into town last night, block after block of derelicts culminated with a fantastically preganant woman laying on her back in the filthy street, her shirt rolled up to expose her swollen belly. I could not believe my good luck to have seen something so revolting. Tomorrow, though, my parents and younger sister, Shannon, arrive in San Jose, whereupon we will fly to southwest Costa Rica to a town called Drake. There will begin a week of relative luxury of the sort that I have not enjoyed for quite a while. "Take care of me, parents, for I am your son." No more filthy youth hostels, no more crappy street food. It's time for family. And it's time for a gin and tonic.
I left off at Paris, a city that needs absolutely no introduction and, insofar as I know, is the most heavily touristed in the world. It deserves this, of course. And while as Americans we like to pretend that we dislike France or the French (or the French economic model, anyway) I say economics shmeconomics! -- they live well in Paris.
It was only after deciding to go to Paris that I was reminded that a friend of mine from Maple Valley, Washington, Kristen, is living in Paris and working on a Masters Degree at the American University there. She is renting a quintessentially cute, Parisian apartment in the Trocadero area, about a three minute walk from the Eiffel Tower viewing point. In short, she is living something close to the Parisian dream. She has a spare loft-bed where I slept for a few nights, and a kitchen that I was able to use as my own. For the first time since Jerusalem, I felt temporarily "settled." I was very comfortable, Kristen is an excellent hostess, and we prepared spectacular meals together and drank liberal amounts of red wine.
Although I was there for more than week, I will exempt Paris from my blog update right now. If you do not already know about Montmartre, Champs Elysees, or the Notre Dame, etc., etc., etc., then friend, it is time for you to request time off and speak to your travel agent. I had an excellent time in Paris -- a really, really good time -- but here is not the place to talk about it.
From Paris I took a train-ride through the Chunnel to London, where I was to spend one evening before flying to (egad!) Puerto Rico. Fortunately for me, my sister has a good friend living in London, Jen, with whom I was able to stay for the evening. Jen works as a business consultant for Hitachi, contracted for the last two years by the Microsoft Corporation, a quite profitable business based in Redmond, Washington. As a result, she has a very modern, spacious apartment on Portabello street in London, where by morning there is a bustling street market, and by night the bars are crowded. We were able to enjoy both, though Jen had a cold and I was exhausted. She treated me to a delicious (and large) dinner of English/Indian food, acted as an excellent guide while walking the area, and I was sad to have spent just a day with her. London, though, is still outrageously expensive. I was absolutely outraged.
The following morning, on March 3rd, 2007, I embarked upon a flight toward a destination I had no intention of visting: Puerto Rico. Obviously, then, I never resolved the situation with the airlines. I have to admit that part of the reason that I could not settle anything -- that is, could not persuade Expedia, Air India, or American Airlines to do something about switching my ticket -- was out of pride. I had to call each of these companies from a crowded internet cafe in Budapest, where it was quiet enough that everyone, by default, was forced to listen to my end of the conversation. "No, you see, I accidentally booked the ticket for Puerto Rico, but I want to go to Costa Rica." "No, you're right, I did not check it very thoroughly when I confirmed the booking." I sounded pathetic, and had to repeat these lines over and over aain. After making three phone calls to all three companies involved in the transaction -- and explaining to a variety of individuals my unfortunate, self-inflicted predicament -- I gave up and decidedthat I was, in fact, flying to Puerto Rico.
Puerto Rico ho! A brief layover at JFK airport in New York -- my first time back in America in 5 1/2 months -- was the first time I have ever felt any degree of reverse culture shock. (For whatever reason I did not notice this after studying in Spain.) This probably had more to do with the fact that my plane disembarked at the same time that a JetBlue flight arrived from Cancun, Mexico, teeming with newly bronzed Americans wearing "Save Water Drink Beer" and "...all I got was this t-shirt" t-shirts. I cannot be overly critical of American culture, though; if I would have had the time, one of my highest priorities was to eat a hamburger while back in America. I didn't have time, though, so instead I ate a Butterfinger. It was so delicious that afterward I decided to write a poem about it. It is titled, "Lay off my Butterfinger":
You are crispety,
You are crunchety,
You are peanut-buttery in a way I had nearly forgotten,
good friend,
You are more important to me than my real fingers,
My Butterfinger.
In London I had picked up a guidebook for Puerto Rico, and over the course of my flight to Puerto Rico I developed a high level of stress: I came to find that Puerto Rico is not for budget travelers. At all. I should have known this, really. First, and foremost, it's America (or kind of, anyway), so naturally it is expensive. Secondly, it is an island. Third, and highly relevant, is the fact that San Juan's port is the biggest cruise terminal in the Western Hemisphere. Yikes. According to the guidebook, the cheapest accomodation in the city was $40 per night. Yikes again. Rental cars are the method of transport for nearly all tourists.
Knowing this, I landed inPuerto Rico at the lovely hour of 1:35 AM and decided to spend the night in the airport. I slept sitting up, with my head on my backpack. This was the last straw for my travel-weary body, and a sore throat enveloped me over the next 48 hours.
At a bus-stop transfer point during my bus-ride into Old San Juan from the airport, I met 88 year-old Gloria Rodriguez. She is a very interesting woman: she was born in Cuba as the daughter of the chief justice (or equivalent) of the Cuban Supreme Court, and knew Fidel Castro personally from college. She and her husband caught the last plane out of Cuba after the revolution. "Fidel changed so much," she kept repeating, "he was never like that before. He was never violent." Actually, she kept repeating herself a lot. Really, she never stopped repeating herself. Gloria was a very nice woman -- that day she was on her way to the San Francisco Cathedral in Old San Juan -- but there is an indisputable fact about her that I soon came to realize: Gloria Rodriguez was senile.
Once in town Gloria and I made it halfway to the cathedral (the cathedral is roughly 400 yards from the bus-stop), when she decided that we (she) needed something to drink. "Para animarnos," she explained. While walking, I would say that we moved at roughly 1/4 the speed at which I would normally walk. We stopped in a cafe where I ordered a hot chocolate and she a coffee, into which she put more sugar than anyone I have ever seen. This is saying something, as in the Middle East they really put a lot of sugar into tea. She spilled the sugar all over the entire table in the process -- her hands shook quite a bit -- and during our stay in the restaurant she proceeded to tell our waiter five times that I was an American. She did this to quite a few other people in the restaurant, which really put me on the spot; there was a lot of smiling and nodding on my part. Not only was my being an American irrelevant to the waiter -- there is no shortage of American tourists in San Juan -- but the restaurant was slammed, as well. People would ignore her, and she would whisper to me that it was because they were crazy (by implication she was not). Gloria finally finished her coffee, and looked down to find that the entire bottom of the large coffee cup was filled with sugar. She then proceeded to spoon out and eat all of the sugar. "I love sugar!" she exclaimed in Spanish. Finally it was time to leave, and she left our waiter four pennies as a "tip." The waiter, I think, wanted to kill Gloria Rodriguez. Though my time with Gloria was a strange three hours of my life, her intentions were good.
I spent two nights in San Juan, mostly recovering from illness and listening to Salsa/Reggaeton music through the walls of the hotel, before heading to Culebra, a small island off the east coast of Puerto Rico. I did this both to escape the high costs of Old San Juan as well as to literally escape, but it turned out that both of these assumptions were not totally correct. Camping on the island was somewhat expensive ($20 per night), and there were typically anywhere from 30-60 other tents at the campgrounds.
It didn't matter, though. Playa Flamenco, the most popular beach on the island (this is relative, of course), is consistently rated one of the top-ten beaches in the Caribbean, and once in a while one of the top-ten in the world. Regardless of what you think about these sorts of ratings, the point is that it's a really nice beach: white sand, blue/green water, a few palm trees, and most importantly, almost no development. It is a Conde Nast sort of beach. The island very, very well preserved , but it is a type of preservation that puts a conservationist in a predicament: the reason it is not developed is that the U.S. Navy used it as a practice ground for aerial bombing and shelling until 1975, so the island is still littered with unexploded ordnance. How's that for conservation? If you ask me, I think it's fantastic, and as a side note I am considering adopting this as a campaign platform for a future term in public office: it will be called the "Bomb everything" conservationist platform. Under my tutelage, the world's rainforests, rivers, and endangered species will be safely protected by high-grade explosives. Who would go near them? "The people have spoken, and the people want BOMBS!!!" Anyway, in Culebra they are slowly being cleared, and as of a few years ago apparently it was not uncommon for the cleared explosives to be periodically detonated in a remote area of the island; the residents would simply hear the explosion and see the accompanying black mushroom cloud.
I spent seven straight days on this beach and allowed myself to deteriorate as a respectable member of society. I did not shave during this week, nor did I take a shower. I wore the same shirt and swimming trunks all day every day (the shirt was a button-up with a collar, if you're thinking that I don't have any class). For whatever reason, by the end of the week this shirt smelled like a doughnut.
My stay at the beach was idyllic, though. After day two I managed to get the best camping spot on the whole beach. (This was objectively corroborated by the half-dozen or so people who, while walking down the beach, stopped to tell me that I had "the best spot on the beach.") It was the only spot with a direct view of the water, and I had the beach's main attraction right in front of me: a rusting tank half-submerged in the white sand. It was quite a view. I bought a massive load of groceries on my way in, so for the most part I did not have to leave and ate quite well; over the course of two mornings I ate an entire box of Fruity Pebbles cereal, and I also ate four more Butterfingers: "Crocante, Cruciente, Cremosa con Cacahuate!" in Spanish. I read a lot, began running again, did some casual star-gazing, slept like a newborn, and met a group of Spring Breakers who improved my opinion about South Carolina. After breakfast in the mornings, I would pop in my iPod and make the half-mile or so walk to the entrance of the campground to "Joe's Ice Shack," where there was hot black coffee. It was 90 degrees every day. I relaxed.
The point is that this is a very, very good place to unwind, to forget about life, to figure "things" out, or to generally disconnect from the rest of the world. And it is easily accessible from the contintental U.S.
Now I am in San Jose, Costa Rica. This city does not have much to see, and has some pretty nasty areas. (I'm sure that there are other cities in Central America that will top this, though.) On the taxi-ride into town last night, block after block of derelicts culminated with a fantastically preganant woman laying on her back in the filthy street, her shirt rolled up to expose her swollen belly. I could not believe my good luck to have seen something so revolting. Tomorrow, though, my parents and younger sister, Shannon, arrive in San Jose, whereupon we will fly to southwest Costa Rica to a town called Drake. There will begin a week of relative luxury of the sort that I have not enjoyed for quite a while. "Take care of me, parents, for I am your son." No more filthy youth hostels, no more crappy street food. It's time for family. And it's time for a gin and tonic.
posted by conor | 11:56 AM
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