Part I: Dallas and Old San Juan

Whenever Sam has to write something for BYU, there are all these academic writing rules and conventions he has to follow. But the problem is, academic writing is awful! Have you read any of it lately? Wordy and pretentious and obscure. It's not about clarity—quite the opposite. It's about showing off and impressing the others in your in-group. And yet you can't get away from it! If you publish or work in academia you have to follow its rules. I hate it, and yet, perversely, my own writing shares many of its flaws. I'm good at putting on that academic mask! I slip easily into that style because there have been times when I need to, and honestly, it's probably affected my regular writing for the worse.

Anyway, one of the things Sam is always told to do is "contextualize" everything—supposedly so that those who don't work in his discipline can understand the significance of what he's talking about (but really so he can use more words and establish a higher position in the ever-present academic pecking order). (Sam is actually NOT good at doing this, to his credit. His style is way too direct and coherent. The other professors have to edit him back into ambiguity.) And sometimes when I start a blog post I feel like I'm caught in that "contextualizing" cycle too, where I spill a thousand words in disclaimers and caveats and apologies and scene-setting, spending more time talking about what I'm going to talk about than I do about the subject itself! It drives me crazy! And if I spend any more time deciding how to tell about this trip, I'll die of old age! 

So (now that I've completely wasted my two introductory paragraphs), let's get right to it, for crying out loud! Sam and I took Sebastian on a trip for his graduation/birthday. For months, I agonized over every aspect of it—the money, what to do with the kids, where we should go and most of all IF we should go, and finally things fell into place enough that I had to make a choice to stop agonizing and just be grateful. One of the fun things that worked out was that we found really cheap tickets with a twenty-nine hour layover in Dallas. We found a tiny apartment to stay in overnight so we could explore a little bit of the city. I knew we wouldn't be able to visit Abe, but it felt exciting to be right there near him, seeing some of the things he'd seen when he got to his mission!

Abe's mission, oddly (for being called the Texas Dallas East Mission), doesn't actually even include the city of Dallas at all. But he was in Plano and Richardson and Rowlett for six months, and he could see downtown Dallas from his apartment.

We found a place to eat downtown and walked around a little. There was a beautiful sunset!

But it was HOT. So, so hot and humid. I felt immediately drained of all energy the moment I stepped outside, and it gave me such renewed appreciation for Abe's cheerful philosophical acceptance of the heat.(He told us once when we asked about it, "Well, I just decided to like the hot weather, and now I do.") How does he stand it? How? It was such a relief to step back inside our apartment or even get in an air-conditioned car, and that was after only short stints outside!

While we waited to go to the airport the next day, we went to the "Frontiers of Flight" museum near Love Field. It was the right thing to do with Seb, our airplane-lover. Oh, and Seb stole commandeered borrowed my camera for this entire trip, so my pictures are all just from my phone. (In these posts I'll include some of the pictures Seb took too. But you know—he chooses very different things to photograph than I would! It's okay, though. He's a good photographer. He figured out how to use the manual camera settings way faster than I did. And I admit it was nice for me not to have to haul that heavy thing around all the time!)

A cool rotary engine

This is the weirdest plane ever. It's the only one of its kind—but it really does fly, apparently! Its nickname is "the flying pancake."

Same plane from above. Who decided to build this?? I don't understand.

This is the real Apollo 7 Command Module. You could tell it was real somehow—the way it was all scarred and scuffed up.

We liked how this plane came right through the wall! We wished the other kids had been with us to see it.

It's worth mentioning the amazing Mediterranean place we ate at for lunch, with huge piles of different hummuses and tzatzikis. And homemade pita cooking in a big oven nearby! We told Abe we're coming back here for sure when we visit Texas with him after his mission next year!

And then, finally, we were on the plane to Puerto Rico. Seb enjoys the window seat and the plane ride more than anyone else I know. He looked out the window for practically the entire five-hour flight, and took lots of cool pictures. This is the Mississippi River, I think!

It's cool to see the sunset light coming through the engine and making it glow!

I've never been to Puerto Rico (I didn't even know where Puerto Rico was! Here's a map if you didn't know either :)) or anywhere else in this part of the world, so it was cool to fly over Florida (we could actually see the shape of it as we went over!) and then on over toward the Caribbean Sea, with only a few lights of islands breaking the darkness every now and then. There were far-off low clouds too, with lightning flashing silently every few minutes.

And it was super cool as we flew down low over the island before landing, looking at the lights of the cities and puzzling out which areas were water and which were land, wondering what it would all be like in the daytime. We got there after midnight, and the minute we stepped out of the airport, it felt foreign and exotic. It was hot and humid—a different kind of humid than Dallas had been. Like stepping into one of those tropical greenhouses at a botanical garden, or the butterfly museum at Thanksgiving Point—my only prior experiences of such a climate! The air felt more sticky than wet, and it never stopped being sticky our whole time there. If you rested your arm down on a table or touched your legs to a chair, your skin would sort of squelch and cling as you peeled it off again. It sounds unpleasant—and at times it was!—but mostly it just made me constantly aware of being somewhere new and unfamiliar. SO different from our Utah air.

Before we left on this trip, I had done tons of reading about Puerto Rico. Even though it's part of the U.S. and you don't even need a passport to go there, it felt like such a foreign place and so different than anywhere I've been before that I felt nervous going into it blind. I did get a pretty good idea of things to do and places to stay, and some good general advice from travel forums, but it also made me nervous about some things (like driving and getting around) that ended up being no trouble. Apparently lots of people who post at those places are either paranoid or way too fussy about things. Or we could have just been lucky, I suppose. Of course, Sam did all the driving and I knew there were moments where he felt stressed (I did too as navigator!), but it was really mostly fine. 

When I'd asked Sebastian and Sam if they wanted to stay in one place or see more of the island, they both instantly agreed on seeing more. That fit with my own inclinations too—I wanted to drive around the whole island if we could! It's pretty big (maybe about like the Big Island of Hawaii, but longer and thinner) but definitely not too daunting to anyone who's used to driving around the Western United States! Circling the island only takes 6-7 hours total.

We rented a car and stayed in a small place near the airport that first night, and then drove into Old San Juan.

In some ways this part of San Juan, which dates to the 1500's, reminded me of other old cities I've been to in Italy and Germany and France. (And how? How have I been to so many? It still amazes me when I think about it.) Cobblestones, steep hills, narrow streets, charming little balconies and hidden courtyards. But in other ways it was so different from anywhere else. The heat, for one thing. The temperature was in the 90's when we went to Orvieto, but the tropical heat just feels different! There's a sort of hard white brittleness to the sunlight that was only familiar to me from movies—it's not warm and round and medieval like it feels in Rome. Instead it glances off the turquoise ocean and the bright colors of the buildings and dazzles you all the way to the back of your eyes.

And that's the other thing that makes this old city completely unlike the others—the colors! I was in love with the colors. Instead of warm wood and cold stone, it's all pinks and yellows and salmons and turquoises. It is beautiful! People must put a lot of effort into maintaining it, because the colors all looked bright and fresh and crisp. 

On top of that, when you get up close, the cobblestones are blue. I don't know what they're made of—some kind of slate, maybe? They have a really distinctive shine in that severe light.

We walked through a courtyard with lots of pigeons. People were buying bags of food from a little stand to feed them. Seb was standing among the birds trying to see if they'd land on him, and a nice girl handed him her empty bag of food. That was good enough to get them to swarm all over his arms and head! He was pleased.

This wall is full of little pigeon-homes.

We stopped at a store with huge heaps of gelato in all different flavors. It looked so beautiful and tasted so good, especially in the heat of the day!

Sam's white chocolate-pistachio swirl was amazing.

So was my watermelon and…hmm…maybe passion fruit? I only remember that it was really good.

As we walked along the streets, I loved looking through doorways and seeing glimpses of green courtyards and little gardens hidden within.

We all got so excited when we saw this guy with a "Caw" on each shoulder! (You know how it is when one of your children really loves something. You can't help but love it too.) We wished so much that Gus could have been there to see this guy! But we took pictures and showed Gus when we got home, and now if anyone asks what he's going to be when he grows up, he says, "A Caw Man!" I hope he does it, too.

He was such a nice Caw Man. Very happy. The little green bird on his hand was a Puerto Rican Parrot, maybe? Or maybe not. I think they are endangered.

And this rainbow-y macaw was cool. I haven't seen one quite like it before.

There are two big forts in Old San Juan. I guess as an important Spanish stronghold, San Juan was attacked by the Dutch and the British at various times (and by pirates too, of course)—and never taken. That's the sign of a good fort, eh? This big green "lawn" leading up to the fort isn't really grass. I mean, it may be some sort of grass, but it's not like our grass. More like a low green ground cover.

Here we are! I am not, in fact, pregnant, though I look it in this dress.

The fort had a sort of moat around it, and when we looked down we saw some big things moving around down there. When we got closer we realized they were iguanas! They're huge! This guy is probably four feet long from head to tail.

When we walked over nearer to him, he scrambled up the wall of the fort! He was so agile!

The clouds were really interesting in Puerto Rico. They formed so fast over the ocean, and they had misty soft edges kind of like you see in California, but then they could get huge and towering so fast! You could almost see the rain gathering in them and then spilling out in a sudden storm.

This was probably my favorite view in the entire city. The colorful houses spilling down the hillside, the bright blue Caribbean sky, and that turquoise water breaking against the rocks below.

This was a graveyard, just absolutely packed with monuments and gravestones. Every graveyard we saw in Puerto Rico was like this. They aren't large expanses of green grass and flat headstones like we have in Utah, nor like the tree-lined forest-y ones I've seen in Europe. They have their own character, like everything else here.

I liked this row of potted plants against the colored walls.

Such a great view down to the sea!

We are very hot.

So many balconies!

We tried a sampler of Puerto Rican food for lunch. Lots of pork, rice, plantains, and corn. Sausages. Fritters of various types. Everything was delicious! And we were so happy to be sitting down, indoors, with a fan blowing on us!

Another fort on the other end of the Old Town.

This picture captures that Caribbean light really well. Also, I wish my house were painted that color of yellow!

And that's the end of what we saw of Old San Juan! Don't get too excited, though. Another unfortunate similarity I share with academic writing is a tendency to go on waaay toooo lonnng. If I had any self-respect, I could just post one picture from each place we went! Or fewer! However, I know from sad experience that if I don't put my pictures and thoughts up here, they will disappear forever into the depths of the back-up hard drive. Worse, they will fade from my memory altogether. But if they're here on the blog, I get to reflect on them, my kids will look at them, and I might even print them into blog books sometime! So here they will stay, and if you find them excessive, just reflect on how lucky you are not to be reading Sam's Continuing Faculty Status Dossier. 

Next up: the west side of the island!