Our Trip to Puerto Rico!

Hi!

Late last night Alex and I got back from a four night stay in San Juan, Puerto Rico!!  Alex applied for and received funding to go to a Public Health Law Research conference that was held there this year.  We decided that I would go too and that the trip would be our Christmas present!



We had so much fun!  First of all, it was in the 80s every day and it felt sooo good to be outside in the warm sun!  We got there in the early afternoon on Tuesday and we took a taxi, with the nicest man Guillermo as our driver, to the hotel.  After we checked in, the first thing we did was explore!

We were hungry and wanted to find somewhere other than the hotel restaurant to eat so we walked to an area called Condado, which was about 15 minutes from the hotel.  It was a weird time to eat so some places weren't open for dinner yet.  We ended up getting Subway.  We passed the beach on the way there and knew we wanted to come back another day!

There are so many cute buildings there!  This one was my absolute favorite.

Isn't it perfect??  So many of them are painted pretty pastel colors with white trim and they're so retro-looking and adorable!

Here's another cute one.

We stayed at the Sheraton Puerto Rico Hotel and Casino.  It was really nice!  That's where the conference took place, and it's right by the huge convention center.  From our room we could see lots of city and the ocean!

The first night we swam in the big jacuzzi/pool.  It was so nice!  We practically had the whole pool deck to ourselves!

I had a lot of time to relax and read!  I read Amy Poehler's book Yes Please, which I got for my birthday, and it's SO good!  I'll write more about that in another post.  I spent a lot of my time on Wednesday and Thursday reading on comfy couches on the sun deck by their infinity pool!  It was great.

  

My view :)

Thursday evening, everyone from the conference plus their families rode buses to Old San Juan for a walking tour and then dinner and a flamenco show!  This weekend in Puerto Rico is the busiest of the whole year!  They have a huge celebration called the San Sebastian Street Festival, celebrating the end of their Christmas (which is two months long - the longest in the world!) and they expected 500,000 people to come to Old San Juan Thursday through Sunday.  This meant that getting there on buses was pretty complicated!  There were traffic blocks and police everywhere.  Lots of roads were closed off the whole weekend.

The walking tour was so interesting and fun!!  Our tour guide, Moira, was so nice and she was so smart!  She told us so much interesting information.

We got to see the narrowest house in the world (only five feet across!), the governor's house, several statues and monuments, a convent-turned-fancy restaurant, the last remaining set of outer doors (the entire Old San Juan used to be surrounded by a wall with six sets of doors that closed every night), and a lot more.

See the tiny yellow wall between the blue and red buildings?  That's a five-foot wide house!!

  

That is the house where the governor lives.

This is inside the covenant-turned-restaurant.

We walked down some streets where there were tons of people celebrating!  The weather was perfect, of course!

It's blurry but maybe that helps show how much they were celebrating :)  The bricks we walked on were from the 1700s and were brought over from Spain!

I'm so glad that we got to go on the tour.  We learned a ton and got to see so many cool places!

Dinner was at Restaurante Triana Tapas and Flemenco.  First, we entered through their vault bar (it actually used to be a vault!).



They had what looked like the entire restaurant upstairs set up for the group and they started bringing out our dishes right away.  There were two giant tables, plus lots of smaller tables along the walls.



We sat at a table for two.  We had salad, rolls, scallops in garlic sauce, a few things we couldn't identify but they were delish, our entree - we both got the meat paella - and dessert.  It was some kind of creme brulee/flan situation that was so yummy.  We had to eat it fast because the people in charge of the group told us we had to go back to the buses!!  The food was sooo good!

During the entire meal a flamenco group performed and they were amazing!  There were four dancers that would alternate, sometimes dancing in groups and sometimes individually.  The guitarist was incredible!  They played and danced along to recorded music and it was so fun!

  
On Friday, Alex was done with his conference at lunch time, so we had the rest of Friday and Saturday until we left to do whatever we wanted!  We walked to the beach and had so much fun!

We didn't get all the way in the water, but we walked in it and sat on the beach for a while.  I got a coconut to drink (and eat, I used the straw like a spoon) and that was yummy!

We walked to Coldstone Creamery and got ice cream to eat while we walked back to the hotel.  Since there is a big five-lane highway between the beach and the hotel that we had to cross, we didn't want to wait until rush hour to walk back.  There's a crosswalk but the light never changes to let you cross!  You just have to run across when there is a big gap.

Two of the nights we had dinner at a little outdoor restaurant right across the street from our hotel called Ficus Mexican Bar and Grill.  We also ate a few meals in the hotel restaurant called Choices.  We had yummy food at both places!



On our last day, we went swimming in the morning and then packed and checked out of the hotel.



We had lunch there and hung out for a little bit, then got a taxi to the airport.  They recommended getting to the airport pretty early in case it was busy because of the festival.  It wasn't bad at all!

We had a layover in Ft. Lauderdale and got back to Baltimore late last night.  After getting our luggage, taking a shuttle back to the car, getting home, and going back outside for some 2am fire alarm fun, we finally got to sleep!

I'm so glad we got to go to Puerto Rico!  It was perfect weather, such an easy trip there and back, and we got to see so much neat stuff!



Oh, here are some mimes on the phone :)

Thanks for reading!