Leaving San Juan

Wow, so here it is, my final night in San Juan before I fly out to Guatemala. I've been staying for the past few days in the beautiful apartment of our friend Abigail, who has been something of a savior to us here in San Juan. Luke and Holly found her on Couchsurfing.com, and she has subsequently had every single one of us stay for at least a day or two ever since, with me being the last to leave out of our whole rag-tag little crew. Amazingly, she is not even here right now- she went to New York to see her family two days ago, so I even have the whole place to myself which I have to say I'm enjoying a lot!
Eli and I also spent a few days with another Couchsurfing contact- Sarah & Jose, a couple who live in Rio Piedras, which is about 45 minutes south of Old San Juan by bus. They, too were lovely, and Jose even let me have my computer sent to his house, which I went and picked up today. At first I wasn't going to bring it, but I have been going crazy having to write such short, succinct messages to everyone and not be able to use all the myriad wi-fi places they have here, not to mention that internet here costs a fortune: the average is about $6/ hr, so I figure it will be well worth it to be able to pre-compose messages and posts and spend minimal time actually having to pay for internet, if at all.
Since leaving Vieques, we had two days in which we rented cars, and just for the record, getting around San Juan with a car is NO easier or faster than the ancient buses if you don't really know the city. It is a myriad of one-way streets and extremely poor signages, so even if you can find a street sign you still can't legally get anywhere without going in the most roundabout way possible, or so it seems. No wonder everyone we've met just rides the bus! It really is saying a lot, cause while the bus is cheap, it isn't fast and the times & places it runs are pretty limited. They don't even HAVE a bus from where I'm staying now to the airport, which is extremely frustrating since a cab is $20 normally; because my flight leaves at 7:20am tomorrow, I will also have to pay a $5-$10 surcharge for "early service", making it basically cheaper if I had just rented a car yesterday morning and driven myself to the airport. But whatever, life isn't perfect, is it?! Overall I've had a pretty good time just hanging out with friends old and new, reading some good books, and exploring new places.
Oh yeah, back to what I was saying: So Car Rental #1 occurred so that Eli, Colette & myself could go and visit the El Yunque National Rainforest, where we camped overnight and hiked both at nighttime and again in the daylight . it was gorgeous, of course, with countless tropical plants, glimmering streams and waterfalls, and hundreds of fascinating insects, birds and reptiles to see and hear. The Coqui frogs, which are everywhere in Puerto Rico, were louder than ever here in their natural environment, and accompanied my reading by flashlight long into the night. Once, as I was stepping out to pee, I even managed to notice one just sitting there on a huge umbrella leaf I was about to push aside- I called quickly to Colette, hissing, "come here! right now right now come here!" and together we watched as the frog tried to stay perfectly still, minute after minute, apparently hoping we'd eventually lose interest and move along. But we didn't for a while- Colette ran and grabbed their ancient camera, and we managed to get a few decent shots of our little friend before finally we felt bad and decided to let it off the hook. I thanked him/her for hanging out with us and stepped away, and watched as it immediately propelled itself away from the leaf and back into the safe cover of the thickly tangled underbrush of the jungle. It was great.
Car Rental #2 was a result of Jose and Sarah's invitation to check out an indigenous festival that was happening way west of San Juan, in the beautiful mountain town of Jayuya (pronounced "yigh (like high)- you- ya". We set out a little late, around 1:45 in the afternoon, cause we had had a little difficulty securing an affordable rental car on such late notice, but eventually we were on our way and managed to figure out how to get to the right highways without too many mishaps. By the time we reached the smaller mountain roads though, I was becoming more and more nervous as the roads became progressively narrower and more and more winding. Eventually, our two hapless friends in the backseat trying to surpress the nausea that comes with unrelenting hairpin turns, I turned the driving over to Eli who was able to deal a little better with the insanity of the route. Still though, we were all relieved when it was finally time to park the car and get out, regardless of what it was we were actually there for.
The festival itself was alright; there was a cute, very modest set of displays set up in the local municipal building, and a young boy tried to explain to me in halting English that last year, as developers were digging to ready the site of a new fast food restaurant, they unearther a large collection of old broken pottery, bird, animal and fish bones, along with a few other artifacts that apparently were quite significant as they indicated that a heretofore unknown market or trading site probably existed there, which has had local archaeology buffs furiously developing all kinds of new theories about local indigenous life over the last few hundred years. The most interesting thing was a small human skeleton, the skull in particular being well-preserved, that was still in the ground as they'd found it but now had an entire building centered around it, laying there in the center encased in glass.
The rest of the festival that we saw was a lot of traditional music, tons of food kiosks (basically nothing vegetarian though, let alone vegan- luckily I had trail mix), and all kinds of handicrafts. It was nice, but after a few hours I think we had seen enough so we went in search of Jose and Sarah, but they had not arrived yet. Eventually at nearly nine o'clock we left, and the drive back to San Juan was a bit faster since we knew what to expect. Our plan was to get back to town just in time to get changed and go hit the clubs for an exciting night of dancing and making new friends- doesn't that sound great?
Well, it wasn't. We basically got lost/ on the wrong freeway/ stuck on a one-way street so many times that by the time we had dropped off Colette in one part of town and worked our way back to where we were going, we were so cranky and tired we just ended up trying to find something to eat at Denny's (a traumatic experience, to say the least) and then made our way back home- though this, too, took another half hour even though we were only 4 blocks away. Not to mention it had started to rain.
The next day was better- we all decided that what we needed was to chill out so after we finally managed to drop off the rental car (basically a repeat of the fiasco of the previous evening's navigation attempts), we just hung out and read and ate and wandered around the marketplace. At night we again attempted to go out, this time meeting with a slightly more reasonably modicum of success in the form of Junior's, the one gay bar we managed to find the last time. It was alright, except for the fact that like every other "queer" thing or place I've seen in Puerto Rico (and basically everywhere else, too, for that matter) it consisted entirely of young gay men and a few supermodel- looking trans girls. No female-born or radical queer types to be found beyond our little corner near the pool table, and any requests for where to find any such people were met with either blank stares or snotty attitudes. Nevertheless, Hazel and I made the best of it by suctioning ourselves to the jukebox and dancing as much as we could, even though we were the only ones.
But overall, I can't complain at all. San Juan (and Puerto Rico in general) has been really great to us. I have rarely visited a place where the people seem so genuinely warm and open to visitors, particularly ones like us. Of course not everyone is all excited when we walk down the street, but the actual interactions I had reflected a lack of the coldness that I often feel in the big cities I usually spend time in. Anyway, that, at long last, is it. I'm off for Guatemala, and hopefully everything will work out with my language school and volunteer projects! Stay tuned for more... xoxo, Pike