I'd Like To Make a Toast to....It Tasting Delicious?

Story Time.

Last Sunday we went to a hotel bar to watch the Bears play the GB Packers. There aren't many Americanized sports bars in our area and we settled for a small side bar in a nice, trendy hotel that happened to be carrying the game. I accidentally ordered a Peroni that ran me $5, Dan and Jon did their research before ordering and each got a soft drink for $2. A $3 difference may not seem much to you, but you learn to appreciate these discretionary ordering techniques when your volunteer stipend leaves you with an ATM message that looks like this:

ACCOUNT BALANCE: $0.87

Anyways, the lack of money is to be expected and that's all part of the experience...so somewhere around the beginning of the 4th quarter of the Bears game, a twenty-something skater-looking dude walks up to the bar and orders a Heineken. Tattoo on the lower neck region, black Hurley hat with an abstract white design (adjusted slightly to the side), oversized, black Billabong style shirt, jeans, high-top DC shoes...you get the picture. He drank his Heineken slowly and regretfully, as if he had just lost $2,000 in the nearby casino and all of a sudden he found himself at a side bar in a hotel. He stared at the labeling on the bottle as if he were conducting a research project, watching it slowly turn in his hand, around and around. Myself and the other volunteers watched him from a few feet away, feeling sorry for him and what was probably his recent monetary loss.

After finishing the Heineken, he left for about 20 minutes and came back to the bar and ordered a $206 bottle of champagne ($216 with tax). I was all of a sudden paying very close attention when he paid the bartender in 2 $100 bills, and when the bartender politely asked him to pay him the other $16 he owed-he laid down another 2 $100 bills and told the bartender to keep the change. Change in my bank account is literally just that, $0.87 cents in change. Change in this skater dude's case was $84.

I assumed he was going to take the nice bottle of champagne, the bucket of ice, and 2 champagne glasses upstairs to some lucky lady. Instead he told the bartender to forget about the bucket of ice, and he asked him to pop open the bottle right there. Keep in mind this is Sunday around 11:30 PM, with no one else around except 3 white kids watching the Bears game...not exactly the most common time to start popping bottles.

After he had a couple of sips, he looks at the bartender, nods in our direction, and says (in the most monotone, calm, dull, slow voice I've ever heard), "Did you give those guys some?" The bartender did a double-take to make sure the kid wasn't joking. Skater Dude looked down at us and asked, again in the chilled-out-bro tone of voice, "You guys want some?" We responded that we would, "sure why not?"

After each of us got a full glass, we asked him what the occasion was... "Yo man, this is awesome, thanks so much, what's the occasion?" "Yeah man, what are we celebrating tonight!?"

He looked up ever so slowly from his glass of champagne, as if turning his neck 90 degrees was something he only liked to do a certain number of times in one day...and we were pushing his limit on that number. "Because it tastes f-ing delicious, that's why." (he didn't say f-ing, but for the sake of keeping this blog G-rated you can use your imagination there)

That was a good enough answer for us, and we began to sip. It tasted like liquid gold, it was easily the best champagne I've ever had (obviously). Usually I don't like champagne, but this bottle changed my entire outlook on the bubbly.

We tried probably another 5/6 times to get a conversation going with this Skater Dude, and each time were politely denied from anything past a comment like the first. Examples...

Us: Yo man, so where are you from?
Skater Dude: Bloomington.
Me: Oh awesome, like Bloomington, Indiana? My girlfriend was considering IU's Journalism School...
Skater: Bloomington, Illinois.
Us: Oh right on, so are you a Bears fan?
Skater: (Purse of the lips and nod of the head up and down one time, no words)
Jon: Awesome man, I'm from Palos Heights outside of Chicago, we're here watching the Bears game, thanks so much for the champagne, this stuff is delicious.
Skater: No problem (looks back to begin another research project on the rising bubbles)

After he told the bartender to give us the remainder of the bottle and to make sure we had had enough, we watched the end of the Bears game mostly in silence. I'm not sure about the other guys but I didn't want to agitate the guy or disturb the flow of how the night was going. So we just sat there and enjoyed it, because the Skater Dude was right...it did taste f-ing delicious.

Sorry there's not a grand finale ending to this story, we got up after finishing and thanked the nameless Skater Dude again...he just nodded and pursed his lips as if we had disrupted his train of thought. Then we kind of just slowly backed away from the situation and started on our way home.

Sum it up to another weird, yet adventurous and entertaining night in Puerto Rico.

Being Resourceful with Leftover Bamboo

Post-Machetes Blog Post

My fingers are full of blisters from the machetes today, so I'm gonna use that as an excuse to not type as much tonight. This video will show a little portion (I'd say about 1/43 worth) of the area we were clearing from Centro Buen Pastor.

Machetes

Tomorrow we're going to work with machetes at 730 AM. Bittersweet considering the early starting time... but let's go chop down some trees, I'm stoked.

Los Tubos (Manati) e el Mar Chiquita - Labor Day Special

So this morning we found out that we didn't have to work, a pleasant surprise for us on Labor Day. We went to Playa Los Lobos and El Mar Chiquita (in the town of Manati), both of which are about 45 minutes west of San Juan on the northern shore of Puerto Rico. Who wants to visit?!

Skype

Random thoughts of the day:

Skype is awesome (see above).
I miss Notre Dame.

It's Freezing Down Here!

Usually I wake up in the morning and I feel like I just got off the treadmill. It starts getting hot in Puerto Rico around 6:30 AM. By 8AM, my room is too hot for me to sleep in. So yes Mom and Dad, my sleeping habits have changed.

Today I slept in until about 10AM, enabled to do so by the cool breeze and rain pattering I heard on our terrace. So when Dan and I were talking this morning about how good it felt in our apartment today (somewhere around room temperature instead of steaming hot), I decided to look up the weather and see what our new definition of comfortable is. The following is what weather.com had to say...



Light Rain

76°F
Feels Like
79°F

79 is the new 60.

La Peninsula de Cantera

Cantera has stray horses. Apparently people just get horses from wherever and try to take care of them for awhile until they run out of money, time, or motivation to do so. Then when they stop caring for them, the horses are left to fend for themselves. One of the locals was telling us with dogs or cats getting in the way of your car on the road you can just honk at them and they'll run away. But with horses you have to approach them slowly and ease them out of the roadway because you never know how they'll react. Since all of us gringos think this is so weird/interesting, there's probably going to be more pictures/videos documenting these horsey loners.


The other boat we took out into Laguna Los Corozas,
Laguna San Jose, through Canal Suarez and into
Laguna la Torrecillas. The guy hanging off the side is
a professor, testing for the salinity of the water.


One of the homes on the water in Cantera. They have a lot of
contamination problems with the water from years of trash
buildup, disallowing them from using the water.


Sunset photo from the highest point in Cantera

The van/shack thing we got our lunch from...one of the
community leaders, Chago, helped us find this diamond
in the rough (it's in the housing projects in Cantera).
The thick, footlong, meaty sandwich and a drink cost
us $3. Best value in Puerto Rico so far.

















Psalm 23 written on a wall in one of the barrios in Cantera.


Jon took the initiative for telling our readers about our upcoming work at Centro Buen Pastor in Caguas. So now I'm going to try to explain a similar project in La Peninsula de Cantera (that means the Peninsula of Cantera, and if you didn't pick up on that already this whole blog thing is going to be a struggle for the both of us) which is the other alternative tourism project we will be volunteering for.

Last Thursday was essentially our orientation for this "Proyecto Peninsula de Cantera." In a short day of 13 hours, we learned about the history of the place they call Cantera, about the people who now occupy that peninsula of land, about their pollution and water contamination problems, and about their stray animals: cats, dogs, horses, roosters, etc.

I'm going to use some of the information from the website of La Compañía para el Desarrollo Integral de la Península de Cantera (the organization we will be complementing as volunteers-it means the Company for the Internal Development of the Cantera Peninsula) because...well, just because. Soooo once upon a time (around the 1930's) the main economic activity of the peninsula was a quarry owned by the Corporation Rexach, which engaged in mining, processing and the sale of stone and other aggregate materials. After an extended time of people referring to the "cantera" or hanging out at the "cantera," the name stuck and became the official name of this plot of land. By the early 1930s, economic activity generated by the quarry began to transform the Peninsula area, which until then contained mostly vacant land, mangroves and hills. As they were removing the stone hills, people took their piece of land, and families (especially those of the quarry workers) started to get nice and cozy in this area.

Today they have problems in the Cantera community ranging from crime, drug trafficking, lack of education, and very low standards of living to name a few. See now you all didn't know about this kind of Puerto Rico, did ya? You just thought it was all Viejo San Juan with lush beaches, cheap food, and hand rolled cigars in the street. Yeah well, so did I...ha just kidding-I knew what kinds of communities we'd be working in for the most part. Although it is an eye-opener to see first hand how simply these people live in Cantera's housing projects and how poor they really are. A lunch on the porch means eating on a 4x4 piece of concrete slab in 100 degree heat, watching stray dogs, cats and horses walk by while chicklets and roosters peck at the crumbs by your feet. It makes you think twice about the things that really matter in life...things like A/C, my 2 golden retrievers, close toed shoes, etc. Just a broma... take it easy, everyone.

Spanish lesson numero uno: BROMA (bro-mah) = JOKE.

Anyways, they also have a lot of flooding problems because, with exception to the public housing projects, the people living there built their own homes with what they had at the time (which was mostly an abundance of trash.) Dejame explicar...the people from Cantera who built their own homes didn't view trash in the same way that we typically would as smelly, dirty, and gross. Rather they saw it as a resource, as a replacement to soil or gravel; they knew trash was the cheapest, most efficient way to build a foundation for their homes. So when the government gave them access to the land and let them essentially build their own infrastructure, they did so on a pile of trash. In addition to this, the lack of a cost-effective solution to disposing of trash to get it out of the community has led to more and more contamination in the water, as you saw in the video. This is just one of the deep-rooted cultural aspects of the community that our organizations are trying to work with as we aim towards a higher quality of life for the Cantera community, less contamination in the waters around Cantera, a higher quality of education, socio-economic improvement and opportunity, etc.

K, that's a lot of info for now...more to come on Cantera later because it's an extremely interesting community development project and hopefully you're as intrigued by its potential as I am...if you're not there yet, maybe you will be soon after I keep the updates coming (hopefully).

BTW, who else can't wait for Notre Dame's thrashing of Nevada on Saturday? Go Irish, baby.