Hola, recepcion a mi blog.
It’s a special edition coming straight to you from San Juan, Puerto Rico. I’ll be here until the work is done. It may be a few days, it may be a couple of weeks.
I tried hard to stay awake on the plane. The movie they showed on the flight didn’t help. “Georgia Rule” isn’t exactly my type of movie. I endured it without audio. My iPod played in my ears while my eyes kept getting drawn back to the screen where I saw Lindsay Lohan being a bitch to just about everyone on the screen. No thanks.
I didn’t want to sleep because I know how badly I snore and I didn’t want to drive the guy next to me nuts. He already has to sit next to the fat kid, now the fat kid is going to snore in his ear? Luckily we were able to move around and we had an empty seat between us. We were in the exit row and I had four feet of legroom. Nice!
The night before Teresa and I stayed up all night (4am) with Freddy and KC playing Nintendo Wii. I couldn’t wait to make fun of him for having one but I said I’d give it a try. It was a lot of fun. In a setting like that, I would like to have one. I could never imagine playing it by myself but with four or five friends it would be entertaining. I was going to leave it at just that and never give it another thought but he kept telling me I should get one so we could link up and play online all the time. My answer was going to be “Absolutely not. If I wanted to play online I’d play with a real game system and upgrade to an X-Box 360″. That was what I WAS going to say, until Teresa looked up and said she’d like it and that she’d play it often. Ok, so now I might have to buy the damn thing…
The games look like shit when compared to X-Box. You can get the classic NES games like Zelda and Mario Brothers but they don’t have Super Mario 3 available yet. The Wii is lame and generic. The games are like a 3-D Atari 2600. Baseball. You hit the ball, a Fisher-Price person waddles out to field the ball, you don’t; control him and the game assigns outs according to where the ball lands like when you played WiffleBall in your back yard. Sounds boring and lame so it should be real easy right? Nope. Well, for some people it was. Teresa repeatedly kicked my ass in baseball all night. The games are geared toward small children. Why the hell would I want to play the Wii baseball when my X-Box is clean, sharp and detailed? You field the ball, you take leads and steal bases, you dive for a catch, you can slide into base. When your guy slides, his uniform is dirty the rest of the game… Give all that up for the novelty of simulating swinging a bat? No thanks. My arm hurts from all the swinging and bowling and I never got the satisfaction of feeling the ball hit the bat or throwing the bowling ball halfway down the lane. But now I can say that “I hurt my wrist playing with my Wii” and no one can call me dirty…
So we land and the culture shock is subtle but it’s there. The subtlety is what makes it so wrong. You know something is different but you barely notice it. When I took off, a large sign said “Baggage Claim” with a small print Spanish translation below it. When I landed it was in Spanish with small print English now. Just enough to let me know that I’m the outsider here and that I had better appreciate everyone I come across that speaks English because my Spanish rusted shut years ago. I took three years of Spanish in school. The third year was conducted entirely in Spanish. The next year I took one year of German. Years ago I dabbled with a “learn at home” Japanese course. All the Spanish has gone out of my head. On top of that, I haven’t used anything but English in 15 years. I can’t understand a word when it is spoken and I can barely decipher written words in time for them to be of any use. Immediately after leaving the car rental place I hit the main road. 26 Oeste or 26 Este? Quick! Little things like that. That’s not entirely true, I was listening to the radio and they kept singing “no se porque” and I knew that was “I don’t know why”. I know just enough to get myself killed…
I’m boning up on my classical music. I love classical but I don’t listen to it nearly as much as I used to. Here I have little choice. You know how in the States we have the entire radio dial and the Spanish speaking stations are relegated to the lower end of the dial and mostly on AM stations? Reverse that here. I love the latin music I hear but it gets repetitive real quickly. So I’ve been scanning the channels and the only English-speaking voice I found on the FM dial was that guy with the smooth voice between movements telling you “that was Giuseppe Sinopoli and the Philharmonic Orchestra with the second act of Wagner’s Tannhauser”. Opera and Classical, those are the only choices I have that aren’t punctuated by a guy streaming Spanish at 100kph.
That’s another thing, gas is only 67 cents here. They sell it by the liter. The “Velocidad Maxima” signs are in kilometers per hour. I thought we decided to ignore the metric system? Yeah, WE did, they didn’t. Every time I get into the car I flag myself as a tourist; I use my turn signals. I was warned about the traffic down here by a bunch of people. I didn’t expect all of this. Lanes merging with no notice, barely any lanes at all, if you can FIT three cars on the road then it is a three lane road. And “fit” is a relative term. I would guess we could fit two cars across, the locals prefer four. Pot holes that we call sink holes back home. I just know that I’m going to get hit before I leave.
So I may be here a couple of weeks and my plans only conform that I am such a NERD! Everyone kept telling me about the cool spots to hit while I was down here. The casinos, the beaches, the clubs, the cigar factories. I may hit them but none of them make the top of my list. While in PR, I have a list of two things I plan on doing. Top of the list; The Arecibo Observatory. Why look at hot Puerto Rican babes on gorgeous beaches while drinking a local specialty drink and a smoking a fine hand-rolled cigar? Why hit the casino and party it up like a rich American tourist? I want to visit the largest radio-telescope on the planet. Yeah, I’m a geek. I’m that kid who actually paid attention on the class field trips. 1000 feet across, discovery of Mercury’s true rotational phases, SETI@home, it’s just the coolest thing to get my picture taken with it in the background. I can’t wait to see it.
The other thing on the list is to visit my old friend Jose. I haven’t seen him since he moved back here after high school. Six months or so will go by and we’ll get back in touch again. Most of you who see me regularly know that I’m not the best at staying in contact with people. I don’t do the correspondence thing very well and I end up losing touch with most people. Jose is one of the few that I made sure to stay in contact with, even if it’s just a few times a year. He’s the only reason I finally gave in and joined MySpace. It will be good to see him again, even if I was Robin to his Batman.
Well, the FAA is no different in the states or here in PR. I just spent the entire day waiting on a shipment that won’t be here until tomorrow. What that really means is; I didn’t have to waste a Sunday flying in, I could have come in today and have been ready for tomorrow. SSDD…
For those of you not keeping up with the forums, I have posted a date for our little attempt at dressing up the house. The weekend of October 12 and 13th we are going to paint, trim and stuff. Thank you everyone for your offers of assistance. I think this is going to be a very easy weekend. Good people, good music and good drink. I’m actually looking forward to this now.
More to come from Puerto Rico when I have more to report. Stay tuned…
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