Salinas, PR -- Viejo San Juan

Thursday morning we got a late start to avoid San Juan rush hour traffic and arrived in Old San Juan around 10 am. For those of you who were kids in the early 80's, San Juan was home to Menudo (a latino boy-band that included a pre-VidaLoca Ricky Martin). So of course I had the refrain from one of their songs running through my head all day. Old San Juan is dominated by two Spanish Colonial fortresses: the larger Castillo de San Cristobal and the older El Morro. Both have stunning views of the ocean and the city. We started off at San Cristobal and then wandered up the road to El Morro. The architecture was worth admiring, and both forts had all kinds of underground passages and spiral staircases to explore. By the end of the morning, we were all forted out. So we strolled over to the Casa Blanca, home to several generations of descendants of Ponce de Leon (you may remember him from such quests as "the search for the fountain of youth" and "finding Florida"). Anyway, we wandered through the shady courtyards in the walled gardens and admired the fountains. It would've been a great spot for a picnic lunch. If only we'd remembered a picnic lunch.

San Juan

By this time it was after one and we were ravenous so we walked into the old city and found a restaurant that seemed to be full of people. After our food arrived, we realized why all the other patrons were only drinking at the bar. It was a pathetically half-hearted attempt at spanish/mexican cuisine. Afterwards we walked down the street to Ben & Jerry's to get something that we knew for sure would taste good. We meandered some more down the city's scenic streets. Old San Juan is only about 8 blocks wide by 7 blocks tall, so we had seen all there was to see by 3pm. One point of interest that was mentioned in Lonely Planet was a visit to a shop called the Butterfly People. This is run by a family that takes tropical butterflies and mounts them in lucite (after they're dead of course) that's meant to hang on the wall like a shadowbox. The walls of the shop were covered in large-scale arrangements of color that were both beautiful and extremely creepy. Not to mention expensive: a small box with 6 butterflies was priced in the hundreds whereas the larger collections could be upwards of two grand. We had to laugh when we saw a little tacky tourist shop down the street selling framed butterfly knockoffs for only $27.