Yeah…about that. I think I’ve seen blue skies for maybe about an hour; the weather has been seriously lacking.
Yeah, the pork…it’s big here. Christopher will be amazed that I ended up on a farm down here…
So, about Puerto Rico. Let’s start with a bunch of random thoughts and then the next post or two will head into photos:
First, I should mention that Suzanne took Christopher to his second practice and called afterwards to report that he displayed the same sorts of awesomeness that I’ve previously described here. Once can be a fluke; twice indicates (hopefully) a trend….
A State?: Yeah, that’s not going to happen. Ever. That decision would require such a shift in focus for the population of this territory to be almost impossible to contemplate. I figure, hey, it’s a US territory, that, well, you know, ENGLISH, would be common.
Not. There are no signs in english on the roads. Most service-type people understand well and speak little, but, for work, we had to venture away from that population and it was a a disaster…I mean, you might think that planned interviews with police and fire departments (who might have to answer calls in english) might be reasonable, but, no, not a word of it.
My spanish comprehension level, or better said, memories of high school comprehension, grows day by day….my buddy down here was impressed that I was picking up about one in every ten words as they rattled by in super-speed fashion. “Mi nombre is Escoto”….
Traffic: Holy cow, where everyone in the US has a car and the roads are built for that, here, everyone owns a car and the roads aren’t built for that. 3 to 4 hour backups are common. I won’t even try to describe the drive home from the site on Tuesday through Vaughn-like conditions…but, wait, I have to mention a few things.
Driving: Learned early here that aggressive driving was the way to go, because if you are passive the locals are going to pick you over like piranha. A left turn from a local street onto a major thoroughfare is typically a stop for the car in question and then a slow glide into the thoroughfare (no matter what is coming) in the hopes that the one set of traffic will stop and the other set of traffic will let their sorry butt in. This is not an isolated description; it is the rule, not the exception.
I’m getting good at it!
Emergency Services: These vehicles drive by, everywhere, with the lights on. You’re only supposed to pull over if you hear sirens. But, man, it’s a weird feeling to look back and see the lights and not move over (I would tend to move to the slower lanes until they went by so I didn’t have to deal with it).
Surface water drainage: You would think(!) that a territory that had to deal with hurricanes wouldn’t have problems with getting rainfall from the high parts of the island to the low points, but, man, Tuesday I was driving through water up to the floorboards of the rental Jeep. Which was fun, but, what the heck!
