Soy Ponceña*

This trip to Puerto Rico was way too short. We really only had 3 days, since I traveled all day Tuesday, and will be traveling all day today (Saturday).

We spent Tuesday and Wednesday night in Old San Juan. I enjoyed wandering around and absorbing the history. Christopher Columbus was here in 1493, over 500 years ago. Much of the old wall that the Spaniards built to protect the island from the English and Dutch still stands. And the old town is a study in color combinations: pink and blue, green and pink, blue and orange.

I shopped a little, but most of the souvenir shops sold tacky trinkets imported from Ecuador. There are quite a few outlet stores there, however, and I bought a new purse (hot pink!) from the Coach factory store.

I expected San Juan to be more cosmopolitan that it is, or maybe I just didn't go to the right spots. And I definitely expected it to be more like the U.S. After all, it's been a province of the U.S. for over 100 years and its citizens are American citizens. Instead, it is more like Mexico.

Nevertheless, we found a fabulous restaurant just a few doors down from our hotel. It was called Marmalade and the chef really knew how to combine flavors. Our waiter was a young man from Manhattan and he was great. And the ambience was wonderful; very contemporary.

On Thursday, we got out of Dodge and headed to Ponce on the south side of the island. We expected the drive to be 2-3 hours, but it was barely over an hour. We checked into our hotel, the Hilton Caribe, and then went into town. My grandparents and great-grandmother came from Ponce and I wanted to see the home of my ancestors. My husband and I walked along the town square and I was awed to think my grandparents walked in that same spot when they were young.

We ate a late lunch at the Hotel Meliá (plantain crusted Dorado, with rice and black beans) and then had a tour of the Ponce History Museum. There I learned that Puerto Rico had declared Spanish to be the official language. In 1993, the king of Spain gave a medal to commemorate that decision.

Friday we hung around the hotel pool and I got sunburned. I foolishly tried to look like a local in one day. It was too hot and too windy to go running, so we went into town. I bought a souvenir and M.H. asked where we could get some good Puerto Rican seafood. We were sent to a little seaside town west of Ponce and it was perfect. The restaurant had a deck that jutted over the water and I had a soup loaded with fresh seafood: shrimp, lobster, octopus, and conch. A Puerto Rican bouillabaise :-) The waitress did not speak English, which was a challenge because even though I'm half P.R., I do not speak Spanish. But we managed to get through to each other.

My run this morning was nothing extra. I just stuck around the hotel grounds, which were beautiful but not like running for miles along the ocean. Still, I got five miles in, which was good.

I would like to have more time here in Ponce, and discover more about my ancestors. And maybe meet some distant relations--there were many people who looked like me. And I definitely would like to spend more time sunning; I didn't even go in the ocean because it looked too rough. I hope I can come back soon.


*I am from Ponce