Vacation
Last week, I went to Puerto Rico with my family for February Break. To say the least, it was a great trip, and I would highly recommend it to anyone. As I take Spanish and have an AP exam approaching in May, having the chance to practice was beneficial and far more useful than what I thought. I feel like my listening improved, and during the trip I was surprised by my ability to understand what was going around me at restaurants, in town, at the airport, etc.
It was also the first trip where I brought my camera, which made for some memorable photos. We only stayed for 4 days, but we surprisingly managed to do a lot in those 4 days. Here is sort of an overview:
Day 1:
Our flight was at 1 p.m. so we arrived at around 5 pm. With needing to check out the car and drive over to where we were staying, we didn’t have time to do too much. We went to dinner at some place near the water, and that is where I first got the idea of “island time” because it took an hour and a half for us to get our food. After, we got back into the car and drove to the local supermarket, where we bought breakfast items and other essentials for the week. That was the first time I needed to use Spanish because the cashier did not speak much English and was trying to make us buy multiple bags for our 10-ish items. Anyway, we then drove to our Airbnb which was a top floor on a house in a little village called Las Casitas. By then it was already late, so we just unpacked and went to bed. But, as we did not realize, Puerto Rico celebrates President’s Day legitimately, so there were parties outside that lasted until 1 a.m. which sucked.
Day 2:
We had already realized before the trip that the day after traveling would be a lazy one, and we were fine with it. We woke up unbeknownst to our casita having a stunning view onto the water and other islands on it, which is this panorama below:
After waking up and making breakfast, we decided to head town to the pool that was part of the village for a morning swim. Despite being a public and relatively large complex, there were not that many people walking around, and it almost felt more private than public. When we got to the pool, there was nobody there. We swam and reclined for an hour, still with nobody there. All the while, I took photos of everything: the countless geckos around the place (which, by the way, I overheard there is a 1:3 ratio of people to geckos on the island — pretty crazy), the unique flowers I had never seen before, the lizard that stopped by, and a beehive constructed in the ground.
We continued exploring the resort after that, and quickly found an infinity pool that again overlooked the islands. This was a bit more crowded, I would say maybe one or two small families, but the pool itself was virtually empty. We had just dried off, so we did not end up swimming that time, but I took some photos of the view:
We then went back and got ready for lunch, where we ended up going to this place down by the shore that ended up being our favorite restaurant. I’m forgetting the name, but I ordered the fish tacos, and they were incredible. Also, something that I found funny was that at nearly every restaurant we went to, there was some form of an animal walking around either begging for food or picking up scraps. This time it was a chicken that wandered around the parking lot and the restaurant, picking up fallen scraps.
We again went back to the resort and chilled out for the afternoon, taking another trip to the pool and hot tub. Soon, it was time for dinner, where we chose to go to this boating club place that had a much larger menu. I ended up getting a hamburger and Croquetas de Jamon, which were both pretty good. Here, I learned that people play their own music in restaurants, which I thought was funny. We had some English songs from the restaurant in the background, and the table behind us was playing some Spanish rap song. In later restaurants, the same thing happened where people would play their own music while eating. Maybe this is a common thing? – I’m not too sure, but it makes for an interesting topic.
We again drove back to our apartment, where I sorted through the photos from the day, edited some of them, and then went to bed for a much better sleep.
This is getting sort of long, so I plan to continue the next two days of the trip in next week’s post, so stay tuned until then.
Website
Over the break, I also redesigned my personal website. I wanted to include more photos on the website, and the current display process would not have been able to scale sufficiently, so I ended up scrapping the entire thing. Instead of making the entire thing one page, I decided to break it up into 6 and opt for a more traditional style of website. I also found this cool network from some MIT professor on GitHub, and I thought that that was cool for the website’s home page.
The speeds are still a bit slow for the website itself, with a significant increase in high-definition images from the camera, but I plan to optimize those in the future. I will say that in my experience, creating about pages is actually the most challenging aspect of website development. It’s hard to think of descriptions about yourself in particular, because you always feel like they are too corny or just are bad. It took me about 30 minutes to decide on just 2 or 3 sentences vs 30 minutes to write this entire blog post.
