We used Thursday to explore Old San Juan…Our first stop was at San Cristobol, one of the two famous forts in Old San Juan. After watching a brief film, we went outside to explore the grounds. It was so cool! We weren’t sure what to expect, but all of us were definitely glad we went to check it out. One of the first rooms we came upon was used as a dungeon for a priest who had sexually abused a young boy and then killed the boy. It was interesting because he was locked up in the room (no light except a very minimal amount from a window about 1 inch wide) for 20 years. During this time, he made detailed sketches of ships on the stone walls. There were a handful of ships on the wall that he had drawn! Here’s some more information about the fort in general…San Cristobol is the largest of San Juan’s forts and it was used to protect the land from enemy ships entering the harbor. It was completely in the mid 1780’s and is quite an impressive architectural structure. The fort is an example of “defense – in – depth,” which means that each part of the fort is supported by another. Some of the walls are 18 ft thick…Can you imagine making walls that rise 150ft above sea level and are 18 ft thick…with your HANDS? Crazy!

After exploring the fort, we wandered in Old San Juan, popular for it’s blue cobblestone streets. All of the buildings in Old San Juan are so cute! It looked like how I would think Italy would look. We grabbed some authentic Puerto Rican food at Café Puerto Rico and then headed back to the ship. Next, we spent a few hours on the beach about ¾ of a mile or so from the ship. The water was SO warm and refreshing! The sun was pretty darn intense so it was nice to hop in the water for a bit. One thing that surprised me was that the water seemed extremely salty…no idea why, though!

I did my first SAS excursion on Thursday night: Bioluminescent Bay. SO COOL! We rode a bus for about an hour and a half to get to the bay where we hopped in two-person sea kayaks and kayaked through a long, winding lagoon to get to the Bioluminescent Bay. I LOVE kayaking so I knew I was going to enjoy it, but it was just amazing once we got close to the bay. We started to notice the water sparkling when our paddles dipped into the water while we were still in the lagoon. ((We were doing this in completely in the dark. The kayaks had blinking lights on the back of them so we could follow each other as we paddled)) Finally, we made it out to the bay and we were able to jump in the water and swim. It’s such an awesome natural phenomenon! I was expecting the bay to just glow like a glow stick, but it just starts to glow when you disrupt the water. If you don’t move too fast, it just looks like green sparkles, but if you move your legs really fast it looks like you’re floating in bright green water. This is actually a terrible description…I don’t think I can really describe in words how it looked! Anyways, there are 5 sites in the world that this occurs and 3 of them are in Puerto Rico. Actually, one in Puerto Rico and one in Jamaica have gotten too polluted, so there are 2 remaining in Puerto Rico and one in the Bahamas. The glow in the water is caused by fragile organisms which light up with any movement in the water. We saw some fish jumping out of the water in the lagoon that made the water glow…they scared the crap out of me! Apparently it is good luck if one jumps in your kayak…none jumped in ours. The environment that these organisms survive in is extremely salty and warm. The bay only varies about 5 degrees during the year. It is definitely a must-see!

Later that night, we headed out to the bars in Old San Juan…At first they weren’t too crowded, but as the night went on, the streets/bars were just flooded with SAS kids! There were a bunch of bars right next to each other on one of the streets, so all the students were there for the last night in Puerto Rico. We ended up running into some of the Puerto Rican students we met from the Welcome Reception the night before at Carribbean University. Soon after that, we all decided we wanted to go salsa dancing so a bunch of us wandered around San Juan looking for this salsa place one of the Puerto Rican guys knew of. It was literally a herd of us taking walking in the middle of the street for about a half mile to this place. The walk was fun because we got a chance to meet some other Puerto Rican guys we hadn’t met the night before. They’re all so friendly! Well, once we finally got to the salsa place, we found out that you had to pay to get in, so we turned around and walked the whole way back to where we started. Once we got back to the bar we started at, we found out that they had put on some salsa music so we DID get to salsa after all! It was fun partnering up and having the Puerto Ricans teach us some dance moves. Obviously it turned out to be a late night, but we all had a blast!

One thing that strikes me about Puerto Rico is that everyone seems like they’re part of one big family. The students and professors that we met at the university were all dancing together and having a great time. When we went out to the bars, this one student, Victor, walked up to a cop car that was sitting in the street and just started a conversation with the cop as if he had known him forever! It’s so different from the United States because I feel like we just avoid confrontation and eye contact with people we don’t know. Basically, I think our country is too uptight. If we took some notes from the Puerto Ricans, I think we would all loosen up a bit! Another thing is that although Puerto Rico is part of the U.S. and the drinking age is 21, they certainly don’t enforce it at all like we do in the states. I just thought that was interesting because everyone in the U.S. goes to great lengths to get fake ids and all this stuff, but Puerto Ricans don’t have any problem ordering drinks when they’re underage. Anyone ready to move to Puerto Rico yet? Also…one girl in my family class mentioned that she saw two little girls playing in a plaza that were seemingly unsupervised. Surprised and concerned, she asked an older woman that was sitting near by and the older woman told her that there were about 30 sets of eyes watching these girls and that their moms were probably just in a store. Back home, no parent would ever think of leaving 2 five-year-olds playing in even the Exton Mall playground while they went shopping!