Our Trip to Puerto Rico - Life in the Neighborhood

When we woke up the next morning and took stock of our situation, things were looking up. We had supplies waiting for us by the front door and a text message from the Air B&B host promising to take care of everything (a promise promptly kept). We’d triumphed over the forces of Ghost Air and actually made it to Puerto Rico. And we were ready to venture forth to see what we’d gotten ourselves into.

It turned out that we landed in the most hopping neighborhood in Old San Juan. You wouldn’t know this by day. When the sun was out, it was just a gorgeous little street full of colorful houses.

Sometimes it feels like 90% of the houses in the continental US are painted white, with the remainder mostly beige. There are a few rebels here and there with pastels, and once in a while you’ll find a primary color that you know was put on there by the people the neighborhood talks about behind their backs, but for the most part homes in this part of the world are designed to show as little individual character as possible. This is not true in many other places in the world and it makes those places more interesting, really.

Our apartment, for example, was in this building.

You walked in the front door, unlocked the heavy metal inner door, and found yourself in a tiled corridor that had a roof – it went underneath the front apartments – but was otherwise open to the elements. It led to an inner courtyard of similar color, and at the back was the door to our actual apartment.

It was a nice place, really. Two bedrooms, a tiny little kitchen not quite big enough to spread your arms in, a living room, a bathroom, and a short hallway connecting it all together and containing a table that could fit two people if they were friendly enough. It also had access to a couple of small open spaces that seemed mostly designed to provide fresh air and cool the place down. We didn’t spend a whole lot of time there, but it was all we needed it to be.

During the day the street looked like this:

You’ll notice the Christmas decorations overhead. This is because it is still, technically, Christmas in Puerto Rico. They are, according to one person we spoke with while we were there, very proud of having the longest Christmas celebration in the world. It starts at about the same time most such things start in the Western world (i.e. late October for early shopping!), continues in full force through Epiphany and finally winds down around the Feast of San Sebastian, which is tomorrow. It was the 2nd by the time we arrived, right in the middle of all this in other words, which meant that most people had a lot of time off to celebrate, or at least it seemed that way to us.

At night, however, the street looked like this:

The street was lined with bars, clubs, and restaurants, and it was always crowded with what appeared to be a healthy mix of locals and tourists. If you look up “Things to do in San Juan” you’ll find several of the bars on our street listed there as places you should not miss, although in the end we did because while the drinking age in Puerto Rico is 18, the most famous club in the neighborhood (“The Factory,” which was maybe thirty paces down the street and is a popular place to film music videos apparently) had a minimum age requirement of 23 and the bar across the street where we tried to go for dinner one night was both too crowded and too loud for people not actively clubbing. I’m not sure when everything shuts down in that neighborhood – when we arrived from the airport at 3:30am the street was still crowded and festive and I’m too old to be staying up that late every night to investigate that any further – but the only time I ever saw the street even remotely unoccupied was early morning in bright sunshine and even then there were people milling about. It was a fun place to walk around.

The odd part about it was that even with all the noise, you couldn’t hear any of it in the apartment. Other than occasional hammering from the building next door, which was being renovated, the place was dead quiet inside even while outside there were crowds and bands. There was one evening where we’d come back from Touristing and were getting ready to sit still for a while when Lauren and Sara decided they wanted to run an errand of some kind. They left, and about a minute later we got a text from them. “There’s a live band a couple of doors down the street!”

This we had to see.

By the time Kim and I got outside, however, the band was on a break, so we sat in the Plaza de San Jose for a bit just enjoying the evening. It’s a nice little plaza, a few steps from our front door in the opposite direction from The Factory, with benches around the outside and a little kiosk that sold pastries during the day. There’s a statue of a conquistador or someone similar right in the middle of it and a church that is older than the United States on one side, and there is always a crowd of people there just milling about. One night there was a quinciñera. It’s a lovely place, really, and since it’s easier to drive to the Plaza than to our apartment it became our Uber pickup point. We spent a fair amount of time there, in other words.

So we sat on one of the benches enjoying the night air, and then it started to rain. It does that in tropical climates – usually for not more than a few minutes at a time, though sometimes it can get heavy. That night was kind of drizzly, and sitting on a bench under a tree was plenty of protection for us. The Plaza emptied out, though.

And then the rain lifted, the band came back from break, and within ten minutes the entire street was packed with people singing along.

It was someone’s birthday, it turned out.

I have no idea what they were singing – a birthday song of some sort no doubt – but pretty much everyone in the crowd except us and the small scattering of other tourists knew the words and the accompanying hand gestures and were merrily serenading the birthday girl, who stood on the sidewalk in front of the band and encouraged them.

So a good time was had by all.

Also in our neighborhood were the wings. I’m not sure whether they counted as “hopping” but they were interesting and eventually we did get over to take our pictures with them. You might as well.