The Tyranny of Distance

Puerto Rico & New Pictures!

I am currently sitting in a Starbucks in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico since they have free wireless internet. I can finally upload pictures! I have been in Puerto Rico for three days now and have been having an incredible time! For the first few days on the ship we had to go through tons of orientation meetings, which are thankfully finally over. I have had Global Studies twice, but all three of my other classes are B day classes, which don’t start until tomorrow! So there has been a whole lot of hanging out and relaxing for me, which will probably change very soon.
On the first day in Puerto Rico I went on a tour of Old San Juan, including a few Spanish forts, El Morro and San Cristobal, which were gorgeous. After the tour, which lasted a few hours I returned to the ship and took a brief nap. At night, I went to a welcome reception that was being held for the SAS students at the University of Puerto Rico. There we talked to a number of students, ate really good Puerto Rican food (everything is fried!), and learned how to Salsa. According to one of the Salsa teachers, I am a “very good dancer” which I interpreted as “I am the best Salsa dancer on the Island.” The welcome reception was incredibly fun since we were able to socialize with Puerto Rican students our age. Afterwards I went back to the ship and got to bed relatively early.
The next day I woke up early to go on a hike through the El Yunque rainforest, the only rainforest in the U.S. It was absolutely beautiful! There was mainly vegitation, and little to no visible animal life. There was an amazing waterfall, which people swam under. I took many pictures, some of which should be up on my Flickr account by now. The path was extremely hilly, and was tiring to walk through since our tour guide was doing nothing short of power walking the entire time. After the rainforest I went back to the ship and went walking around Old San Juan for a few hours in search of snack food to bring back to the ship.
Almost everyone was going on this trip to the Bioluminescent Bay. Supposedly, this bay has dynoflagellates, which light up when you touch them. There are only 5 places in the world in which the phenomenon occurs, and Puerto Rico has three of them. I did not buy this trip during the presale and it sold out extremely quickly. Everyone was saying how amazing the experience was. My friends and I wanted to go terribly and thankfully we were able to join up with a group of SAS students at the very last minute, who organized the same trip themselves (an “indie” trip, in SAS lingo…) I cannot even begin to explain this experience but I will try. We first paddled about a mile in kayaks through a mangrove swamp, about an hour away from the ship. We traveled through this awning of mangrove trees in the pitch black. After a while, you could begin to see little specks of light on the paddles. Slowly the lights became brighter and more and more appeared. Supposedly there are 720,000 dynoflagellates per gallon in this bay. We eventually tied up the kayaks and jumped into the water. I can’t begin to explain what this looked like, and I unfortunately couldn’t take pictures. There was like a bluish-green glow around everybody when they moved. Picture all the bubbles that are formed in the water when you move, but instead of them being bubbles they are millions upon millions of living organisms who are emitting light! It was pitch black in this cove, but in the water you could see everyone moving due to the glow around him or her. When you lifted your arm above the water hundreds of lights would slowly slide off back into the bay. We swam in the water for about 40 minutes, which was honestly the most surreal moment in my entire life. Kayaking in St. Mary's can never compare.
We leave Puerto Rico tonight and set sail for Salvador, Brazil!!! We will be there during Carnival, which should be an insane experience, to say the least. I will try to update again as soon as possible. Thank you so much to everyone who is actually reading this blog and who left comments. As always, you can e-mail me at emhoffman@smcm.edu and I will try my hardest to respond ASAP. I uploaded a few pictures of the ship and Puerto Rico, including the forts and the rainforest. You can find the link to those on the right side of the page at my Flickr site! Until next time!

posted by eric @ 8:18 AM