Back in Belgium
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Ciao
It rained for two days in
I went to the biggest mall in
The nice thing with malls is that when you go to the food court, every eatery has someone standing outside to have you taste what they offer. I especially like the pretzel stands or Cinnabon, which have cinnamon pretzels. There’s panda express (there orange chicken is good) and all different kinds of pizza places, burger joints, sub makers… It’s all very fast food, but hey, that’s the
Every mall has a huge cinema complex too. The reason why I was visiting all these malls, was to get to see Apocalypto, the Mel Gibson movie about the Maya culture. I really looked forward to seeing hat movie as the reviews were good and it’s just a culture I want to get to know more of. The only problem was that they didn’t really show the movie in many theatres and the hours that were given in the newspaper were incorrect. Anyways. I went to the movies a few times and what I always do in the states is make it into a movie afternoon. I pay for one ticket and then after the feature film I just go from one theatre in the other to see parts of other movies. It sounds crazy, but I always did this when I lived in the states and I discovered some interesting movies like that. During two visits I saw three movies in their entire length and big parts of some 5 other movies.
Apocalypto is an amazing movie. I really loved it. xxx1/2. I just loved everything about it. I don’t think highly of Mel Gibson, but I thought it was incredible how he filmed those scenes in the jungle. Also the entire movie is one long journey that ends in a chase scene. It just keeps you focused all the time. I also absolutely loved the performers. Especially the evil guys. They were just the coolest meanest native Americans I’ve ever seen. When you see pictures of heavily tattooed El Salvadorian gangsters in prison: well they got inspired by their Mayan ancestors man! A lot of people didn’t like it because of its violence and its gore. But, I didn’t think it was bad at all. I prefer seeing this than horror flicks like Saw for instance. This was very well done.
I also saw Last King Of Schotland, which was a bit disappointing. Forest Whitaker isn’t that good. He’s ok, but I wasn’t that impressed. The movie was a channel four production, which basically means it’s a good television movie. I really didn’t think it was that extraordinary. I was more impressed by Will Smith in Pursuit of Happiness. That guy surprised me by acting so well. Anyways. Third movie: Dreamgirls. Again, disappointed. That Jennifer Hudson girl was amazing. But she’s the movie: I don’t understand why she got a nomination for best supporting actress. Beyonce was just not present at all, although I loved it when she sang ‘listen’. Still, her character and her performance were very weak. Eddie Murphy was okay, just like Jamie Foxx and Danny Glover, but they weren’t extraordinary.
And then the movies that I briefly saw: I saw parts of The Queen, which I missed in
I just spent a week or so in
There’s a few well known establishments on
I really prefer
Another nice thing about
There’s three more roads that you can walk on.
I noticed something funny in the
And there’s the nightlife! I love going to Twist. It’s kind of like a hook up place, but you can have fun watching people there. There’s a few rooms that play all kinds of music. As you enter you go though a mainstream (often pop rock) bar with video’s, then you get to a patio where there’s a separate bar in which gogo dancers get really trashy with stupid customers willing to put a dollar bill in their pants to get a touch or kiss maybe. If you walk up on the stairs in the patio you end up on the second level where you have a room with urban music and then a dance floor where you hear the typical
Friday and Saturday night are incredibly busy! Parking is hell. Remember this golden tip: park your car in the car parking near the police station (12 street/Washington). During the week it’s only 6 dollars/24 hours. In the weekends it’s 10 dollars. You’ll pay much more in other parking lots and it’s kind of safe next to the police station. It’s also very central. The parking on
I was happy to have a car though as I found a very nice and affordable hotel on 76 street (yes, 60 blocks north of
Oh well. I’m stuck at the airport in
I just spent a short week in
I didn’t know much about Puerto Rico apart from the singers that the country has produced (Jennifer Lopez, Ricky Martin and Ghent-resident Gabriel Rios), it’s most typical sound (reggaeton), the song by Vaya Con Dios and Marco, a law enforcement officer from Fort Lauderdale who used to be a pen pall of mine and who I met twice while touring in Florida. Most probably the coolest blatino I had ever met!
Anyways, back at the house of the couple I’m staying with in
I just spent a short week in
I didn’t know much about Puerto Rico apart from the singers that the country has produced (Jennifer Lopez, Ricky Martin and Ghent-resident Gabriel Rios), it’s most typical sound (reggaeton), the song by Vaya Con Dios and Marco, a law enforcement officer from Fort Lauderdale who used to be a pen pall of mine and who I met twice while touring in Florida. Most probably the coolest blatino I had ever met!
Anyways, back at the house of the couple I’m staying with in
I didn’t know much about Puerto Rico apart from the singers that the country has produced (Jennifer Lopez, Ricky Martin and Ghent-resident Gabriel Rios), it’s most typical sound (reggaeton), the song by Vaya Con Dios and Marco, a law enforcement officer from Fort Lauderdale who used to be a pen pall of mine and who I met twice while touring in Florida. Most probably the coolest blatino I had ever met!
Anyways, back at the house of the couple I’m staying with in
I knew the Caribbean was expensive and that’s why I didn’t go to the
I called this hotel in the centre of Condado who was famed for being a ‘house party’ at times. It was a gay owned hotel with a bar on the beach and close to a bus station taking you to Old San Juan. They asked 115 dollars for a room and I decided to be a bit decadent and go party in
I had just spent 15 dollar on a taxi ride from the airport to the hotel, which would not even have cost 10 euro in Brussels (no meter! fixed price! In EVERY cab!). I really didn’t want to pay 115 dollar for a room, which even in
Not only were the taxis and the accommodation outrageously expensive, the prices of food and clothes and everything else you can buy were never below US prices. Even at my favourite Subway sandwich place, the menu was more expensive than in
I ended up renting a car because I needed to get out of the
The craziest thing in
The big thrill of driving a car in
Although I didn’t like my first hotel at all, the
An older American who was on a business trip started talking to me and offered me a drink. I guess I’m becoming as gay as you, Piet, accepting drinks from older guys knowing very well that they don’t make a chance at all, but hey, I ran out of money and I was thirsty. The guy ended up being a very interesting lawyer from
The club was a ten minute walk from the hotel, but was located in a more seedy area of course. I had no trouble walking there with that guy, although he was very scared and I would have been scared too if I had walked up there on my own. However, no mugging and no harassing whatsoever. Unlike other tourists who wrote their stories on the internet. They served Coors light at the club (a beer from
I didn’t know much about reggaeton. It’s been around for a while, but it only recently started to be mainstream. It’s basically latin gangsta rap with a very typical sound that you either like or not. It’s like drum ‘n bass. Every song sort of sounds the same, but not quite. The bass is very important and the attitude even more. Unfortunately it’s the music of the drug dealers and the criminals and the lyrics are really nasty and aggressive, but I just love those beats. However, I heard nothing but reggaeton. On the radio, on tv, out of boom cars passing by in the street… I’ve heard enough of it for the rest of the month. Examples: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWQUPak5S-g / (the most famous duo) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrA4ERbxxF0 / (yeah, they have child stars too)
Apart from reggaeton, there’s other latin music too, but I didn’t really hear it that much. Ricky Martin has an unplugged cd and I heard some nice version of some terrible songs. He’s still big there. And of course you have meringue and cumbia and salsa and stuff. There’s a lot of music everywhere you go and that’s what makes travelling so cool.
On a small note. Just as a test, I asked 20 people if they knew Gabriel Rios and only one person (the bar tender of the gay bar in the hotel) knew who he was. Most other people (young, educated, older, music loving taxi drivers, …) had no clue who he was, but were very interested in hearing me talk about him. I don’t like Rios and his music; I don’t think it’s anything special. I’ve seen him live a few times and I thought he sucked (he doesn’t address the audience), I watched him parade with an ugly model girlfriend at the Cactus festival in
First I visited the Caves of Camuy, which is one of the few natural attractions of the country. It’s one of those school trip destination, which meant that there were plenty school kids hanging around. Upon arrival, I had just missed a guided tour, so I had to wait 40 minutes for the next one (yeah, that’s
The tour itself was a bit amateur, but I was entertained. I still couldn’t walk properly, so I didn’t really want to complain too much. The caves are naturally cut out of a rock formation area called the Karst region. Now, I once was so fascinated by a guy in my school who had the same name extended with –en that I looked up the word in the dictionary. I hadn’t thought about that guy in ages, but finally seeing around the world. The caves are inhabited with bats, but I didn’t get to see any. We did see amazing shapes of stalactites and stalagmites that, in my imagination, looked like dinosaur fossils. But I especially liked the light that came into the caves.
We had to wait a long time before the trolley brought us back to the parking lot and I wondered what would happen if I was stuck with my fellow tour takers in a LOST kind of scenario. There was absolutely no-one in the group I felt like bonding with. It was the most boring mix of people I’ve ever seen together on an excursion. But the local guide was nice.
The drive from the Caves to Mayaquez was incredibly. I didn’t see that much of the very diverse landscapes I drove through as I was too focused on the road, but it showed that
More about Mayaquez later. This is about the west coast. I visited two beaches on the west coast that were tipped to me by other people I had met earlier in the trip. The first one was Boqueron in the southwest of the island. The other one was Rincon in the northwest of the island.
Boqueron has a large beach with palm trees as far as the eye can see. It also has a small village centre where you can buy mussels on the street! I tried to stop in the village and walk around, but it was so busy (on a Saturday) that I couldn’t find any place to park my car. They have a local dish which serves mussels in coconut milk sauce. It’s the kind of village that will become a major tourist attraction in a few years time. I parked my car on a designated car park near some condominiums and a big beach resort. From there you had a perfect beach filled with Puerto Ricans who want to get away in the weekend. I really liked that beach a lot and stayed there for a while watching the many surfers and ordinary families who had brought there whole kitchen with them.
Leaving Boqueron, I drove a little bit further inland to San German, which is the second oldest city of the country and the place where the missionaries tried to baptise the Indians. I had no idea there were Indians on the island, but apparently there were two tribes who didn’t like each other. They all got extinct of course, because of the European diseases, but some people still claim to be from a direct lineage of the indigenous people. San German was dead! There was no one there apart from this older man who was walking his dog and a few kids with their skate board. The city had a nice square though, as almost all these little towns.
Rincon is famed for its lighthouses and the best sunsets of the region and I didn’t want to miss that all. Of course, I ended up visiting the beach on that one day when it got cloudy in the afternoon and rained a bit. No sunset. However, I really liked Rincon. I stayed in a beach hotel which also had a bar and restaurant. A small family owned place with six rooms or so. There were more of these places on that stretch of beach and there was a nice atmosphere. Lots of young people, pina collada’s (invented in
People who know Puerto Rico ask: did you go to
Much to my surprise the city was celebrating it’s patron saint that weekend! I couldn’t have had more luck. It looked as if the whole town was getting ready for the big party. My first impression was very positive. The church was small, but typical for the region. They had this statue of the virgin Mary who I never had seen looking so sad. Some older guy in the church told me it depicted the ‘birth of pain’, when Maria says goodbye to Jesus’ body after his crucifixion. The man was probably one of the oldest people in town who probably has been mayor at one time, or at least someone important. He explained to me how the archbishop of
There was a nice atmosphere in the city, with small stands selling fried codfish or a sweet cake called
Unfortunately I found out that there are young people in
I had stayed in after checking out the area around the hotel. There were some bars and clubs but none of them appealed to me. Some looked a bit dangerous, others worked with a door policy based on the dress code. I just enjoyed watching the people and when I still couldn’t sleep at 2.30am, I decided to watch the street live from the outside corridor of the hotel. And then it happened. A car stopped, someone got out, started beating up a guy, who was immediately backed by his friends who started to beat the aggressor, upon which the driver of the car did nothing less than get in reverse, then turn and drive into the fighting crowd! I swear, I couldn’t believe I was witnessing this. I got back to the room, felt very uneasy and had my imagination run wild about a possible
A friend of Jayte works for A&E, arts and entertainment. It’s a popular showbiz channel on television. He invited us to a vip table at Caroline’s, a comedy club on Broadway and 50th street. I liked the idea of going to a nyc comedy club, even though I had never heard of the star of the night, Paul Mooney.
The opener of the night was very funny. I guess I understood 90 of the jokes. I had some trouble knowing what she was referring too and her character is drunk so she mumbled a lot. She was fun though. I liked her a lot. Very cynical and sarcastic, although her victims were easy: Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, George W. Bush. I forgot the jokes, I forgot her name. But she was hilarious.
Paul Mooney on the other hand was more difficult to digest. He’s an African American who had issues with the ‘white folks’. The vast majority of the crowd was African American or Black American as you have to call them now and I guess he was on a roll talking bad about ‘the white folks’ as that got a lot of cheers. He didn’t really care that I was sitting in front of him. He never gave me any look. He was funny though as he didn’t only laugh with the white folk, but also with his fellow black guys (he clearly had a problem with Oprah Winfrey), the Chinese, the Mexicans. Too bad he didn’t laugh with the gays, the Jews, the Muslims and handicapped. He was pretty nasty though and I sensed a lot of frustration and anger in his jokes. Especially at the end, where he almost gave a political speech and noticed that the crowd wasn’t laughing anymore. Larry, the guy who works for A&E was going to confront him with that. At the end of the show, I really didn’t know if he wanted to be funny or if he really hated the ‘white folks’. All I know is that a white stand up comedian could never get away with a night black bashing.
He releases a new dvd: Jesus is black. Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HpnMdzEp7s&NR
Jayte took me to two of his favourite bars in Manhattan. I didn’t like them. They were empty (it was still freezing) and the music sucked big time. I expected a little bit more cool in New York. But I’m sure I went to the ‘wrong’ places. I so much hope I don’t have to work in June and can join my friends on their trip to NYC. I really love this place.