Puerto Rico--Day 5: Viejo San Juan

Today we knocked part of another thing off my “must-do in Puerto Rico” list (it’s a very short list). We visited Old San Juan.

I’m still not adjusted to the time difference, so I got up late, but I got up at 8:00 a.m., which I think is a big huge improvement! Especially considering it only took 30 minutes of “hitting snooze” to get up. We’re getting there, slowly, but surely.

We eventually got everyone dressed, sunscreened, and shod and got out the door. We hit a little bit of traffic getting up to San Juan, but no major tie-ups. That is, until we hit Old San Juan. Think of every picture of every little teeny tiny European town with the ancient medieval cobblestone streets with barely room for a horse-cart and that’s what Old San Juan looks like. Except that Old San Juan has two lanes of traffic on those teeny tiny roads with a whole row of cars parked along the side of the street! Sometimes you’re lucky and it’s a one-way street. But you still have the row of cars parked along the side. It’s just nuts.

It was the most frustrating thing trying to get where we wanted to go. All the streets seemed to be one way the wrong way, and the one street going the way we wanted to go, was blocked off! Eventually, we went back out of old town and came back in via a different route and got to where we were going. We stopped at the tourism office and picked up a walking tour guide with a map. But the route on the walking tour map was completely unrelated to the written turn-by-turn description of the walking tour. We gave up on the walking tour and just decided to see what we could see as we made our way up to El Morro, the first castle on our tour.

A Gardita, or guard tower. They're located all along the wall, they're on the official Puerto Rican logo, and they were one of my favorite things in Old San Juan.

This is the San Juan Gate. It is the last remaining gate of the original five gates into the city. Access to the city was tightly controlled for safety. This particular gate was the gate through which visiting dignitaries would enter, and through which official documents and other official business of the Spanish Crown would enter the city. It's located right next to the water. The inscription on the white part (it's hard to see in the picture) says, Benedictus qui venit in nomini Domini, meaning "Blessed are they who come in the name of the Lord." It is believed that some sort of entrance into the city has existed here since 1540, but this particular gate was built in 1635 and has been repaired and restored over the years.

On the way up there, we walked through the town and enjoyed the architecture and the definite Spanish-European feel which is pretty different from the Caribe-Latin American feel of the rest of the island. This picture is down one of the little streets. I think this one is a one-way, but wouldn't be surprised if it was two-way.

Sam in a gardita.

We stopped at La Catedral de San Juan Bautista, which was the first church in Puerto Rico. It was very pretty and quiet and the kids wanted to know why there were so many dead people around. It is also the location of the tomb of Juan Ponce de Leon, but we didn’t know that until we got home, mostly because all the signs and plaques in the cathedral were in Spanish and we didn’t really understand most of what they said. But I don’t remember anything about Ponce de Leon on any of them. Maybe he’s in one of the side chapels. We didn’t go into all of those. It felt kind of weird to be wandering around in a church taking pictures (we asked if it was okay before we took pictures), so we tried to see what we could and move on quickly.

This is the interior view of the main chapel.

This is the stained-glass window behind the main altar at the end of the picture above.

After the cathedral, we passed by a Ben&Jerry’s shop, and since we hadn’t had lunch, well. . .

While we were having a refreshing treat (by this time we were all completely soaked through with sweat and it felt so nice to eat ice cream in an over-air conditioned establishment), it started to rain. At first it was just a little drizzle, so we popped up our umbrellas that we had brought along. We just had three, Squig had hers, I shared with John and Sam and Ruby shared his. Which was fine, until we were just getting to the end of the street where the long, open and completely exposed path up to the castle starts, when the skies just opened up and poured down. Squig called it a “tropical rain storm”. We stood around under our umbrellas for a while, then moved under some trees with the umbrellas. The number one goal was keeping the camera dry. We’re waterproof, it’s not. Even with the trees and the umbrellas, we still all managed to get soaked to the bone. Which wasn’t too different than we were before, since we were already all sweaty--now you just couldn’t tell the sweat from the rain. But we kept the camera dry!

Sam and Ruby under their umbrella.

We noticed that when the rain started, people just disappeared. People were huddled under trees, in doorways, under overhangs. One group was huddled under the umbrella of this ice cream vendor. Which was kind of funny. Except that they were all enjoying ice cream while we were just wet. At least it was still warm, so we were comfortable. Just wet.

Eventually we got tired of waiting and figured since we were soaked anyway, we might as well make our way up to the castle, where there was likely to be some shelter at least. So we did. And there was. The girls and I got cheap rain ponchos from the bookstore (cheap as in construction, not cheap as in price), so I could keep the camera dry and we could still enjoy the castle without all being tied together under our three umbrellas. They were perfect. The rain died back down to a drizzle again, which was nice for keeping the temperature down and the crowds away. There was a smattering of people and one group that sounded by their accents to be from New York. It was a high-school-aged group of kids and chaperones and I understand what people mean by “obnoxious, loud Americans”. They pretty much ran through the place and were in and out before we had even finished one level, so mostly it was us and about 15-20 other small family-sized groups in this huge gigantic castle.

Since we’re waterproof, we just went about enjoying learning about the history of San Juan in the rain and if I needed to take a picture, John provided cover. We worked it out and had a really nice day (especially considering that we never did get lunch, we just had the ice cream).

We thought we were going to be visiting a fort and a castle, but we learned that there aren’t really any forts in Puerto Rico, they were all built as castles. I’m not sure what the difference is, then. El Morro sure seemed like a fort to me (and frankly, it was referred to as a fort in the official signs and literature).

Castillo San Felipe del Morro (or Fort San Felipe del Morro) is a National Historic Park, administered by the National Parks Service (which means they had a passport stamp for the book--la, la, laaa!), and was one of the most interesting places I’ve ever been to. The whole thing is pretty much open and you can just wander around through all six levels of the castle and learn about all the different defenses used through the different time periods and all the different nations who tried and failed to take Puerto Rico. It was so interesting. The Spanish held onto it for over 400 years, withstanding attacks from the British (under Sir Francis Drake, even!), the British (under George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland), the Dutch, and the British again. But they were no match for the U.S. Navy in the Spanish-American War. (Go Navy!)

We did not get to the Castillo de San Cristóbal, the other castle in Old San Juan, which is supposedly where they kept the Spanish treasure. So we’ll be going back, since our entrance ticket is good for both castles for a week. There’s just too much to see in one day!

Squig in a gardita.

This tunnel goes down to the oldest part of the original fort. The little alcove you can see at the very end there was an embrasure, or gunport, for water level canons, which shot at the hulls of ships. Each level (literal level, first floor, second floor, etc.) was targeted toward a different area of defense. The first three levels were dedicated to defending the port from invading ships. This part of the fort is from the original tower, built in 1539. As defense needs increased over the years, walls were built around the old tower, completely enclosing it.

You can see how pretty we looked in our rain gear. I had to put my sun hat somewhere!

A picture of one gardita taken from another. Imagine a Spanish soldier sitting in the tower keeping watch over the entrance to the bay.

Ruby was so excited to see a stack of canonballs!

John and the kids on the top of the fort (level 6--ground defense), with El Faro (the lighthouse) in the background.

This monument is dedicated to the memory of the men who died in the Spanish-American War fighting on this field.

Correction: The monument is to the Dutch and Spanish fighters from when the Dutch invaded. Sorry about that.

After we saw everything that we could and wandered into every room and tunnel we could find, we walked back down to the street and picked up the free tourist trolley that goes through town and enjoyed taking the long way back and seeing the old town again, only this time we weren’t driving and it seemed so much nicer! Though, I have no idea how the bus got through those streets without taking off a few rear-view mirrors.

This is the view out of the front of the bus. This is one of the wider roads. There were literally inches on either side as we passed.

We took the bus back to the parking garage and while John was paying for the parking garage (a whole day for under $5!), Ruby needed to use the bathroom, which needed a key. She’s learned the word for key and we had the word for bathroom on the bathroom door at home, so I reminded her how to ask, and she went up to the parking attendant, an older gentleman, and she said in her cute little Ruby-ness, “La llave del baño, por favor.” And the attendant just though that was the cutest thing. He laughed and smiled and told her “Si! Si! Muy bien! Muy bien! Que bueno!” along with some other things I didn’t quite get. And when he gave it to her, she said, “Gracias.” Which he also loved. What a cutie.

I mentioned the black flies yesterday. They have been going at Squig with a vengeance. She’s just covered. It’s really sad. On the way home from San Juan, we stopped at the store and got calamine lotion, hydrocortisone cream (we had some, but she’s really gone through it) and bug spray. They’ve been particularly bad on her legs. It seems like every time she turns around, there’s a new bite. Poor thing. It’s just the saddest thing to see. Those flies are so little, you don’t even notice them. As she said, “At least with mosquitos, you can hear them coming!”

Poor Squiggy Baby.