All of my practical expectations of Puerto Rico were gleaned from Hunter Thompson's The Rum Diary— which is to say that I had no expectations whatsoever outside of warm water, palm trees, and beachside dives that only serve hamburgers and beer. San Juan was a city, I knew, and there were colonial buildings and forts. Possibly pirates. That's where my knowledge of the island began and ended.
I cannot say with any authority that I left the island enriched, but I can tell you a little about my impression of the place.
Understand that for the first three days of our stay there, I had the flu. My fever circa our arrival at Logan was 101.1ish. Also understand that our trip to Caribbean wasn't so much of a vacation as it was an escape attempt; a last ditch effort to stave off the icy grip of winter. We were fleeing sickness and snow. On top of all this, I harbored a plot to propose to my girlfriend. It was a stellar setup.
Our resort was in the Condado district of San Juan, tucked between the Marriott and Vanderbilt hotels. It's a tree-lined strip brimming with tourists, homeless, and the concrete shells of long abandoned resorts. Painfully tanned white couples tottered up and down the strip while twenty-somethings rushed from bar to bar. Panhandlers quietly shook their change cups outside of Walgreens and CVS and cab drivers waved them away when they approached their windows.
Our stay coincided with with the Electronic Daisy Carnival and so our hotel lobby was filled with EDM kids; white twenty-somethings with dreadlocks, tanned douchebags sporting flat-brim caps in camouflage marijuana leaf prints, and girls wearing "I'd Rather Be Masturbating" cut-off tees, no bras. Everyone was likely rolling on molly and I rued the fact that I wasn't there to cover the abomination, to observe and report on the EDM kids and their ridiculous combat boots and silver hula hoops.
The Great Deed went down on our hotel balcony. We sat there in the dark, looking out at the sea, at the Marriott, at the narrow ruins of a resort. And I told her that we were good partners, the best partners really, in everything. You could hear the sound of the surf washing over the sounds of the strip below. I fished the wooden ring box out of my shorts like an awkward goon and showed her the ring I narrowly could afford and she assented to my rickety proposition/demand. We were betrothed. We swam in bath-tub warm water and gawked at the EDM kids from the pool.
The next morning we grabbed breakfast at the Punk Burger Bar Bistro. A local with a dog sat at the table across from us, drinking down Madella beers with his breakfast. As our waiter finished taking our order, my sinuses gave out, unleashing a vile stream of brown phlegm out of my nose and on to the menu. He took the menu without saying a word and I gingerly made my way to the bathroom to mop up my nose. Really, I was thrilled that someone on the island was having beer with breakfast at a burger place, as prophesied by Hunter Thompson.
