Viejo San Juan

There is nothing like the vibrancy of Old San Juan! Colonial Spanish culture and color with an "of the moment" art and dining scene; it has "old" in its name, but everything but the architecture feels new and cool! 

We started our day at the Forts in Old San Juan before the heat of the day! San Cristobal is, in our opinion, one of the best forts for presenting the way the fortifications are built to work as defenses. We missed the "Tunnel Tour" this trip, but it's offered at 10:30 AM on weekends and is not to be missed for an excellent under and above ground view of how the forts served as an important defense of strategic San Juan for the Spanish in colonial times. 

The forts fly the Spanish Colonial, Puerto Rican and US flags

San Cristobal was built on the water, but located to provide defense to the interior of the island.

Tunnels under the fort are a literally "cool" way to see life of the soldiers stationed in this new world outpost and understand the defenses of the fortification.

A view of the Celebrity and Jewel of the Seas cruise ships docked at the Pan American pier.

We next took the free tram from San Cristobal to El Morro. Here school children were flying kites on the lawn in some kind of festival. Every time we've visited we always see some sort of local event happening at the fort which means not only are we immersed in the colonial history, but also in the modern culture of Puerto Rican life!  

The El Morro light house, which we will pass by at night when we sail on Adventure of the Seas on Sunday! 

This fellow was enjoying the warmth of the walls and the tourist were enjoying him! 

Following our fort tours, we walked down the hills. By zig zagging down the hill from tiny alleys to be main calles, we were able to see a lot of colonial architecture along the streets of old San Juan. Here an icon serves as a "street address" on St Sebastion!  

On Calle Hospital, an organization cares and feeds the local feral cats, who are very friendly and happily pose for photos! 

Beautiful bouganvillia drapes down an upper balcony. 

It took nearly 3 years, but we finally made it to a restaurant recommended by a Crusie Critic member from San Juan. Parrot Club (Calle Forteleza) has a fun vibe, colorful original art and even better food! With a piano tucked in the corner and mojito happy hour, I bet it's even more lively at night! 

A ceviche appetizer with plantain chips.

Another recent recommendation on line - Cafe Cortes on Calle San Fransisco. This home of the Cortes chocolate family houses and uber cool chocolate bar and restaurant, where everything on the menu has at least a touch of chocolate. 

We may have had more than a touch with this lava cake dessert! And don't miss the Frio Chocolate drinks! 

Upstairs in the old colonial villa is the fascinating modern Latin American art collection of the Cortes family (free). Today they were holding a free concert with Jose Luis harpist. 

Burlington Vermont Trip Report

I've got another trip report ...this time a recent trip to Burlington VT, A Warm Welcome on a Cold Weekend.  Click here for the whole report Burlington

A Monumental Day In Budapest

We had a "monumental" day in Budapest,  Hungary, we toured with Magdi Pelech, a private guide we hired to take us to see the city and Momento Park. At every turn we saw monuments. In a country that has had a long history of changes in rulers and governments, there are lots of monuments to wars, uprisings, liberations and commemorations of people who have died during the horrors of all these changes. We even saw old monuments from the communist era that have been removed and warehoused in their own park where they can be seen with a wry eye to the propaganda they represented. 

Today I'll share a few of the monuments we saw and what we were told by our guide Magdi about them. 

Liberation Monument

This is the Liberation monument on Gellert Hillin Buda; which was sculpted by Strobol and was set up to commemorate the liberation of Hungary by the Russian Army in 1945. Of course this is the same country that at the turn of the next century rejected Communism, and put the statue of a Russian soldier that was on the lower pedestal away in a separate park out of town.  If this was a Face Book relationship status it would read : "it's complicated". 

At Momento Park, Communist monuments usually depict unidentifiable "workers"; always happy and moving forward quickly. 

Just outside of town is Momento Park. I had read about this and had the sense it was just warehouse for all the Communist statues that were removed from around the city after the fall of Communism. But in reality, it's a very well designed park, set up to give one the feeling of the hopelessness and paranoia that exsisted  under Communist rule. The paths are infinity loops, the park ends in a brick wall, and statues are redeployed in a rueful way, such as one with Lenin, put aside, and his Communist Soldiers, who once stood guard at the base of his monument finally getting to lie down on the job. 

An old statue of Lenin and the frescos of soldiers lying down on the job.

There are also monuments to terrible times before that. We stopped at the banks of the Danube on the Pest side just west of the Chain Bridge to see this heartbreaking memorial  sculpture, called the Shoes on the Danube Memorial. During Nazi rule in Hungary, Jews were made to remove their shoes and coats and stand at the rivers edge, where they were shot. It's sober and horrifying to imagine the bronze shoes lining the banks of the Danube representing real people who were killed simply because of who they were. 

A detail of the Shoes on the Danube  Memorial on the banks of the Danube

Jumping forward to one of the newest monuments, we also saw one of the most controversial. This monument was erected by the current governing party in Hungary over the objections of many local activists and descendants of Jews killed or interned during WWII by the Nazis.  The objection to this monument, which was just installed just weeks ago, is that it claims to honor the dead, while picturing a huge eagle (a known symbol of the Nazis) and other language that activists feel does not properly respect the feelings of the people's for which it was designed to honor. Citizen activists are staging an ongoing protest of the monument, and many people have created an ad hoc memorial made up of stories and symbols of their family's real story in hopes to counter act what they see as a flawed attempt to memorialize their loved ones. 

The new memorial and the ad hoc memorial displayed by protesters near the Parliment building. 

So at the end of the day, we learned a lot about Hungary's complicated history, and even more about man's ability to brutalize eachother. Interesting and sobering at the same time, but I have a strong belief that remembering this difficult history helps us to stand firm in preventing it in the future.