The Arts District Downtown

1.19.19

We slept in today!!!! Until at least 9:00am for most of us.  No one got up before dawn, which has been our norm since we arrived.  It felt very weird to just wake up, rather than getting jarred out of deep sleep with the message that sleep must end.  

The day was sunny and clear, which helped us too.  We had the unfortunate realization that our nighttime foray to the beach brought a zillion new insect bites into our lives, so we are hitting the anti-itch potions a little harder than usual today.  

We had a late brunch that included a couple of huge frittatas, avocados, and raisin toast. We are out of lighteners for coffee so we all drank it black on this particular occasion.  

Our plan was to go to the museums downtown today, but we were a little slow on the turnaround and we also wanted to hit the beach quickly before leaving, so we decided to take an afternoon bus to get to where we wanted to go.  Little did we know what we were getting into.  

We decided to walk to the bus stop, which is a couple of kilometers away.  That short-ish distance stretches a bit farther, though, when it is really hot out and you have a group of 23 people straggling along.  We missed the first bus we planned (though as far as we know it never arrived anyway).  We all got to the stop in time for the bus that should have arrived 45 minutes later than the one we missed, but it didn’t come either.  We called our local friends to see if things were different because it was Saturday or because this is a festival weekend and they all just kept telling us to wait and it would come.  

We finally went all California on the situation and called Uber rides.  There was a bit of a delay but we got all of the cars we needed and everyone made it where they belonged.  As soon as we were all in cars, we saw the bus that we had expected to ride.  Oh well. 

We got dropped off right at the Museum of Contemporary Art, which was a wonderful old building that had a few galleries of different kinds of contemporary art.  Some were paintings, some installation pieces, some posters, some graffiti, and some interactive pieces.  There was a video in one gallery that was all in Spanish; it traced the experience of Maria for a range of different people.  Not many of us caught all of the details of the video, but we saw some images of Maria that we hadn’t seen before and got a sense of what life in those first days after the storm must have been like.  

From the museum, we realized that we were actually pretty hungry, especially because it turned out that a few of us didn’t realize that the word “brunch” meant that we wouldn’t then eat lunch an hour or so later.  So we headed to one of the options that our SBP friend Katia had told us about: a food court of sorts that was a bit like a collection of food trucks on a courtyard.  

We didn’t realize that our chosen place was almost directly across from the theater that is currently running the most popular and famous show on the island: Hamilton.  In case you are not aware, the creator and original Broadway star of Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda, is Puerto Rican-American and is reprising his starring role for a limited three-week engagement in San Juan, RIGHT DOWN THE STREET from the art museum and our dinner destination. There was crazy traffic and lots of VERY dressed up people were eating in our little food court.  

There was an Airstream serving up pork sandwiches, a place called The Hen House that had some amazing chicken fingers, poke bowls, a vegan place, a French fry place, a pizza place, a croquette place, and a pseudo-McDonalds hamburger place, among many others.  A surprising number of us went for the apparently familiar hamburgers and pizza, while others picked things whose Spanish names we didn’t recognize and welcomed the surprise of what we ended up eating.  

All of the tables were outdoors down the middle of the space and there were these huge fans (with a slightly offensive but very funny brand name that we won’t print here because we know that there are third graders reading this) that helped to make it feel like the temperature was perfect.  The sky was beautiful and mostly clear, with just a few of those puffy clouds we’ve come to love floating by.  

We went from booth to booth, everyone got to pick whatever they wanted most, and we sampled each other’s choices.  Some of us got special items to bring home with us, though we have tons of snacks and leftovers to eat at our house already.

We then walked from the arts district to the beach hotel district to catch some big van size cabs home.  We had missed the chance to get the bus that hadn’t worked out earlier, so we just pivoted and found a different way home.  We got a good sense of the nightlife in San Juan by walking back past the Hamilton theater and through the area around the beachfront.  

We are tired even though we didn’t work today so we are going to rest up for our trip to the festival of San Sebastian tomorrow.  We don’t quite know what to expect, though we think it involves arts, music, and huge crowds. We’re ready.  

We will post videos from these two days but we get home so late that there might be delays.  Please be patient with us . . .

Stephane, Lindsay, and Molly enjoying some coconut water at the Loiza bus stop before heading out to Downtown San Juan. 

The central plaza of the Puerto Rico Contemporary Art Museum.  

Hope and Kresha getting their art knowledge on in the Puerto Rico Contemporary Art Museum. It was a beautiful moment to see different kinds of art forms that were created by famous artists from the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. 

An abandoned colonial building that we saw in the streets of Downtown San Juan. 

A nice view of this amazing food hall that we ate at for dinner. Amazing cocktails and food, truly a fabulous way to end our visit in San Juan. 

The balance of colors and sunlight at the museum was perfect that it was hard not to take a picture! 

A beautiful church that we passed during our walk down to Lote 23.

This was the setting of Lote 23, outdoor seating with many different varieties of food vendors. 

All smiles from a group of DIRTies!

After enjoying an evening at Lote 23, we walked through San Juan and saw beautiful street art!

Art work at the Contemporary Art Museo de Arte.

Maddie looking at some free books on the streets of San Juan.

Hope, Madi, Hannah, Jenny, Molly, Lauren, Sophia, and Sarah at Miramar’s food trucks!

Art work in San Juan!

Thomas being goofy in San Juan!