“Horse,” Ray said.

We were driving down an expressway in the middle of San Juan on our last afternoon in Puerto Rico.  Instinctively, I slammed on the brakes.

“Why are you stopping?” Ray asked.

“You said ‘horse,’” I said.  “I thought you meant there was a horse in the road.”
“When have we ever seen … never mind, I withdraw the question.”
Frankly, by that point, a horse in the middle of an expressway in downtown San Juan wouldn’t have surprised me at all.  Not one bit.

I went to Puerto Rico for a conference, held at one of the glitzy five star hotels near San Juan Aiport in the Isla Verde area. Puerto Rico is, officially, part of the United States of America.  It’s a Free Associated State (Estado Libre Asociado), which is emblazoned on a number of license plates and bumper stickers.

Culturally, however, Puerto Rico is quite distinct from the US.  To begin with, the primary language on the island is a weird language that kind of sounds like Spanish, except that they use interesting words for things that I’ve never heard before.  A naranja (orange) is a china.  A frijol (bean) is either a gandule or an habichuela.  The letter j is pronounced as … well, as a kind of “zh” sound instead of the usual “h”, so the stickers on all of the doors say “hale” (pull) instead of “jale.”  Anything good is “chevere.”  (On the flip side, batteries are baterías, instead of pastillas, which is what they call them in Spain.  Pastilla also means “pill.”  I’m a little uncomfortable with the analogy.)

I’d heard that Caribbean Spanish is kind of the worst-case scenario for speakers of Spanish as a second language — now I know why.

I had a rental car.  This may have been a mistake–it’s hard to tell.  Taxis are expensive (one could literally walk from the airport to our hotel in about 30 minutes–a taxi is $12, flat rate), but free parking is both risky and hard to find.

The road signs are made to the American standard, but they’re all in Spanish.  Given that Spanish is the primary language of the island, that’s understandable.  What’s less understandable is this: speed limit signs are in miles per hour.  (Apparently just as a suggestion: I tried to slow down in a school zone once and … well, when the sign says “15 mph,” it apparently really means “40 mph.”)  However, distances are measured in kilometers, and gas is sold by the liter.  I gave up trying to figure that one out, and am much happier for it.

Traffic lights are hard to figure out, so when the light turns green, all of the drivers waiting for the light start honking immediately, to helpfully let the driver in front of them know that the light has turned green in case he’s fallen asleep or decided to get out and walk or something.

Cars in Puerto Rico are equipped with an archane lighting system.  There are four lights on the car: one at each corner.  They are connected to a lever on the steering column.  When you push the lever up, the two lights on the right side of the car light up and blink.  When you push the lever down, the two lights on the left side of the car light up and blink. Archaeologists are uncertain as to the original purpose of this lighting system.  Modern drivers simply ignore them.

The night we arrived, I woke up with a splitting headache at about 2 am.  It was the kind of headache that has physical presence: it was a third body in bed with us.  I tried to ignore it for a bit, but when I heard Ray stirring a little later on, I asked it he’d brought any aspirin with him.

“No,” he mumbled.  “Go ask at the front desk.”
I threw on shorts and a T-shirt (and no contacts, having left my glasses at home, naturally), and trudged down to the empty lobby where “The Girl From Ipanema” was clinking over the speaker system (of course it was “The Girl From Ipanema.”  Why wouldn’t it be?).

The concierge had no medical supplies, but I was helpfully informed of the existence of a Walgreens “5 minutes away.”

I’m supposed to walk to Walgreens at 3 am along a deserted street in San Juan?  Does this sound like a good idea to anyone?

I went up to the room and tried to go to sleep, but now my head was throbbing on a level that had me quesitoning whether I could remove my eyes temporarily to reduce the pressure.  Ray finally insisted that we go to Walgreens, and so, at 3:30 in the morning on our first night in San Juan, we strolled up the street filled only by us, the frequent passing by of the tourist police, and the bouncers at the clubs that never close.

Back to the horse comment.

On Friday morning, the day after my marathon four presentations at the conference, Ray and I decided to take a cue from the Lonely Planet guide I’d brought with me and drive to Loíza, the next town over.  According to LP, one could not wander around the town square without stumbling over makers of the vejigante masks.  We have a small collection of masks that we’ve bought on trips, and we’re always looking to add, so we got in the car and drove along the rambling road to Loíza.

There were, in fact, several horses along the way–although, to be fair, none of them were actually in the road.

To make a story that seemed longer at the time rather short, LP was an epic fail.  The town square was not where the guidebook said it was.  There were no mask makers.  We found a (singular) establishment — Centro de Cultura, Inc. — that had some (pretty ugly) examples on display, but when I asked the nice lady if one could find the artisans, she shrugged.  “Maybe on Sunday,” she said.

At some point, while driving around, we noticed that some of the expressways through San Juan were labeled with little icons.  There was one of a tree, one of a parrot, one of a coquí frog, and one of a horse.  We never found out what the icons stood for — they weren’t in the copious amounts of tourist literature in the hotel room (directed at the sort of tourist for whom money is not an issue, natch), nor was there ever any explanation in writing on the signs themselves.  At one point–possibly on the drive back from the Bacardi distillery in Caguas–we got giddy and started calling out “parrot!”  “Tree!”

And, the next afternoon, Ray called out, “Horse!”

As I said, by that time … the presence of a real horse in the road would have failed to surprise me on every level.

Would I go back to Puerto Rico?  Sure.  Just not sure I’d plan to drive there again …