Not much happened on this day. Of course, we slept late, the previous day having been long and arduous. After doing some shopping (at Walmart, of all places), we went for lunch at a little sandwich shop right across the street from the resort - here's a picture of Terry, Carlos and Ashley at the table:
This would be a good place for a digression about our experiences with Puerto Rican food. It was good, but got repetetive after a while. It seemed that in almost every Puerto Rican restaurant we went to, the menu was about the same. I don't know, maybe we just didn't go to the right places. Rice and beans, of course, were everywhere. And seafood is very popular, particularly in the coastal areas, and every seafood restaurant offers jueyes (HWAY-ays), or land crab... which we never tried. (Terry interjects: I did!)
And then there were plantains. Everywhere there were plantains. They're like bananas, but larger and starchier. Actually, the word "plantain" is a generic word, referring to any of a number of varieties of banana-like fruits used for cooking. And they're on every restaurant menu in the country (at least in the restaurants serving Puerto Rican food). Maduros, or amarillos, are plantains fried in butter and sugar. Tostones are plantain slices fried in oil and salted, and are served like chips. Alcapurrias are fritters consisting of a dough made of mashed plantains (or yuca), stuffed with ground beef, or jueyes, or other fillings, and deep fried. Mofongo is made from mashed plantains cooked with garlic and spices.
There are lots of roadside stands along the highways and byways of Puerto Rico, and they can be some of the best places to eat. It was at one of these that I tried an alcapurria, as well as a sorullo, which is fried cornmeal dough stuffed with melted cheese - kind of like mozzarella sticks, but larger and sweeter. I also had something they called a taco, but was more like what we would call an empanada.
But the real big deal in Puerto Rico is lechón, or roast suckling pig (my apologies to the vegetarians in the crowd). Which leads me back from my digression to the day's next adventure. There's a road called La Ruta del Lechón - the lechón route. This is a stretch of road where lechoneras - food stands specializing in lechón - proliferate. We had been advised that the best - or at least most popular - lechonera is El Rancho Original. So that's where we went. And quickly left. Not because of the food - actually, we didn't get as far as tasting the food. We turned around and left because the music was playing ear-shatteringly LOUD!!! If you want to get an idea of what that's like to a blind person, just imagine being in a room full of mirrors and blazing lights.
So we headed back down the road, and stopped at another place. But we discovered the place was just a bar, not a lechonera. Oops. So we headed back down the road again, and stopped at another place. After verifying that this place was indeed a lechonera, we had a couple of drinks, and then went to order some lechón... and discovered that they were about to close, and had just turned off the grill fort the day. Oops again.
So we headed back down the road AGAIN, and stopped at this place - El Mojito:
...where we FINALLY got to eat some lechón. And rice, and plantains, of course.
The place had an open air covered dining area, where we found ourselves a table and sat down. That is, Terry and Ashley and Carlos sat down... but I had a problem. The table was bolted to the floor, and the benches were attached to the table, so nothing could be moved. And the table was situated right up next to one of the posts holding up the roof, in such a way that there was no room for me to sit down:
Yes, I could have asked Terry to just move over, and sat on the other end of the bench. But rather than interrupt her, I brought a chair over from another table and perched at the end of the table.
As we were getting ready to leave, I noticed that each post was sculpted to look like a tree trunk, and the tree's "leaves" were painted on columns at the roof level:
...and there was this large mural on the far wall:
The large center panel of the mural shows a woman laborer wearing a large straw hat carrying a bunch of bananas on her shoulder, with the words "El Mojito" written in large letters above. The smaller left hand panel shows a male laborer, and the right hand panel shows a small house with a man working in the yard, and some farm animals.
We drove back to the resort, and that was it for the day.