Puerto Rico, Part 3

I just realized I never finished posting about our Puerto Rico trip back in August! If you missed the first two parts to this series, here they are: Part 1 and Part 2. Mostly I just want to make sure that when I look back on my blog a few years from now, I didn't leave out any important/fun parts of our experience during Dental School.



On our final day in Puerto Rico, we decided to head to Old San Juan in the morning to explore the shops and grab breakfast. By this time we had become public transportation experts and hopped on the right bus after making a quick stop into Walgreens for some cookies "sin gluten."

We ended up in a little cafe called Cafeteria Mallorca that I had read about online.

They are actually famous for their namesake pastry, mallorcas, which are little sweet-bread rolls covered in powdered sugar (kind of like a donut) but since Robbie couldn't eat them I opted for a more classic breakfast as well.

And by classic breakfast I mean cheesy scrambled eggs, two pancakes, and... cocktail weenies? The pancakes were perfection.

Robbie had an omelet that came with french fries instead of hash browns.

 After breakfast, we took Mary Poppins' advice and fed the birds.

They didn't seem to mind gluten free cookie crumbs.

I told Robbie that I would be okay with him opening a practice in Puerto Rico when he's done with school.

This Starbucks looked small from the outside, but it just kept going back and back with room after room of sitting areas.

Starbucks Support Center: for coffee addicts perhaps?

After a fun morning in Old San Juan, we decided to head back to our hotel and change to go to the beach. On our way, we passed by the Capital.

My dad let us borrow his GoPro camera so we had fun playing in the waves with it.

The surf was a little too rough for getting underwater shots since it was kicking up so much sand.

After a few hours of swimming, we settled in to the bar at The Atlantic Beach Hotel where they had an amazing Happy Hour.

Our view of the beach was fantastic!

In total, we had three pina coladas, a daiquiri, three mojitos, and an order of french fries over the course of several hours and our total bill was only $20. Talk about an awesome Happy Hour!!

It was so relaxing and romantic to watch the sun go down as we enjoyed our drinks.

 After a long day at the beach, we headed back to our hotel and freshened up to go out to dinner on our final night there. We ended up at a Mexican restaurant called "Cielito Lindo" or "Pretty Little Heaven." The owner was awesome and actually had a whole conversation with me in Spanish (something I had been wanting to do the whole trip). Overall I would say this was definitely the best trip Robbie and I have gone on together, by far! I definitely recommend visiting if you have a chance!

Back in Action and Puerto Rico Trip, Part 1

We're back from Puerto Rico and I just dropped Robbie off about an hour ago to officially start his second year! It felt great to get up this morning with him and have some breakfast together. We spent some time praying about the coming year before heading out. I'm definitely the type of person that likes having a routine so it was especially nice to be up instead of sleeping in so I could get some cleaning done around our apartment (I think we were still in vacation mode the last few days because it was a little messy!).

Puerto Rico was an absolute blast and I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking to travel somewhere tropical without spending a load of money. We decided to not rent a car while we were down there and did not have any problems getting around on the public transportation. I think we spent at the most $50 getting around. $40 of that was to pay for the taxi to our hotel from the airport and back only because you can't take luggage on the bus. The bus was only 75 cents per person and it went to all the areas where we were wanting to go in San Juan.

We stayed in Le Consulat which is a little boutique hotel about two blocks from the beach. Our first night there our airconditioner broke. We told them that morning before we went out for the day and when we got back it was already fixed! Talk about speedy! They also mopped the floors everyday in our room which was great because we dragged a lot of sand in from the beach. The room was a little small, but it was clean and comfortable and that's all we needed.

Our first full day there, we took the bus into Old San Juan and visited El Morro, a fort built by the Spanish in the 1500's to protect the port of San Juan.

It was only $3 per person to get inside the fort.

Here's the lighthouse that's within the fort walls.

This is looking back towards Old San Juan from inside the fort.

After touring El Morro, we walked back into Old San Juan and had lunch at a place called Mojitos. I had some delicious chicken with creole sauce and Robbie had the traditional Puerto Rican dish mofongo. Mofongo is a savory dish made with mashed plantains. He chose to have his stuffed with pork and it was absolutely wonderful! I also got a side of amarillos, fried sweet plantains which were our favorite part of the whole meal. You can see one of the amarillos towards the top left of Robbie's plate.

From Old San Juan, we took a ferry boat (50 cents each) to another part of San Juan called

Cataño to visit the Bacardi Distillery. We got there too late to go on the tour but they still gave us our two free drinks each!

I had rum punch and some sort of coconut rum something or other. They were quite tasty!

Robbie had rum punch and a Cuba libre (rum with coke and lime).

And that concluded our first full day in Puerto Rico. I'll write a couple more posts about the rest later.

Pictures to Make You Hungry

My sister sent me some pictures of the crepes we had at Crepes a la Cart in Boulder, Colorado last weekend. So here are some pictures to make your mouth water!

This one was filled with pulled pork, macaroni and cheese, and cole slaw. It was like a BBQ dinner in a crepe! Sorry I didn't get a picture before we started digging into it!

This one is called Raspberry Delight. It was filled with raspberries and dark chocolate! YUMM!

Here's the inside of the Raspberry Delight crepe. The stuff on top was some kind of thick whipped creme.

The moral of the story is, if you are ever in Boulder, you should eat at Crepes a la Cart.

Baby Shower

What a busy weekend! My sister Deborah was in town from Las Vegas so my mom, my sister Ariane, and her husband Randy, and I went to Boulder with her to eat at Crepes a la Carte. We also got to have my favorite chai in the world at the Dushanbe Tea House.

My mom and Deborah outside of Dushanbe.

Me "smiling" for the camera, Ariane and her husband Randy behind me and my mom on the right.

On Sunday, we threw the baby shower for Ariane at my sister Altair's house.

That is in fact a giant uterus on the wall. I made it so we could play pin the sperm on the uterus! Everyone got a sperm to put their name on and taped it on the uterus, then the mom-to-be closed her eyes and taped an egg on the uterus. The person whose sperm was closest to the egg won $5 to a frozen yogurt place.

Deborah made bubble bath punch. You put sherbet in the punch and it gets all foamy and bubbly.

We decorated onesies. These were the ones her guests made. The "Miso Cute" one was the winner and received a $5 Starbucks gift card. :)

An adorable fat kitty that Deborah painted

An olive riding a chicken (the baby's name is going to be Olive and Ariane has a bunch of chickens)

Another onesie I made just telling it how it is.

This one is my favorite that I made. It's Admiral Ackbar from Star Wars! Once it's dry I'm going to write "It's a crap!" on the bum. If you get this joke pat yourself on the back because you are a nerd.

As you can probably guess, decorating the onesies was my favorite activity. We also did a Mad Lib that Deborah and I wrote about Olive and we played Baby Scattergories. Overall, I think it went really well but by the end of the day I was absolutely exhausted.

I barely got to see Robbie at all this past weekend because I was so busy with family so it's nice to be back at home with him now. While I was at the baby shower, he got to hang out with his family and see the new Star Trek. Robbie's been hard at work studying for the Boards using that application I mentioned in a previous post. He also told me that they had their first periodontics lab today. Dental School just keeps moving right along!