Condado and Old San Juan

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Monday the second was a nice day, the sun was shining and it was warm. After the Starbucks discovery, we just walked in the neighbourhood of our hotel. The beach is only 30 meters from the hotel, it's not big, but looks nice. You only can't swim there, it's too dangerous. The part of San Juan we're in is called Condado. It's an old part of the town (but not so old as Old San Juan).
They do a lot of reconstruction and we see quite a lot of new, expensive hotels around our hotel. The first 9 days of the holiday we are just in an old hotel called El Canario by the sea. It only has 25 rooms, breakfast is nothing (only some bread with butter and jam, cornflakes with milk and coffee tea and juice as drinks), but it's ok, since we won't be there so much. The last 4 days we will go to the Mariott on the other site of the street, to relax a little bit in the hotel.

During the walk we found another small beach, close to Condado plaza hotel. It looks really nice and it's oke to swim there, since it's in a bay. We enjoyed our first Cuba Libres at the Condado plaza hotel. That's great, only prices are high, so we won't get drunk this holiday I guess.
When I wanted to smoke a cigarette on the terrace, I just found out that's not allowed to smoke in bars, restaurants, outdoor terraces!?, and not in the hotels, specially not when there are small children. Shit, that's even worse than in Holland. There it's still alowed to smoke on an outside terrace. Martin will be happy with this, because he hates it when I'm smoking hahahahaha.

The next day we went to old San Juan. We wanted to enjoy the public bus system, but when we walked to the bus, it just drove away (without us in it hahahaha not funny. Twenty minutes waiting later a Puerto rican woman told us that the bus only comes once in an hour. Two German women also wanted to take the bus to the old parts, so we decided to share a taxi.

The first thing we visisted was the Fuerte San Christobal. The weather wasn't so nice, very clowdy, so not so nice for pictures. The fort looks nice, but they did a lot of restoration. The American's stayed there with their army, so you see a lot of modern things in the fort.
We are not really museum types, walking around in the city or siteseeing in the country is more our thing, so after the fort we walked through the city looking at old streets and housed and skipped the rest of the museums.

After lunch (we ate at J-taste, a very nice japanese restaurant) we walked a part of the Paseo del Morro, a route around the El Morro castle.
There was an outside exhibition of Yannus Arthus Bertrand
The exhibition is called Earth from above. This photographer made a lot of really nice pictures from places on earth, seen from above. If you like landscape pictures you should definitely take a look on his site.

At five we wanted to go back to the hotel with the bus. We walked to the bus station, shown in one of the travel books. During that walk we came across the harbour were 4 cruiseships were waiting. Amazing how big these ships are. We've never been on a cruiseship (and I can't imagine going on one too, oke maybe when I'm 80).
Nice to see the ships, but we couldn't find the busstation and it started raining. Since we don't speak Spanish ( I do have to learn that one time, it's making travel life in South America much easier), it took us some to time to find the station, but finally we did, and we arrived an half our later at the hotel. It was still raining.

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