Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

We slept in deliciously late this morning (after a week of getting up at 7 for diving or earlier to catch airplanes, sleeping until 9 seems decadent), had breakfast at our hotel, and then proceeded to meander through the walking tour in the guidebook.

Old San Juan is charming. It has a really interesting mix of architectural styles, ranging from the oldest government building in the Americas that's still in use (La Fortaleza), through colonial styles, and Art Deco, to some fairly new construction. We visited part of the old city walls and saw cats, iguanas, spiders, pelicans, and parrots. We stopped in at a few churches, and visited the Castillo de San Christóbal, one of the two major fortresses that protected San Juan's harbor through 400 years of Spanish control.

One of the most fun buildings we've been in is actually our hotel, which was a colonial mansion that had fallen into disrepair before being bought in the 1960s by an artist and slowly renovated and decorated by her and her circle. There are prints and paintings and sculptures everywhere, and also tropical birds, including a couple cockatoos, two different kinds of macaws, and an african grey parrot.