Kenia in the Middle

Week 2! Today was a special event for CRES, every year they do a beach cleanup with Corona Extra. They bring in a bunch of volunteers and give out t-shirts, beer, etc. CRES does the job of informing the volunteers why they’re doing this event, kind of leading the charge. We ended up picking up 514 pounds of trash just in a couple of hours. This was just another amazing example of what we can do for the community surrounding us if we come together. We spent about 3 hours cleaning up and then planting on the shoreline. After we finished we headed to this small hidden beach that Yvette showed us. It was so fun, the current was super strong today so we all were being pushed around by the waves laughing at each other getting tossed around. Belle and Nastassia even lifted me up to do a flip into the waves. One of our best beach days by far! Once we got back we all got ready to explore old San Juan! We shopped around little stores went, got some nachos, and took way too many pictures. There’s tons of history in old San Juan. For example, they have tons of architecture still preserved from the Spanish American War. They built forts such as Castillo de San Felipe del Morro to protect them from sea and land attacks during the war. It’s just a beautiful city in general. Colorful buildings all around with memorable stories behind many of them. We didn’t take a tour or anything special but we explored all we could and spoke to locals about parts of the history. Nastassia also knows a ton about Puerto Rico due to her having many friends who are Puerto Rican. Around sunset, we went to this hill that’s known for flying kites. We found this guy selling them on the street so we could participate. Although it was an awful kite we had so much fun doing the best we could trying to fly it. We were all getting tired after a while so we went back to the hostel so we could rest before going out again at night. A running joke for us three this whole week was the Rio soundtrack if you could believe that. I randomly started singing it one of the days and we all just caught on and now blurt it out constantly. We actually even watched the movie one of the nights which I forgot to mention. So anyways as we were getting ready we listened to the soundtrack together and other throwback songs from old Disney movies. We ended up going back to old San Juan to check out the nightlife. It was definitely more vibrant in color but last week we were definitely surrounded by more people. After about an hour or two we wanted to show Nastassia La Placita, so we went back over there. We had a great night just us girls dancing and walking around. One of the longest days we’ve had but also one of the most fun.