The time has come to take another step in our journey. Should be a good time.
We are still ‘up in the air’ so to speak about what direction to take in our journey to move to Puerto Rico. It seems that we can take a safe path, a challenging path or somewhere in the middle. Its tough to make such decisions but it is a lot of fun too. Feeling alive.
Over the next week check back often for updates!
The view from the “house on the cliff“
We have some goals for our trip in March to Puerto Rico. Most obviously, we want to look for a property to buy in the western side (Aguada, Rincon, Mayaguez area). This is difficult because in Puerto Rico there is no MLS (multiple listing service), so you have to go with various real estate agents to see houses and you have to look all over the place. The best place we have found so far online is Clasificadosonline. It seems that most Puerto Ricans haven’t gotten too much into Craigslist, which I think is an absolute necessity here in Colorado. But Clasificadosonline pretty much fills that need in PR.
Anyhow, it is difficult to gauge the market in PR because of the lack of MLS or central resource of properties. Plus, a lot of people sell as the owner without a real estate company involved at all. We are planning on seeing a house with a real estate agent (Jose Marti Realty) and asked if we could see others with him, including others he has listed and he tried to sell us a house-hunting service! ! For like $500 a day just to drive around with the realtor! That is ridiculous. I can’t imagine it is such a seller’s market that they are discouraging possible buyers through this “service”. If I were selling my house, I wouldn’t put it through this company just for that reason alone.
So our main goal is to find a place that works with what we are looking for (a little bit of land and a comfortable house that we can rent out a portion of, not too far from the beaches and a town) and put in an offer. We would like to close on it this year if possible. We are not sure if we would be moving out right away or what, but we would like to have a property ready for us.
Other goals include meeting some of our blog friends and enjoying Puerto Rico as we always do. We are flying in to San Juan, although I am getting very tempted to fly into Aguadilla, but we just never have before. Then from there we are taking a rental car to Rincon where we are staying as roommates with two women who rent out their house in that way. We talked with one of them on the phone and she sounds like she will help us out in finding a place as well.
We also found this great reggae musician, Mishka, and so we plan on listening to a lot of his music in the rental car while we are driving around.
Vintage style Puerto Rico Adversting
Britton and I have been watching the show “Mad Men” lately and have found it pretty interesting to see the changes in what was normal from the early 60s to now. The most noticeable of course is the rampant smoking and drinking in the office and really anywhere, but also the sexism, racism, and lack of safety for kids (in one scene the mother has a minor accident and the small children are flung into the floor of the car, in another the kids are playing around with plastic bags over their heads). However, while there are a lot of things that have changed as a result of research, laws and social norms evolving, some of this period still seems magical to me. The books When I was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago, The Time it Snowed in Puerto Rico by Sarah McCoy, The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson and Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner were all set in that fascinating time.
So, anyway, when I saw that the Puerto Rico Tourism Company was modernizing an advertising campaign that connected both the Mad Men style advertising with a refreshed artistic look at Puerto Rico, I was intrigued. Apparently, as the NY Times article relates, a young “unknown” photographer by the name of Elliott Erwitt was sent to Puerto Rico in the late 50’s/early 60’s to cover an ad campaign about Puerto Rico for the Madison Avenue Company Ogilvy and Mather. Now, 50 years later, he has gone back to do it again as a well-established and esteemed photographer. The website: http://www.seepuertorico.com has many of the photographs as well as video of his time there. While it is mainly centered on the San Juan area, I think it is a beautiful portfolio of how much things have changed and how much they remain the same.
I sent Britton this link about Puerto Rico. I signed up for electronic updates about Puerto Rico from the New York Times so I occasionally see something in there about PR. I thought Britton summed it up perfectly well with his comment:
I couldn’t even scrape the frost off my windshield this morning. The -4 degree temperature seems to make a super bond with the frost and the glass. It was worse than the blue countertops!
Whiskey and fresh coconut water in the warmth of PR sounds good about now. So does live salsa and alcapurrias.
Sometimes I think maybe people think we are escapists. Well, I am reading a new book called Getting Stoned with Savages about a young couple who move to and live in the South Pacific and I thought his sentiments exactly:
“I have been called many things in my life but if there has been one constant, one barb, one arrow flung my way time after time, it is the accusation that I am, in essence, nothing more than an escapist. Apparently this is bad, suspect, possibly even un-American….Escapism, we are to believe, is evidence of a deficiency in character, a certain failure of temperment, and like so many -isms, is to be strenuously avoided. How do you expect to get ahead? people ask. But the question altogether misses the point. The escapist doesn’t want to get ahead. He simply wants to get away. I understand this, for I am an unapologetic escapist.”
-From Getting Stoned with Savages by J. Maarten Troost
We may be escapists but we can’t wait for our Puerto Rico dream to come true.