Arthur Frommer's Blog, page 6

Leaving the Beach to Focus on the Modern Aspects of Puerto Rico

Last Thursday, the day before we finally flew home to New York from San Juan, my wife and I decided we would no longer stay indolent and aimless on a beachfront chaise lounge, but would deliberately plunge into the contemporary life of Puerto Rico. We headed, first, for the Plaza del Mercator (the big, covered, marketplace of San Juan) to gaze at the unfamiliar tropical fruits that are harvested on the island itself and made the mainstay of the residents' daily diet, and then we crossed the street to have a quick and early seafood lunch at El Pescador ("the fisherman"), one of the many local restaurants for residents that surround that marketplace square.

From there, a short walk brought us to the Museum of Puerto Rican Art in a stunning new building that displays the oil paintings done by leading local artists over the past two hundred years (a "must see", reflecting the strong emotions about their culture felt by these highly-innovative men and women); after which we headed into Old San Juan ("Viejo San Juan"), where a modern protest demonstration was the highlight of our stay.

All throughout the afternoon, a group of more than 100 young Puerto Rican women, in festive but modern dress, marched through the streets of that original city beating drums and brandishing placards, banners and flags advocating approval of the Violence Against Women Act that is now bogged down in the House of Representatives in Washington, D.C. At various plazas, they would stop to perform graceful dances and to respond to the cheers of the various onlookers who applauded and shouted their approval.

I am mentioning this not to make a political point (heaven forbid!), but to cite it as an instance of the growing modernity of life in Puerto Rico; in previous generations, women held back by the traditional views of Hispanic culture would never have dared to present such a strong feminist message, no different from what you would have heard on the streets of San Francisco or Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was one of many instances in which we glimpsed a sort of life in Puerto Rico that is centuries ahead of what you see in virtually every other island of the Caribbean.

We mainlanders visit Puerto Rico for the beaches and the surf, for swimming pools warmed by the constant sun, for the sounds of rhythmic music, and for temperatures that make you feel lucky and privileged. But we now enjoy these pleasures in or near a city, San Juan, that is comparable to any big metropolis at home. You arrive in a totally modern airport, take a broad highway into town, and pass not simply the resort areas but the business district of Santurce with big office buildings and graceful parks. You could be in Dallas or Cleveland. And the outward appearance of most of the areas you visit is thriving and prosperous. There are numerous impressive museums and other cultural attractions, a vibrant restaurant scene of many different ethnic cuisines, and a population that is gracious to a fault -- and often English-speaking.

I am of course aware that Puerto Rico has its problems. It has been in recession since 2006 and the unemployment rate is 14%. But it is clearly recovering, and considerably aided by the tourism we Yankees bring to it. It is one of the least expensive destinations to reach in the Caribbean -- if you are flexible in your dates you can often find round-trip airfares of $250 to $350 from most U.S. cities -- and its price structure for accommodations is moderate by Caribbean standards. I thoroughly enjoyed my own recent Puerto Rican vacation.

Isn’t It Obvious that Cruise Ships Should Have a Back-Up Source of Electricity Located Far From the Engine Room?

To install such a facility on existing ships will cost a lot of money. To make space for another massive generator will probably mean eliminating as many as 200 passenger cabins. No longer will such ships carry 3,000 passengers, but rather 2,500 passengers.

But isn’t that a small price to pay for avoiding such tragic events as recently endangered the Carnival Triumph and its passengers? Imagine if that loss of power had occurred on a transatlantic or transpacific crossing while the ship was several hundred -- even a thousand -- miles from land!

A cruise ship is like a city at sea. And like any city, it should have an alternate source of energy and power, located at the other end of the ship from where the basic source of power is found. To rely on a single producer of energy located in or near the engine room entails a giant risk, as Carnival discovered.

Most cities have back-up plans, back-up connections to other electric grids that can be used if the main source of power fails. And such a back-up source should also exist on cruise ships carrying a thousand and more passengers. New ships should be re-designed to enjoy such alternate remedies; old ships should be altered -- sent back to the shipyard -- to install such alternate remedies.

And that way, we won’t encounter an even greater disaster than the one that was partially avoided on the Carnival Triumph. Since the large cruise lines -- Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Norwegian -- now enjoy earnings measured in the billions per year, they have the obvious wherewithal to institute this improvement in the reliability of their systems of energy.

At a Number of Upcoming Talks, I Hope to Meet Readers of the Frommers.com Blog

Today is the last full day of my Puerto Rican idyll (where the winter temperature is usually 86 degrees), from which I fly back to New York on Friday. Two days later, on Sunday, I’ll be recounting the experience, and adding still more comments, at the opening of The Travel Show shared with my daughter, Pauline, from 12-2pm ET. You can hear that program on any of the 130 radio talk stations that now carry it around the country. or by going to www.wor710.com where it is streamed live. If you miss that time,  recording of that broadcast is carried on the site for several weeks and is presented without commercials! Just click "podcast" from the mainpage.

(With today’s merger of American Airlines and U.S. Air and the tragedy of the Carnival Triumph drifting through the Gulf of Mexico, we’ll have more to discuss than simply Puerto Rico.)

Then, a week later, I’ll be appearing at the Los Angeles Times Travel Show at the Los Angeles Convention Center, where I’ll be speaking from 11 a.m. to noon on Saturday, February 23 (and then signing books at the bookstore booth near the speaker’s stage). I’d very much appreciate meeting with California readers of this blog at that time.

Two weeks later, on Saturday March 9, I will again be speaking at 11 a.m. at the Washington, D.C. Travel and Adventure Show in the Washington, D.C. Convention Center, and hoping to meet readers afterwards, again at a bookstore booth near the convention stage.

If you can’t attend either of these events, you should know that you can always phone in questions or comments to The Travel Show, toll-free, at the 800 number that we announce on the show. And if you can’t do that, you can always e-mail us with questions or comments to Frommertravelshow@yahoo.com. Many of your e-mails will be discussed on the show, but if they aren’t, they are always answered in writing, by Pauline or myself, within two or three days after we receive them.

We hope to enjoy these contacts with you, and especially look forward to meeting you either at the LA or DC shows.

At a Number of Upcoming Talks, I Hope to Meet Readers of this Frommer.com Blog

Today is the last full day of my Puerto Rican idyll (where the winter temperature is usually 86 degrees), from which I fly back to New York on Friday. Two days later, on Sunday, I’ll be recounting the experience, and adding still more comments, at the opening of The Travel Show shared with my daughter, Pauline, from 12-2pm ET. You can hear that program on any of the 130 radio talk stations that now carry it around the country. or by going to www.wor710.com where it is streamed live. If you miss that time,  recording of that broadcast is carried on the site for several weeks and is presented without commercials! Just click "podcast" from the mainpage.

(With today’s merger of American Airlines and U.S. Air and the tragedy of the Carnival Triumph drifting through the Gulf of Mexico, we’ll have more to discuss than simply Puerto Rico.)

Then, a week later, I’ll be appearing at the Los Angeles Times Travel Show at the Los Angeles Convention Center, where I’ll be speaking from 11 a.m. to noon on Saturday, February 23 (and then signing books at the bookstore booth near the speaker’s stage). I’d very much appreciate meeting with California readers of this blog at that time.

Two weeks later, on Saturday March 9, I will again be speaking at 11 a.m. at the Washington, D.C. Travel and Adventure Show in the Washington, D.C. Convention Center, and hoping to meet readers afterwards, again at a bookstore booth near the convention stage.

If you can’t attend either of these events, you should know that you can always phone in questions or comments to The Travel Show, toll-free, at the 800 number that we announce on the show. And if you can’t do that, you can always e-mail us with questions or comments to Frommertravelshow@yahoo.com. Many of your e-mails will be discussed on the show, but if they aren’t, they are always answered in writing, by Pauline or myself, within two or three days after we receive them.

We hope to enjoy these contacts with you, and especially look forward to meeting you either at the LA or DC shows.

Some Further Reflections on a Mid-Winter Stay in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico

Seen with the eyes of a tourist, Puerto Rico is as lively and thriving as ever: The beaches have lots of bathers, the restaurants are often full, and the big Walgreen’s drugstore near where I am staying is packed with shoppers identical to its counterparts back home. Were it not for the occasional product described in Spanish on the packaging, you could swear you were in Miami.

And yet I am told that the economy of Puerto Rico has slowed; that unemployment is at 14%; and that numerous residents are leaving for a better life on the mainland. It all goes to show that the out-of-touch visitor (myself) is often oblivious to real conditions but accidentally contributes to an economic recovery simply by showing up on the scene.

And there are plenty of us here, on a very impressive tropical island. No matter how many times you have seen it, Old San Juan (Viejo San Juan) is awesomely beautiful, a tribute to the aesthetic sense of the Spanish grandees who began constructing it as early as 1508, when Juan Ponce de Leon first came to explore and to build. Head for El Convento in Old San Juan, the re-constructed convent made into a stunning hotel, and order a small bowl of gazpacho at its garden cafe, and you’ll fall into reveries, as I did yesterday.

The island has enjoyed remarkable development in the past ten years. As you move from Old San Juan to Condado to Santurce to Ocean Park to Isla Verde to the Airport, you pass literally dozens of new resorts and condominiums (the largest-ever resort, the Vanderbilt, is now in construction) and when you pause for lunch at the famous El San Juan in Isla Verde, you look up and down a curving, two-mile-long, white-sand beach lined with high-rises presenting a scene that looks identical to Miami Beach. This is the new Miami Beach, with the advantage of guaranteed weather: it is almost always hot.

If you’re intent on staying in a modern, high-rise condo overlooking the sea, then I’d definitely suggest you choose Isla Verde against Condado; the latter has become too-jam-packed with a solid wall of buildings. But best of all is where I am, in laid-back Ocean Park, a partly-residential area with no high-rises but one guesthouse after another. In the one where I’m staying, in a seaside apartment on the third floor of its guest quarters, I’m surrounded by impressive and quiet private homes that would do credit to any equivalent neighborhood of America.

This is the beachfront neighborhood described in a famous, user-generated website as "like Times Square" by one disgruntled contributor.

"Like Times Square!" You have to be awfully angry over some perceived slight to mis-describe a place in such an extreme manner. From my guesthouse, I have to walk for three residential blocks before I reach even a single bodega, one of those tiny Hispanic grocery stores. I walk another block to reach the sandwich shop visited by President Obama in 2011, where there’s a touching placard commemorating the historic pork-and-pickle sandwich he wolfed down. And if you walk another block, you reach a giant Walgreen’s with every convenience (and a quiet, Spanish-speaking clientele), where you then encounter the start of a commercial district of small stores. Some Times Square!

I’m enjoying my stay, and the only drawback to this sunlit paradise is that high winds are creating such strong surf that the white-capped waves knock me over when I go wading out into the sea. But they knock me down, with such unexpected force, into waters that seem like a warm bathtub in comparison to the frigid seas you find at mainland beaches of the USA.

Though the Puerto Ricans have much to complain about, in terms of their domination by the United States (see Sonia Sotomayor’s "My Beloved World" for a well-balanced portrait of the U.S.-Hispanic relationship; I've just finished reading this fascinating autobiography), one nevertheless feels a bit proud of the fact that today’s Puerto Rico is considerably more prosperous -- poor economic conditions and all -- than most of the other non-U.S. islands of the Caribbean.

 One tourist after another tells me that they flew here for round-trip costs of only $300 from their home city in the US. You might want to do the same.

The Combined Talents of Sherlock Holmes & Sigmund Freud Are Needed to Trust UGC Sites

My current vacation in a seaside neighborhood of San Juan, Puerto Rico, has given me plenty of time to ponder the task of reading one of those popular user-generated websites for finding a hotel. I am prompted to do so by the comments I receive from readers whenever I attack those sites as being unusable.

In a tone of world-weary resignation, the persons responding to my outlandish attitudes are usually anxious to set me on a path of wisdom. In comments that usually run around five lengthy paragraphs, they tirelessly set forth the formula for doing so.

In a typical example, they deal with the instances in which 138 persons have rated a particular hotel resort -- with 49 persons claiming it is "wonderful" and 37 persons claiming it is "terrible." The first thing you do, say the commentators, is eliminate all the enthusiastic recommendations -- all 49 of them. These are probably fakes, they point out, submitted by employees, friends and relatives of the hotel in question. Then you also eliminate all the harshly critical pans -- these are apparently sent in either by competitors of the hotel or by irascible people responding to some momentary slight they have suffered at the hotel.

This leaves you with the "balanced" comments, the middle-range in which some good points are found, to be weighed against some negatives. But some of these are also fakes, they point out, composed by smart hotel executives who know how to write a seemingly balanced comment that looks honest but isn’t. To determine whether this is the case, you look for "telltale" words -- some telltale words are evidence of deceit. But the telltale words cited by some authors of comments are different from those cited by others, and I have a hard time remembering which are the telltale words for each.

Anyway, after scanning the hotel comments that are half and half in nature -- half positive, half not so -- and eliminating those with telltale words, and after studying the entrails of a sheep in the approved ancient manner, spending half-an-hour at the task, you finally get to the essence, and shrewdly determine whether the hotel is a decent one or a horror. And this approach is better, they claim, than relying on the opinion of a newspaper travel editor or prestigious magazine critic.

In other words, you approach the user-generated sites as Sherlock Holmes would have done (using insights from Sigmund Freud). But I simply won’t (or can’t) transform myself into either of those gentlemen.

Have I exaggerated? Turn to the comments appended to my past blogs on the subject, and tell me whether I have mis-described the advice that some people offer to the readers of user-generated websites. And the next time you turn to such a site, and encounter 138 wildly-differing opinions, then reach your own decision as to whether the opinions of experts -- well-known travel journalists, heavily-followed restaurant critics -- are to be preferred over the wisdom of amateurs.

An Appreciation of Puerto Rico from a Balcony Overlooking a Sunlit San Juan Beach

I am at a mid-point of a 10-day vacation in Puerto Rico, and glad that I chose to go this colorful American Commonwealth.

Puerto Rico has several major travel advantages: a climate at least 10 to 15 degrees warmer than anywhere else on the mainland (even Florida); a heavy schedule of flights from almost everywhere in the U.S. (at low airfares designed for the massive traffic of Puerto Ricans traveling to and from their relatives on the mainland); and an almost complete lack of hassles: no passport to carry, the U.S. dollar as the unit of currency; no customs clearance; easy and direct dial phones to the mainland; and a population that is well versed in English, taught almost universally in elementary schools.

It was easy getting here, and even easier to find well-priced accommodations -- especially as compared with Florida, which is enjoying a tourist boom. That isn't the case in Puerto Rico.

My wife and I are in a comfortable apartment on the top floor of a seaside guesthouse, and both the beach and the sea are directly below our terrace-balcony, in an apartment costing us much less than for equivalent digs in Miami. We are in the quiet, residential district of Ocean Park, about midway between the high-rises of Condado on one side (about a mile away) and Isla Verde on the other. There isn't a casino in reach, nor a single chain store or mall, and we have the beach virtually to ourselves except on the weekend, when residents of San Juan enjoy the sands and surf to which they have free public access.

We make breakfast in our apartment, and then go to a sandwich shop called Kasalta (a few short blocks away) for lunch. Kasalta is the modest place to which Barack Obama was brought for a snack on his 2011 presidentrial visit to Puerto Rico. The bakery-cafe now displays two large placards, one in Spanish and one in English, on which the proud statement appears (I am quoting from memory): "On the 14th day of June, 2011, we had the honor of a visit by the President of the United States, Senor Barack Obama. We are proud of this achievement and wish to share it with our customers. May God bless you all." Then, on a list of sandwiches affixed to the wall behind the main counter, the words "presidential selection" appear alongside the sandwich that President Obama chose, a pork-and-pickle combination called "media noche." I had it on my first lunch there, and appreciated the President's taste.

Although we spent one evening wandering the high-rises and casinos of Condado ("Las Vegas of the Caribbean"), we devote much of our time to the beach and the bathtub-warm sea, on which athletic and highly-skilled types go whizzing by on "kite boards," which appear to be the sport of the year. My reading, in the shade of a broad umbrella: Sonia Sotomoyor's "My Beloved World," an autobiographical work devoted mainly to the povery-stricken but rich-in-family-warmth Puerto Rican community in which she grew up, and from which she emerged to graduate from Princeteon, Yale Law School, and various legal employments to become a Justice of the United States Supreme Court. It is a powerful page-turner, a real tour-de-force, which well deserves its current position as number one on the New York Times list of non-fiction best-sellers. And I couldn't have chosen a better work in which to immerse myself during a stay in Puerto Rico.

It was sheer dumb luck that caused us to be away, in the tropics, at the time of the historic blizzard that made life so difficult in areas where I normally live and work. I have had to turn away the compliments given to me by various Puerto Rican guesthouse staff who believe that I foresaw that event and therefore managed to escape the storm's fury.

What a wonderful option to be able to board a flight and then be, in three and a half hours, in a warm-and-welcoming tropical world.

A Record Low $30-A-Day for a Repositioning Cruise to Lisbon

I had thought, until recently, that $34 a day was the lowest price ever recorded for a cruise on a glamorous ship carrying 2,500 passengers. I was wrong. Avoya Travel of Miami (tel. 888/478-8479; www.avoyatravel.com) has just listed a rate of $29.99 per person per day for a repositioning cruise from San Juan to Lisbon, 10 nights in length, leaving the Puerto Rican port on April 13 and arriving in Lisbon on April 23.
Have you got $900 lying around? For that total sum, in my calculation, you can enjoy this particular wonder on Royal Caribbean's  Brilliance of the Seas . Here's how:
You can fly one-way from Fort Lauderdale to San Juan for about $50. (Go to Momondo.com to see how.) You then board the Brilliance of the Seas for your $299, 10-night cruise to Lisbon (stopping at St. Maarten, and at Tenerife in the Canary Islands), en route to Lisbon (six nights are spent simply at sea, crossing the Atlantic.) Then, again by consulting that aggressive aggregator, Momondo.com, and clicking on one-way flights, you can find a return flight from Lisbon to New York for about $500. Add the three elements of the trip, and they still come to less than $900 (airfare included) for your 10-night re-positioning cruise. Has there ever been a cheaper vacation? I don't think so.

Cornell Announces Expanded Program for Its 2013 Summer Learning Vacations

After many years of assuming that Cornell's Adult University (CAU) in Ithaca, New York, was not the equivalent in profundity of those other summer learning vacations at Oxford, Cambridge, and St. John’s College in Santa Fe, I finally attended a summer week at Cornell and learned how wrong I had been. The course I took with distinguished Cornell faculty was an intellectual adventure, enjoyable beyond measure and deeply rewarding, and the courses pursued by other adult participants -- as described to me during the excellent meals we took in Cornell’s dining halls -- were equally memorable. And when we all got together for a final banquet dinner and sang the Cornell song -- "High above Cayuga’s waters . . ." there wasn't a dry eye in the room.

Four separate weeks will be offered: July 7-13, July 14-20, July 21-27, and July 28-August 3, 2013, with as many as eight different courses offered each week. And although some of these are for pure recreation:

 

The Wines CourseThe Golf ClinicThe Tennis ClinicThe Harried Gourmet Does Simple Dining: Soups, Breads and Salads

 

Others are serious, day-long, all-week, intensive excursions into academic subjects:

 

The Birth of Stars, Galaxies and Black HolesNatural History in the Field.Great TrialsIndividual Liberty, Privacy and Religious FreedomThe Psychology of Suspense in ArtMath: Personal Paths and Occasional Prodigies.

 

All courses are taught by the renowned faculty of Cornell. My own course in "Great Trials" two summers ago, taught by historian-sociologist Glenn Altschuler and law professor Faust Rossi, and dealing with the judicial trials of the Haymarket protestors, the Barry Bond and Martha Stewart prosecutions, the Suffragette ordeals, and others, remains vivid in my memory and constantly refreshing; my fellow students were an amazing lot from all ages and professions of articulate and highly-engaged people.

What is also unique about Cornell's summer program is that a parallel program for children of different ages is offered to the offspring of parents attending a weeklong course, keeping those children engaged and absorbed while their parents pursue a different course. People of all ages then meet three times a day in the dining halls of Cornell where the food is unlimited, varied, and surprisingly good.

For adults, a week at Cornell costs $1,669, including housing in a comfortable, private, student residence; all tuition; all meals; late afternoon and evening activities and tours; the final banquet dinner; and more. It is some of the best money you'll ever spend. You can learn more, or obtain a catalogue, from www.cau.cornell.edu, or by requesting information from cauinfo@cornell.edu, or by phoning 607/255-6260.

Download E-Books to Your Tablet or Laptop to Read on Trips to Remote Areas

On a recent trip to the tropics, where I had no access to Wi-Fi, I was surprised nevertheless to find that I was able to read several e-books -- including a couple of massive e-books -- on the Kindle Cloud app that I had placed on my laptop. I was using a Chromebook having no hard drive, and therefore no storage other than on the cloud, and yet I was able to enjoy hours of pleasant reading. I completed, in this manner, Justice Sonia Sotomayor's autobiographical My Beloved World.
I was also able to read e-book content on my tablet in the course of several flights aboard an airline that provided no WiFi service in the air. I accessed that content as easily as if I were using the WiFi in my own home. And I learned a lesson: to download e-books I was eager to read in advance of undertaking any trip.
I am not sure I understand how the e-book content on my laptop and table was acquired in the course of a flight, and in remote and un-developed islands where there was no Wi-Fi. And I'd be grateful if a reader would explain it all to me. Was I "grabbing" that content in the same way tha cell phone would acquire a connection? Had the e-book content been stored in some fashion within my laptop or table (which seems unlikely). How did I "pull it down”"in places where I was bereft of a Wi-Fi connection?
Since I enjoy reading while traveling, and since I am often in areas where I have no standard connection to the Internet's content and news sources, I will henceforth make certain that I have acquired the content of several vital books that I am anxious to read. I will become an e-book addict, knowing that at the very least, I will be able to read that content on the laptop and tablet that now accompany my trips.