Visiting the Arecibo Observatory and Local Produce Shopping

October 22

Visiting the Arecibo Observatory and a Local Market

We've made a list of places and things we need to see while we're here. One of those was the Arecibo Observatory, home of the world's second largest radio telescope, located about 90 minutes from San Juan. While most of the drive is on highways, the last several miles are on winding roads that climb high up into the hills. The observatory itself is located at the end of the road.

For those who have seen the movies 'Goldeneye' or 'Contact', the telescope will look familiar.

While the introductory film and information session is offered both in Spanish and English, we decided to give our fledgling Spanish a try and go to that session. The film had subtitles (also in Spanish). The combination of relatively slow speech and subtitles allowed us to understand a good bit of the information, which we could then pass onto the kids contemporaneously. We were feeling pretty good about our language skills......until we went to the Q&A info session.  I don't think we understood a single word of it!

The exhibit itself is quite interesting - lots of interactive stations to experience to gain an understanding of our world and its place in space.

On the way home, we stopped at a local fruit/vegetable market. We had a delightful conversation with a woman who lives in the area. She ended up inviting us to her home - anytime! While we could not take her up on the offer, we were very pleased to have had such a positive interaction. She suggested we try a pana fruta (breadfruit) so we picked one up. Trying local foods is definitely on our list of things to do. We ended up with a large bag of produce for only $7.