Snorkeling Keeps Getting Better

August 7th, 2008. Today was nothing short of kick-ass. After yesterday’s meltdown (and subsequent “check-up from the neck-up”, I’m a brand new man.

We FOUND A COFFEE SHOP!!! It’s called HuChada – not sure what it means, but it’s on the north end of the downtown Oranjestad area, next to “supermarket city.” It’s inside a mall, but don’t let that fool you. They serve coffee, the free wifi connection is fast, and they have lots of room to setup laptops and plugin. It’s awesome. Here’s a picture of Sara enjoying her coffee at HuChada:

So cute.

After scoring a great place to work for most of the day, we headed back to the condo, ditched our work stuff and grabbed our snorkeling gear.

Today’s snorkeling was tougher. The masks weren’t fitting the same, they kept flooding or fogging, and we had some trouble getting going. Sara decided she’d rather lounge on the beach, so I headed out by myself to find fishes. I swam about 100 yards off-shore and found a lot of fish. I have no idea WHAT I saw, but I saw a lot of it.

The highlight – I was drifting with the current when I saw a big black and blue mass coming my way. It was a school of fish! They were swimming from coral formation to coral formation, stopping to snack along the way. Just like me, they were sort of drifting with the current. I followed them for about 5 minutes.

Unfortunately, someone has been feeding some of these fish. Evidently it’s bad for the reefs. In any case, a small group of black and yellow fish (no pictures…yet) followed me around, staying just out of arm’s reach for pretty much the whole time I was in the water. They were like little yellow, white, and blue puppy dogs.

I can’t read fish minds, but I’m fairly certain they were looking for a handout.

Dinner was awesome today too. We drove around for about an hour trying to find a restaurant called “Cuba’s Cookin’.” Since there are no street signs in Aruba, it was really hard to find what we were looking for. Sara gets credit for navigating success, but I think she got lucky.

Sara always looks great.

Everyone in the restaurant was handed an instrument and told to play along to “La Bamba.”

Cuba’s Cookin’ had a live singer and the walls were adorned with lots of contemporary art – some of which was quite good (IMHO).

I had vieja ropa, known in Cuba as “old clothes.” It’s braised shredded skirt steak. Quite good. Sara had some skewered meats, and for desert we enjoyed tres leches cake. That’s right, three milk cake. I mistakenly ordered a Cuba’s Coffee with the desert. It had whiskey in it, so I had to set it aside. But the little taste I had was awesome.

A great day in Aruba – probably the best yet.