thatgirlshines || this is our overshare: Puerto Rico

Last year when Anthony and I visited Puerto Rico, I took about 100 pictures. I'd never been there before and was in constant awe of its tropical beauty. We went on photo-taking walks so I could take pictures of tropical flowers and roosters and pastel-colored cement homes. This year I took maybe 12 pictures. I was more into chilling the fuck out this year. I read THREE books over the course of our eight days in paradise (which is more than ALL the books I read for pleasure in 2009). Although 2009 was a great year & lots of awesome stuff happened (finishing residency, getting my first real gig as a doctor, finally going vegan for an extended period of time, which has long been a goal of mine), it was a bit of an ass kicker. Who knew that being a psychiatrist working mainly with trauma patients (oh, man, the fucked up shit that my patients have had to endure...) and being the adminstrator for three different clinics would be so stressful? Even though I love my job and feel infinitely lucky to have found it/had it find me, it sometimes kicked my ass, y'all!

So in Puerto Rico I took naps every day, swam at a bunch of beautiful beaches, read "The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" (loved it!!!), watched my awesome old man take his first surfing lesson while I read "New Moon" on the beach (yes, this is the second installment of the Twilight series, and yes, I am on Team Jacob), took hikes on the trails of the amazing farm where we stayed in the mountains, fell in love with about a hundred dogs, slept in a treehouse, ate a lot of tostones and chocolate (not together), served as a kick-ass navigator as we circled the entire island from San Juan to San Juan, did not get freaked out by any of the little lizards who roomed with us along the way, and on our last day, I got Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" (a stunningly beautiful book) in the San Juan airport and finished it five minutes before we touched down in Chicago.

And between all of that, I took a picture of two. These are my favorites....

This little guy bunked with us in the treehouse.

I wasn't scared of our little friends in the treehouse who could be seen, moreso of creatures in the surrounding mountain forest who could only be heard (actually, the otherworldy cacophany from the the millions of bugs and birds was amazing. It was the crunching of leaves and the cracking of branches under footsteps of unseen mammals that made me a little wary of taking the stone path to the nearby bathroom at 1 am).

Some grafitti on a wall by a supermarket in Mayaguez (a town on the West Coast that has a VA medical clinic--I'm just sayin'...it's time for me to learn Spanish!):

After dinner at Maravilla (aka, paradise on earth) one night, we went out for night hike searching for Coqui frogs. We were accompanied by the owners' two dogs, Billy & Pony, and the second best cat in the world (love you, Sadie!). Without the flashlight, it was pitch black out because of all the tree coverage over head. When you turned off the flashlight, you might as well have been blind because you could not see a fucking thing. At all. So of course, I commandeered the flashlight out of panic and the raw need to control my environment in some way. Costa was about fifteen feet ahead of me, and in this shot I shined the flashlight just on his head. Sure I kept plunging him into total darkness as I took the light off the path to get the perfect shot, but it was worth it. Right?