California 2 Puerto Rico

Okay, I admit it, I’m a bit picky when it comes to eating. It’s not that I’m afraid to try new foods, or anything like that, I just like to eat healthy, fresh food. Maybe it’s because I was raised by crazy hippies, but I’m just not a fan of most fast food or fried things. So, finding an enjoyable meal in Puerto Rico has been a bit of a struggle for me. Like most caribbean islands, a lot of Puerto Rican fare is fried: mofongo, tostones, empanadillas, etc. With that being said, here is my opinion on the best places to eat in Rincon, Puerto Rico:

Shipwrecks - Everything on the menu is great, but it is expensive. My absolute favorite is the Tuna Tamari Salad. It’s $24 but it is HUGE and could easily feed two people.

Calypso - This is a touristy bar/restaurant, but it’s also a favorite with all the locals. The food is actually very good and reasonably priced. Stefan claims that the churassco steak plate is the best steak in town and trust me, he’s tried them all. They also have good vegetarian or dorado burritos, a decent salad and great drinks.

Pool Bar - This bar/restaurant is a very cool place to get a few drinks and grab some sushi. The sushi is some of the best I’ve had in Puerto Rico (Although, most sushi in Puerto Rico is horrible, so…take that for what it is worth).

Bungers - They just started doing fish tacos (not fried!) and they are SO good and very affordable. I highly recommend them. Bungers also has a good salad and the pastas/meats and whatnot are decent.

Superfoods - This is actually a brand new health food store in town that also serves lunch from 11am - 3pm, and is our new favorite place to eat. It’s very affordable and everything we’ve had so far has been delicious.

Rincon by the Seas - They have a really good chicken breast plate, a decent salad and a delicious hummus appetizer, although I havn’t tried anything else there yet.

So there you have my picks for the best places to eat in Rincon, PR. Please let us know where your favorite Rincon restaurant (or pinchos stand!) is, as we’re always looking to try new/good food!

We haven’t posted too many pictures of us lately, so after uploading the last few pics of the master bathroom door, I figured I would post some pictures so ya’ll can check out Summer. In about 7 weeks we’ll have a new addition to the family and we’ll start blasting you guys with photos of our daughter. We don’t know what she looks like yet, but she knows my voice from stories and conversations I have with Summers prego belly. Now, when I read or talk to her she starts moving around and kicking. It’s amazing.

Summer is 32 weeks pregnant in these pictures. The first picture is in the living room right before we went to the beach on Sunday to fish for lobsters, relax and get away from our computers. We have both been working a lot but aren’t complaining. We love our jobs, working at home and talking office politics at the water cooler. Ok, just kidding. Not much politics going on in our office, just work. Without further delay:

I have been promising the last pictures of our master bath for a while now, but just haven’t gotten around to uploading them until today. Sorry for the delay. The final step to the master bathroom woodwork was to install a louvered door for privacy in the shower and toilet area. Here are the pictures that I promised and I am reposting all of the pictures so you can see the entire master bath set up in one spot. If you want to see what it looked like back in the day…starting with the framing, you can see that here.

On a side note. We fired up the Jacuzzi and it worked great for 15 minutes, then the jets just turned off. I assumed it was a breaker but didn’t stress out about it. Unfortunately, once I checked the breaker, I saw that we didn’t throw a switch. Hmmm, I am thinking that the Whirlpool jacuzzi tub might have an internal fuse or breaker that flipped but I haven’t gone under there with a flash light yet. Now I see why I left a door in the front and on both sides at the his and hers vanities. Funny stuff, nothing ever goes smoothly in our DIY Puerto Rico house. Regardless of the trials and tribulations of building our house in Rincon, it has and is still and amazing experience. I love this place, even when there aren’t any waves.

Seriously, our garden is the bomb. Of course, I say this regardless of the fact that we don’t have any plants in it yet. We have a bunch of tomatoes popping through the beautiful soil, some lettuce and sugar snap peas. We are still waiting on our other little seeds to show their little sprouts. The real reason our garden is awesome, is because it grew a pregnant Summer. Ever seen one? Have a look:

Rainy Season is upon us and isn’t shy. It has been rainy almost every day for the past three weeks. It isn’t always an all day rain though, many of the days are just afternoon showers…lovely, humidity killing afternoon showers.

The thunder was rumbling this morning when I got up and went into the office around 6:30 and by 8:00am we were having power outages, downpours and a big stinky dog hiding under my desk forcing me to work side saddle. Here is a picture of the weather today…both satellite and via iPhone.

Rainy season has started again!

The plants are LOVING all of the rain

Summer and I absolutely love fresh vegetables. The local Econo (grocery store) has done a great job in the past two years stocking their produce section with new and non-traditional PR vegetables. When I used to visit Rincon as a kid, the Econo was the dominate supermarket without much competition and the majority of my diet consisted of beans and rice and Rum. Hmmm….what does that have to do with our new garden? Well, I really think that creating a hybrid of food supply sources is the key to a non-monotonous healthy food plan in Rincon. Lately, we have had great choices, half because we know the area and the other half because there has been a huge push to bring more food variety to Rincon.

Recently, Super Foods opened up right around the corner from Econo and sells organic health food and healthy plate lunches daily. I’ll post more on Super Foods later because Summer and I are stoked on their contribution to the Rincon grocery store scene. If you are in the area, Super Foods is located next to the new Rincon Plaza and Western Bank. Stop by and support them by filling your cabinets and belly with healthy organic food. We want them to stick around and they need all of our support as much as we need them.

Wow, I am getting off track. Back to the point at hand. Summer and I are done building our new garden! I pulled all the grass out of an area that was never excavated so the soil in there is beautiful and full of worms. I then put a layer of very dry and decomposed horse manure, a layer of hay, a layer of soil from our compost pile, a layer of peat moss and then another layer of hay on top of that. Summer and I then planted seven rows of seed. We have about 4 varieties of tomatoes, sugar snap peas, celery, red peppers, green peppers, cilantro, basil, jalapenos, lettuce, spicy mescaline and regular mescaline. After we planted everything, I set up a sprinkler (in case it stops raining every day) and now Summer and I are just waiting.

Check out our baby garden:

I am too busy to go into a big detailed and researched story on Banco Popular and how it got started in Puerto Rico. What I can tell you is this, don’t open an account there. My experience with them in the past two months has convinced me it’s time to change banks, and now I may even have to get a lawyer involved to be able to cash in on the 2 year CD I opened with them two years and 8 days ago. So, that is the premise for two separate rants about my experience with Banco Popular and why I recommend you opening an account somewhere else (please feel free to suggest other banks based on your experiences. It will help Summer and I and all the other readers that come here everyday researching Puerto Rico Banks).

Popular Mortgage | Banco Popular Mortgage Division

As everyone knows that pays attention to the sensationalism passed off as news on the television everyday, the world is in a financial crisis. The sky is falling and chicken little (strong rooster in PR) is running around confused causing hysteria. Well, such is capitalism, and those of us who did not live over extended on our credit and ‘perceived’ value of our homes for the past ten years can now reap the benefits of being financially responsible consumers. Right? I don’t think so.

I filled out the paperwork and payed Banco Popular over $700 to survery, appraise and do all the paperwork associated with refinancing our Rincon home (primary resident) and just last week (after multiple phone calls and visits) they told me the offer has changed, I need a second appraisal (another $150) and they raised my required hazard insurance (equivalent to home owners insurance) from $65 a month to $281.53 a month! They also added a $2,000 fee that they labeled as a mortgage loan discount (FYI Banco Popular: if it’s a discount, you subtract money, not add it, it’s the little button on your calculator that looks like a plus sign, without the vertical line) and they added a $2,600 cancellation fee for canceling my old loan to refinance with the new one. All this has been making me furious. I am dealing with mortgage brokers who answer yes/no questions with a 10 minute explanation that always ends up with some sort of sales person style tie down and a question back to me along the lines of: “are you ready to move forward. sign the paperwork today!”

You have got to be fricking kidding me. Four months and counting on a refinance with Banco Popular? Aside from all the new fee’s they added, they are trying to ignore them and just get me to close the deal. Here is what I have for your deal Banco Popular. I curse you to eat Noni for breakfast, lunch and dinner for the rest of your life. When you get sick, I hope some comes out your nose and it burns and you smell that noni puke for days and days.

Banco Popular | Investments and CD Accounts

When we bought our house, we agreed to place 20% of the value of our home in a 2 year CD Account with Banco Popular as collatoral that we were not going to default on a home that was not finished construction. Heck, all our property and the unfinished home wasn’t enough, which I was cool with. I make interest off the money for two years, Banco Popular doesn’t have to worry about selling the frame of a house and we’re all good. Well, now it’s two years later and they won’t let me cash in my CD Account with them. They tell me that they need some collateral for the mortgage. Hmmm, Isn’t my 5 bedroom, 3 bath house (marble, granite, mahogany) the type of collateral most banks have on mortgages? More over, I received a letter two weeks ago saying that I had a 5 days grace period to pick up the check (cashed in CD Account) or it would be automatically re-instated for two years. But now, I go in and ask for my money and they say there is a hold on it from the office in San Juan. I have been in the Rincon office of Banco Popular 3 times this week and everytime they say they are working on it.

Today, I contacted a Puerto Rico real estate lawyer and then went into the bank. I told them I was not going to leave until the ‘mix up’ was resolved. The Rincon branch manager did not know what was going on and passed the task on to someone else earlier in the week. Today, I walked right into his office, sat down at his desk and told him that if they couldn’t provide a reason (contract with my signature on it) to continue holding my money without me making interest on it, I was not going to leave his office. I told him I would ruin his day if he didn’t pick up the phone and start making phone calls.

Ultimately, the reason for all this is because they can not find my original Popular Mortgage paperwork. I told them that I have a copy and I’ll bring it in so they can give me my money. They said that the paperwork had to be internal Banco Popular paperwork. Ok, so let me get this straight here; Banco Popular is disorganized. Banco Popular lost my mortgage paperwork. Banco Popular is unsure what is going on, so instead of giving me my money that I signed into a two year account (they have copies of the two year CD paperwork), they are going to hold on to it until they can get their business more organized.

I thought putting all that in writing would make me feel better. The only time my blood pressure even dropped a little bit was at the mention of our daughter. And now it’s back up again. Here is how I classify all this, and this is the end of my rant. I need to get back to work:
Puerto Rico Bank Banco Popular is Stealing From Us

Yes, that’s right. After a year and a half of piecing together our kitchen when we had the money and when our custom cabinet builder had the time to show up, we are finally there. Well, not quite there, but 99% there. I am kind of counting our chickens before the eggs have hatched here, but all of the appliances are (and have been) installed, all of the woodwork is done, the handles are installed, the marble floors are installed, the drywall is installed, it’s painted and the plumbing is done. Not to mention, it looks pretty good.

We are only two things shy of a completed kitchen.

1. Last piece of matching granite for our desk area
2. Under cabinet lighting

The under cabinet lighting is not a problem. All of the wiring is done, the switch is in, we just need to buy/install the lights. I may do that myself or I may wait for Brian to come down for another vacation. Brian is our buddy from Florida who keeps taking his vacations to come down here and help us with EVERYTHING electrical. He has pretty much done all of our electrical work and had great suggestions on what/where/how everything should be planned out. Unlike Summer and I, this is not his first rodeo.

The granite is a different story, and I have my fingers crossed. The granite we have in the kitchen seems to be running in short supply on the island and they are currently trying track down the pieces of slab that we need. The reason why we didn’t buy all the granite at once is because the kitchen lay out changed a couple of months after installing the counter tops. Not by much, but we decided to add some drawers for our pots and pans next to the stove, a knife/utensil drawer and a built-in mahogany cutting board, a built in beverage cooler (originally JUST a wine fridge, but it does a great job keeping Medalla cold and is great for that little bit of extra fridge space when cooking for a bunch of people) and a workstation area for our daughter to do homework and for me to stack all of the mail I never open.

Summer and I started Garden 2.0 back in July of 2008. If you check out the pictures, you’ll see that we built a raised planter with rocks and back filled it with a mixture of dirt from the driveway and top soil. Below the soil we brought in is mostly rock. Not much dirt to speak of. We had a good run on our first go around with plenty of Lettuce and tomatoes.

All that changed on round two in the same plot. Summer rotated her plants around and replanted. We watered it daily and maintained well keeping all the weeds out. As of right now, we are producing string beans but everything else is miniature. It’s not dieing, but it’s not growing either.

Summer and I decided it was time to move the garden somewhere with more fertile soil and less ALL DAY DIRECT SUNLIGHT. I have been working on the property a lot lately knocking down Salsa tree’s, weedwacking and weeding and we have an area in the back of the house with nice dirt, 70% sunlight and it’s right next to our compost! I spent a couple hours this week preparing our new garden plot so Summer and I can get planting! It’s really exciting that everything we plant now will be ready around the time our daughter will be born.

The Uncharted Studio in downtown Rincon (right down the street from us!) is having an art show on May 1st with art and photography from many local artists. It’s sure to be a good time with tons of beautiful art to look at, and maybe bring home.