First Vacation of Residency

The first couple days of my vacation, we spent beaching, disc golfing, and rollerblading around Cape Henlopen, a marvelous state park in my new home state of Delaware.

I had already been sailing around the Spanish Virgin Islands, but this trip I wanted to dedicate to San Juan.  We stayed in an Airbnb condo with massive windows overlooking the neighborhood of Condado, specifically the lively strip right before the beach.  It felt like Miami with even more Latin culture.  The whole time I fantasized about being able to live there, and still be able to practice medicine with my American license since it's technically the US.

We spent a lot of time on the beach: swimming in the deliciously warm water, watching kitesurfing while sipping mimosas under an umbrella, playing some volleyball, and walking barefoot in the evening.  I liked Anita Gelato so much, we had to go multiple times.  We went dancing at La Placita, which is a whole quadrant of nightlife.  We danced with crowds in the street to Bad Bunny and then ducked into a side bar to dance bachata.

We tried to go to El Yunque National Forest, but recent hurricanes had caused destruction such that cleanup was still needed to prevent avalanches.  While turning away our rental car, the park ranger happened to mention a waterfall in Luquillo.  We followed spotty navigation until we found a trailhead with locals renting parking spots, leading to a waterfall slide, a rope swing, and serene ponds with Bad Bunny playing in the background.  Back on the coast, we then stumbled across the kioskos de Luquillo for food, with yet another gorgeous beach.

We shared an electric scooter to Viejo San Juan (the oldest city in the United States territory). It has one side that is painfully full of tour groups fresh off the cruise ship, and the rest is colorful old buildings and cobblestone streets.  We were doing acro in a grassy patch in a plaza when a camera crew filming a commercial for a cruise ship featured us.

Finding flan in a packed yet quaint old diner

Throwing a frisbee in the peninsular lawn of Castillo San Felipe del Morro

Cementerio Santa María Magdalena de Pazzis

Our most romantic night was in Viejo San Juan.  We had dinner in the plaza of the Catedral Basilica Menor de San Juan Batista, once again had gelato, and then went to Steve's favorite cigar bar.  We ended the night with salsa dancing at La Factoría -- a bar with multiple rooms of dancing from EDM to Buena Vista Social Club.  The Despacito music video was filmed there and in the nearby barrio of La Perla.

 

I ended the vacation by returning to the mainland US and immediately taking a one night trip to the Jersey shore to visit my friend Charlie who was briefly back from Taiwan.  We stayed at his family's seaside house in Sea Girt, ate Italian American food, and experienced the classic Jersey shore party that is Parker House.  I returned to the hospital having spent the last 10 days straight on the beach.

SD & CDMX

The fourth-year-medical-student-already-matched-new-boyfriend impromptu trip started in San Diego.  It's a peculiar enclave of SoCal marked by a busy airspace and the coexistence of hippies and the military.  Learning San Diego was actually in the depths of "May gray, June gloom" did not stop us from achieving our goal of daily beach volleyball on a real beach.

Instead of going to Balboa Park (walking distance from our hotel) for the purpose of visiting the San Diego Zoo, we went there to play disc golf on a course with landscapes otherworldly to an East Coaster, including a true Californian offering us weed gummies for letting him play through.

We did have one classic San Diego morning of gelato and seals in La Jolla. Our nights varied from alien-themed drinks at MOTHERSHIP to stumbling into a pool bar with a live reggae band.

Representative of each neighborhood in which we stayed, we enjoyed excellent meals and Aperol Spritzes in Little Italy, a cold ocean plunge and an unplanned acro jam in Ocean Beach, and farmers' markets in both (but the kind of hip city farmers' markets where there's no vegetables but yes organic candles you can melt on your own body).

Brunch at Morning Glory

The best Type 2 Fun was waking up in the middle of the night in our hostel on the main drag of Ocean Beach realizing we'd left the car in a no overnight parking zone—and Steve getting up to move it.

The best Type 1 Fun was hiking to Black's Beach, but rather than taking the proper Ho Chi Minh Trail, accidentally forging our own path through the crevasses of sandstone.

To begin stage II of the fourth-year-medical-student-already-matched-new-boyfriend impromptu trip, we WALKED across the border to Mexico—at the Tijuana airport, just an Uber ride away from San Diego.

Going back to Mexico as an adult had me realizing what a fantastic country it is, hiding right next to the U.S.  I can envision with perfect clarity coming back to live here someday (medical practice being the only blurry spot)—a feeling that I've similarly had in Taipei and Amsterdam. We stayed in Condesa, an amazing neighborhood with tree-lined walking paths down the middle of every boulevard.

Jogging to the dream-come-true Parque México

The dog:walker ratio is a phenomenon of the upper-middle class neighborhoods of CDMX

The food was spectacular, from street tortas to Taquería Orinoco, from the Secret Donut Society to our nicest meal at Ling Ling by Hakkasan on the 56th floor of the Ritz-Carlton, where I pretended I wasn't wearing dirty Tevas.

Castillo de Chapultepec

Plaza de la Constitución

The trip peaked in the evenings with a night of barhopping from neighborhood bar to neighborhood bar, a night of salsa dancing to live music at Mama Rumba, and a night of a backroom jazz jam at Parker & Lennox. The trip allowed (forced?) me to discover within myself a love of mezcal cocktails.  It also rekindled my love of Frida Kahlo.

A gross miscalculation meant that we did not tour Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul, although we enjoyed the neighborhood of Coyoacán, whose plaza was hosting a book fair and whose side streets hosted art markets. We did successfully tour Diego and Frida's Museo Casa Estudio, a bauhaus impracticality with a catwalk connecting her room and his studio.  The surrounding old San Ángel neighborhood was also gorgeous to stroll (and do acro in).  I marked my visit to Coyoacán with flan and to San Ángel with churros--Steve to both with coffee.