Gentlemen Spring Tour 2012

Typically, once a year, each a cappella group at William and Mary goes on a tour, usually over fall or spring break.  Every other year, my a cappella group, the Gentlemen of the College, goes on a spring tour to various colleges in North America that host us, and while we’re there, we have a small concert for their school.  On the years that we’re not ‘touring,’ we’re vacationing.  This year we had the pleasure of going to Puerto Rico for a little ‘vacay.’ In the past couple years we have gone to Costa Rica and Gatlinburg, TN to stay in the mountains.

Puerto Rico was awesome, to say the very least. About three days on the beach taking in the sun, not to mention the scrumptious Caribbean cuisine!  The coffee was definitely a highlight. When my friend and I ordered coffee, the waitress asked if I wanted ‘American’ coffee or ‘Puerto Rican’ coffee. The waitress sort of looked at me like I couldn’t handle it.  Thankfully, I am a coffee connoisseur, and I was able to handle the coffee just fine.  My friend, however, was jittery effective immediately for the next several hours!  Their Puerto Rican coffee, what I ended up finding out, has espresso in it.  Another delectable I was able to discover through local help was ‘Mofongo,’ which is a fried plantain-based dish from Puerto Rico.  It comes either by itself, with meat, vegetables, or just about whatever you can think to put with the dish!  One thing that I did notice, and this is holding the whole over-charging tourists factor aside, was that prices in Puerto Rico were generally more expensive, but oh so worth it!

While we were there, we went site seeing at many special and gorgeous locations, some of which include:  Castillo de San Cristóbal, Castillo San Felipe del Morro, the famous Fuente de los Leones (Lions Fountain), Rio Camuy Caves, the fountain of youth (inside the cave), and also the world’s third largest underground river, Camuy river.  The experience was once-in-a-life-time, and I had more fun there than I can bring back home. That being said, it’s good to be back at William and Mary, enjoying the flux of strangely warm and outrageously cold weather – much better than having a consistent 80 degrees of sunshine every day and crystal clear waters to cool off in.

-Jonathan