Days in the tropics

For dinner yesterday, my husband humored me and took me to a restaurant I've been wanting to try for at least a year. It's owned by my favorite chef, Wilo Benet, and it's called Payá.

We arrived and I started with a Mojito Colada, which is just that, a Mojito and a Piña Colada combined into one deliciously dangerous drink. I'm usually not a mixed drink kind, preferring the more sedate option of a nice glass of wine, preferably Pinot Gris. But this drink sounded so enticing that I couldn't say no when the waiter suggested it and, I figured, I'm on vacation so it's a good excuse to try something new.

Of course, the Mojito is a typical Cuban drink and the Piña Colada was supposedly invented in Puerto Rico, so the merger is a nice concept, too. The drink, like the food, fulfilled its promise. It's one of those drinks that make you forget that it has rum in it, so they're a one-drink proposition, at least in my case.

My husband ordered a sangría, but we can safely say that it wasn't as good as the one he occasionally makes himself at home, which is the best sangría I've ever had. My food, which I had to take a picture of, consisted of a pastelón de amarillo con carne molida, arroz y habichuelas coloradas and tostones. My vegetarian husband didn't have luck with the Puerto Rican fare because everything had some kind of meat (even the beans had ham, as is traditional), so he went with a veggie stir-fry that he liked.

My mistake was to order chicharrones de pollo as an appetizer. Not only were they finger-licking good but they were generously portioned so by the time the actual food came around, I was already half full. Still, that didn't prevent me from ordering flan de queso for dessert. All in all, I consumed a prodigious amount of food (in my defense, I did bring a doggy bag back with half of the pastelón). But I know I won't be making it back to Payá anytime soon, so that was my rationalization.

Friday morning, this was the view from "our" apartment window and it was lovely. I absolutely love it when the sun shimmers in the surface of the ocean. I remember asking my father, many years ago, to give me the word for what the sun does when it reflects like that against the water. He said: "Rielar," and I was spellbound. Even the word has a magic that evokes the beauty of what it describes.

In the afternoon, my family went back into the beach and we spent the afternoon facing the ocean and having good quality time. Tomorrow, the family grows by 62.5% when my sister and her children and my brother join us.

This vacation, which has finally felt like one, is quickly winding down.