Your beaches so much admired with palm trees all adorned, your coat of arms and flag is the proudness of us all!

After a couple days worth of venting, and plenty more to discuss, I thought it might be a good idea to change the topic anyway. If our society thinks it wise to track literally everyone in the country on antidepressants, but doesn't bother to keep records on gun owners because that would be an invasion of privacy...well, need any more be said?

Instead, it's about time to finally discuss our trip to Aruba, before finally doing a weeklong series of book reviews (guess what I spent my time doing in Aruba). The most obvious thing that apparently everyone says about Aruba is that it's very much like being in America. After all, everyone speaks English, as well as Dutch and a local creole language known as Papimiento. Yes, I mean virtually everyone born there is at least trilingual, and a decent number of people seem to speak Spanish as well. While there is a local currency, we couldn't find a single place that didn't take US dollars (their currency is pegged to ours, so there's little risk for merchants to do so). At tourist locations, you might not even know that they use anything but dollars, and the menus certainly don't give that fact away. If you are wondering if this is just a reflection of the wealthy tourist regions, you may be a bit surprised. Aruba has a standard of living the places it below Northern Europe and America, but above Southern European countries like Italy and Spain. The houses in the countryside may not be huge, but they look solidly middle-class. As one who suffers from the occasional pang of liberal American guilt, Aruba gave me just about nothing to feel guilty about. They do so much tourist business that the living standard is relatively high and labor needs to be imported from neighboring countries. Honestly, many Arubans do seem happy, what with living in a tropical paradise, and they seem to be using at least part of the tourist income to promote the local culture and language. I just didn't manage to find anything to feel particularly guilty about.

Just to cement the linkage with America, while the beaches are lined with the palm trees so proudly mentioned in the national anthem by which I titled this post, the rest of the island, basically all 20 miles long and 7 wide, is the sort of vegetated desert that looks exactly like the Arizona countryside:

It may seem strange to have a desert in the tropics, but Aruba, apparently like neighboring Bonaire and Curacao, has no rivers and very little rainfall, averaging something like a foot per year. On the good side for them, the lack of rain is due in part to the fact that it lies well south of the Hurricane belt in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Essentially, the weather forecast is temperatures in the mid to low 80's with a 10-15 mph breeze from the northeast, every single day of the entire year.

Along the leeward coasts, you basically have the endless line of hotels and resorts to the west, and a string of towns to the south, including Oranjestad, the capital. Oranjestad is a pretty town, with a harborside street devoted to all the cruise ship visitors and several others for people, including some gorgeous wood-panel architecture in the pastel colors you come to expect in the Caribbean:

Just a quick aside. In case anyone was curious, we have some news that we may not have shared with all of the friends who read this blog. The photo above may make it pretty obvious, and if you go over to the flickr photoset of our vacation, rest assured that the drink shown here was a non-alcoholic strawberry concoction. I only managed one beer myself during the trip, though I can now say that Balashi, the local pilsner, is rather good.

As for the recommended tourist attractions, I would recommend the Jeep safari around the island, making sure to note that when they say you are going off-road, they are really, REALLY not kidding. Also, make sure to visit the butterfly farm, which was a true highlight of the trip. We particularly enjoyed the "butterflies gone wild" segment, in which we saw the first flight of a female butterfly after hatching that morning, followed by the first and only mating event in her life not five minutes later.





Lest anyone think Aruba is some form of paradise on Earth, it should be known that it hides a terrible, awful secret, and it's not the fact that the Cable News will blow any incident on Aruba out of proportion so that their correspondents can "work" there for months, roaming the beaches and nightclubs in search of "news". No, while Arubans are happy to say that 75% percent of the visitors to the Island come from America, they do everything possible to hide the fact that the overwhelming majority of these visitors come from New Jersey. Not that there's anything wrong with the Garden state...but let's face it, it's New Jersey. Everywhere we turned, Jerseyites. (Jerseyans?) I haven't seen so many Yankees hats and visors during visits to NYC. Also, who wears visors?!? Seriously, when you head south from the City, you don't actually hit Trenton and Philadelphia, you just somehow fly over the ocean and end up in Aruba. Given how many of them were sitting on the beach around us, talking about Cawfee and visiting the Shawre, I can only imagine that commuting along the Parkway and the Turnpike must have been a breeze for the week. i don't really have anything more to say, I'm just enjoying bashing a state where some of my inlaws live, hoping against hope that none of them ever read this.

Anyway, we had a fantastic time, and had I remembered to put sunscreen on my back before going snorkeling, it would have been the perfect trip. Instead...well, let's just say that I'm not red in the face, but rather some other places which now itch like crazy.