Halloween in Puerto Rico

Many places around the world celebrate Halloween. In our neighborhood in Puerto Rico, we celebrated it on Sunday instead of the actual date.

All the parents and kids in the neighborhood planned to come together at 4:30 in the park to have a big party with candy, food, and drink where everyone who attended was expected to bring a treat to share with the neighborhood. Then the kids would use bags that they brought and fill them up with candy before they went trick or treating.  There had been a big rain storm earlier in the afternoon and it finally quit about 20 minutes before the Halloween party started.

There were about 100 kids dressed in costumes. I saw one kid dressed as Zorro and another dressed as Indiana Jones. The kids’ costumes were a lot more creative than the costumes kids wear in our neighborhood at home.  Some examples were kids dressed as a banana or as French fries or as a vending machine. I dressed up as a ghoul that had been in a fight. My sister dressed up as a cat.

A surprising number of kids at the party switched back and forth between speaking in Spanish and English. We asked some parents about this and found that many of the kids go to the school near our house. The parents told us that the kids learn both Spanish and English at school and that some families speak English at home.

 

This is me and a bunch of kids in the neighborhood at the party.

After about an hour of the party, everybody went trick or treating to selected houses in the neighborhood. Our neighborhood is made up of apartment buildings and single family houses. The only places we could trick or treat were single family houses because the apartments are locked. People who wanted kids to trick or treat at their house had to have enough candy for everybody.  That’s a lot of candy!

 

This is some of the creative costumes that people were wearing.

Every time kids got to a trick or treat house, they chanted, “Halloween, tricortri; dame chavos, no mani.” This translates to, “Halloween, trick or treat; Give me money, not peanuts.”

After trick or treating, the party ended at about 6:30 and everyone walked home.

Before I moved to Shrewsbury, I lived in a condo in Chicago. Each year at Halloween, we would have a neighborhood gathering and then go trick or treating. This is very similar to how we went trick or treating in Puerto Rico. In Shrewsbury, the younger kids go trick or treating with their parents and the middle schoolers go with friends in the neighborhood. We visit all the houses in the neighborhood and collect candy at each one.

In my opinion, trick or treating with my friends in Shrewsbury is more exciting because you get to hang out with friends you know and you can collect more candy at more houses.

Staying safe at the beach

Staying safe from a riptide is very important. While tens of thousands of people are rescued from riptides by lifeguards every year, about 100 people die from being caught in the current.

Riptides and Rip currents are very fast moving channels of water that can reach up to 8 Ft per second of flowing water.  Riptides and rip currents are two semi different things. A riptide is a specific type of current that is associated with the fast movement of tidal like water through inlets, estuaries and harbors. The cause of many riptides is changing wave heights or heavy breaking waves. They are often by beach areas, piers and other sections of land that are sticking out.  A rip current, however, is a semi strong current, that flows outward towards the middle of the shallow water where people swim. Also riptides pull you under the water, but rip currents pull you out quite a ways and then force you under.

 

This picture has some safety tips on it, as well as how the water moves and forms a rip current.  I got it from a different website.

Here are some water safety tips I learned:

1.      Only swim at a beach if there’s a lifeguard watching you. If a lifeguard’s watching then you have only a 1 in 18 million chance of drowning.  More than three quarters of all people who drown in the United States drown at unguarded beaches.

2.      If you go to the NOAA website there is a rip current forecast that shows you how high risk your local beach is each day.

3.      Learn how to spot rip currents.

If you ever get caught in a riptide or rip current:

DO NOT PANIC, always stay calm and relaxed and try to keep your feet on the sandy bottom or float on your back. Swim parallel to the beach until you escape the current’s pull, then come in at a very slight angle so that you will eventually reach the shore. If you are not a very advanced swimmer and you find that you are going nowhere when trying to swim out of the channel, then simply tread water or float on your back and try to make a lot of noise.

Recently scientists have been discovering and exploring other ways to escape Riptides. Riptides most likely occur in the hurricane and tornado season between August and October. There are three main types of rips, flash rips that come in one place for a short amount of time and can come in at any time and disperse at any time. Then there is the fixed rip that is formed between sandbars and can stay in the same place for up to a few months and finally there is the permanent rip that stays in one place because of some kind of obstacle in its way.

 

Us at the Coconut Beach.  You can see where the waves crash up against the coral that is protecting the beach.

We have heard that certain beaches in San Juan, which are unguarded by coral reef or rocks, have a higher risk of riptides and rip currents.  We choose beaches that are protected, such as Balneario Escambron, which has a lifeguard, or the small beach by the Avenida Ashford bridge, which is unguarded but heavily protected by rocks.  We call the beach by Balneario Escambron the “Coconut Beach” after all of the coconut trees that shade the beach.   We call the one by the Ashford Bridge the “Shell Beach” because we picked up some shells there, but what’s most interesting is the pelicans that dive into the water for fish just beyond the rocks.

We call this the Coconut Beach because of all the coconut palms that shade the beach.

 

References:

http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/ripcurrent.html

http://www.ripcurrents.noaa.gov/

http://www.usla.org/?page=STATISTICS

http://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/water-safety/pubs.html

http://www.ripcurrents.noaa.gov/forecasts.shtml

http://www.nws.noaa.gov/training/BreaktheGripoftheRip/player.html

http://www.tybeemarinescience.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/rip-currents.jpg 

Arecibo Observatory

Who would imagine that the biggest telescope in the world is located in the middle of nowhere?  The drive up was quite a haul.  There were winding roads and stray animals all around.  Arecibo is a huge reflector telescope that is located in Puerto Rico.  We visited the Arecibo Observatory and learned a lot about its history, its construction, and how it’s used.

Panoramic photo of Arecibo Observatory.

Arecibo was very precisely placed and there are many factors that led people to construct Arecibo where it is now.  Arecibo was being built by the NSF, NASA, Cornell University, and United States Department of Defense, therefore had to be on U.S soil.  It was going to be constructed on the equator but, they soon found out that they would only be able to see one section of the sky. Puerto Rico is situated 18.5 degrees north, so the astronomers can see a larger portion of the sky.  When they chose Puerto Rico, they found that there was a natural sinkhole that would allow them to construct the reflector more efficiently.

Arecibo was the largest radio space telescope in the world, with a diameter or 305m from its completion in 1963 until a new and more improved telescope was built in China in July of 2016. The reflector is made out of nearly 40,000 perforated aluminum panels. The engineers chose perforated panels because they can drain water if it rains, and they reflect the radio signals better.  If there trees or debris on the reflector, it can mess up their signal.  So, engineers designed special shoes that distribute your weight so that you can walk across the reflector, pick up the debris, and not damage it.  To hold up the sensing equipment that is housed in the Gregorian Dome, they use thirty-six cables each weighing eleven tons.  Those cables suspend the equipment 450 feet above the reflector.

Sensing equipment suspended above the reflector.  The ball on the left is the Gregorian Dome.

The reflector dish that focuses the radio waves to the antenna.  The black stuff on the panels is mold that has accumulated over time.  The mold does not interfere with any signals that Arecibo receives.

Many very important discoveries have been uncovered at Arecibo.  After the construction was finished scientists from all over the world started to pour in, to study all of the data collected at Arecibo.  One of the first things that they explored was the rotation period of Mercury.  They discovered that instead of the estimated 88 day rotation, it was actually only 59 days!  They also got the first image of an asteroid, and they continue to improve on that and track all asteroids that might collide with the Earth.  The main part of space that they conduct research on is the ionosphere, which is an atmospheric layer of space that is located 50 to 600 miles above the Earth’s surface.  So far two movies have been filmed at Arecibo, a James Bond movie and Contact. When they were filming the James Bond movie they found out that the actor was scared of heights, so a stunt double did all of the work.

Arecibo is an amazing observatory that accomplishes a lot of scientific research.  It was a huge accomplishment for engineers, and has led to many amazing discoveries.  If you’re visiting Puerto Rico you should stop down for a few hours in the afternoon and enjoy learning about the telescope!

References:

http://www.space.com/33357-china-largest-radio-telescope-alien-life.html

http://websites.suagm.edu/ao/

http://websites.suagm.edu/ao/radiotelescope_details

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionosphere

History of the Puerto Rican Flag

One of the first things I saw here was the Puerto Rico flag, so I decided to do some research about it.  Here is what I learned: 

          The beginning of a flag for Puerto Rico is traced back to about 1492 when Christopher Columbus landed on the shore of a new island with a Spain flag, later he named it San Juan Boutista. Later on he wrote that his captains had used two flags each with a “f” and an “Y” for king Ferdinand and Isabella. The first idea of a flag design was mostly based on The flag of the Dominican Republic. The materials were mostly provided by one man named Eduvigis Bueuchamp Sterling and was knit by Mariana Brocett. The flag had the Layton cross, dividing the flag into four different sections, with one half red which is the blood poured by the heroes of the rebellion and the other half blue with a star which stands for liberty and freedom. The flag was soon after the national flag of the Republic of Puerto Rico.

The last and final variation of the flag was exceptionally well crafted and took a lot of time to construct. The “District of Puerto Rico’s flag was first officially used on December 22, 1895. The flag was later used as a rally and a symbol to represent them breaking off from Spain’s rule. It was soon after as a national symbol and in 1898 it became a mark of independence to all U.S citizens. In about 1901 Puerto Rico finally broke off of Spain’s rule and after that was U.S territory. Then 30 years later in was adopted by the nationalists party and 22 years later it officially became the national flag. The new flag had five alternate red and white stripes with a single white, five point star inside a blue triangle. The white star stands for the common wealth of Puerto Rican citizens, while the equilateral triangle stands for the branches of the government. The three white stripes stand for the blood that feeds the government and the two red stripes stand for the rights of man and the freedom in the U.S.A.

Introduction

Hi, my name is James and we are spending 8 weeks in Puerto Rico.  We are getting home schooled here and I would like to share my adventures with you.  Normally, I'm a 5th grader in Massachusetts in Sherwood Middle School.  All of the posts here are things that we have done, places we have visited, and things I have learned about during our trip.