Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Aruba, Part 2: Freaky 2-headed animals

So, Aruba has one "mountain" on it. It's kind of like a hill. But it is pointy, like a mountain, and you can see it for miles around. It's just not very, you know, tall... It's about 600 meters tall, which translates into 588 steps, which is like 20 minutes of walking and taking hits of water (because the weather was hot and beautiful, remember) and taking pictures.
I took a few pictures of the "height" of the "mountain", but it did not look too terribly impressive, so you're getting shots of the bottom. Look! It's Aruba in the background!
You're actually supposed to have a cool view of Venezuela from the tippy top, but the wind was serious, which meant that the waves were high, which meant no Venezuela.

But! There was a 2-headed "mountain" goat!! Look! See the second neck coming out of this guy's ass??
I wish David Attenborough had covered this in the Planet Earth series...

Here's a regular goat, lamenting his normalness... his only-one-headedness... So sad.
After we scaled the massive mountain, we thought pizza and beer were in order. We went to a place close to the hotel and when we ordered beers (Balashi, the local brew, of course) we were asked if we wanted smalls or larges. Dude, who asks for a small while on vacation?

Little did we know, the larges were about 30 ounces. Dang!
I know it may seem like a perspective thing, but this beer really was about half the size of my brother. And see how happy that makes him?
Me too. This beer was like a freaking fishbowl. J managed two while I, wanting to retain the use of my faculties, had just the one.

That night we went to an Italian place. I feared that we wouldn't get in because we didn't have reservations, meaning we'd have to have dinner a the Hard Rock Café next door (and though their Southwestern Eggrolls are beyond reproach, I did not want to waste a dinner in Aruba on them). No problem, we were escorted to a table overlooking the street, where the breeze had easy access to our smiling faces. Then! The waiter was kind enough to bring me 2.2lbs of solid delicious lobster. Soaked in a butter/garlic/wine sauce. I wondered at that moment whether I'd maybe died on the "mountain" and I was really in heaven? It was EXTREMELY delicious. I can't even tell you. For dessert, we had coffees and shared what was called "chocolate salami" (please stay with me, it wasn't actually salami). This was a fudgy chocolate cake studded with almonds. The almonds looked like the fatty bits in the salami so it was a good visual representation, despite the weirdness of the comparison.
All the lobster. Ever.


You know... Other things happened, and we saw some stuff, and ate more foods, but I'm just going to end it there, with the picture of that perfect dinner, and breezy, lovely Aruba, where you only have to care about making dinner reservations and getting to the beach early enough to get a spot under an umbrella. Ahhhh.

Aruba: where even the lizards like to Chill.

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