Aruba - Day 1

First day in Aruba!  Well, if you can call it that.  We landed at 1:00 at the Reina Beatrix Airport in Oranjestad.  Sunshine greeted us as we stepped out from the baggage claim and warmth...oh, the warmth!  It felt so good!  The blue sky alone made me sigh with eagerness to explore a new place.

 By the time we got our rental car as well as the key to our room it was close to 4:00.  We "settled" in and then made our way to Hong King Supermarket.  By far the most interesting shopping experience to date.  I think it's mostly the fact that Aruba is outrageously expensive.  Everything is twice the price in the states.  No lie.  But the neat thing was seeing all these Dutch treats and food that I have very fond memories of!  Sultanas, gouda, stroopwafeltjes, etc.  I wanted to buy it all!  We dodged drunken southern men as we gathered a few items.  These were "good, ol boys" from the south.  Thick accents made thicker with each swallow of Balashi beer.  I was slightly ashamed as I watched them giggle and slurp their way down the aisles.  No one seemed upset by them in the least but I couldn't help but feel for their wives and kids, wherever they were.

 

 When we where done with our shopping adventure ($80 for three tiny bags of groceries) we got back to our resort.  We were famished!  So we sat by the pool and ate Sbarros pizza.  Not the Aruban meal we had thought we'd have but we didn't care!  We had time for a dip in the pool and then a soak in the hot tub.  We met an Egyptian couple.  The lady was delighted to hear that we had left the kids at home!  She told us about her experiences with traveling (which was quite extensive) and as we parted ways she encouraged us to travel as much as possible as a couple.  Okay, lady, we'll work on that!

It was an early night for us since we were three hours ahead of Pacific Time and we'd had a very long flight through the night and morning previous.  We crawled into bed talking about our first day on another island.  We noticed a couple things that were very different from other Caribbean islands we've been on.  The first was that we had encountered no frantic hagglers anywhere.  We could amble by a shop on the beach or lounge under a palapas and not one single person tried to sell us their wares.  It was quite a change and a welcome one!  Another thing was how absolutely delicious the water tasted.  A few years ago Aruba had one of the world's largest water treatments built.  So not only was the water safe, it tasted so good that as I snuggled under my sheet for the night, I wondered how hard it would be to smuggle a keg of it home!