There was a long article in the Washington Post last week about the World Bank and people that work there.

Developmental economics, it's called, and hundreds of World Bankers have PhDs in it. The idea is simple and noble: The world is very rich and very poor, and this disparity is both morally wrong and, in practical terms, dangerously destabilizing. But how to lift up 1.2 billion people living on a dollar a day?

This is what World Bankers think about. In a city obsessed with political maneuvering, real estate values, traffic congestion, baseball, summer humidity, maybe all in the same hour, the World Bankers are a tribe apart.

At work somebody pointed me to Skype. I had seen it before, and experimented a bit with it in the past but never really used it.

However, being in Puerto Rico and all, it is very easy to make calls to the Netherlands. Good phone cards are hard to find here, and it's difficult to coordinate for someone to call me (sorry paps & mams!).

I just installed in on my laptop and spoke for a little while with a colleague in Virginia. That worked pretty nice, so I'll keep it installed and experiment a bit more with it over the next days.

So, for the technically inclined: my Skype name is guusbosman.

I am back in Puerto Rico. The requirements document for my project was signed off on time, something I was rather proud of, but there are additional things to do, and we're also starting with the design of the program.

I arrived around midnight at the airport yesterday. One of the passengers on the plane was Cynthia Olavarria, the Puerto Rican candidate at the Miss Universe competition in Thailand a few weeks ago. She did quite well, a second place I believe.

I left from JFK, which was interesting because Sunday there was a Puerto Rican parade in New York. There were a lot of people in the plane who were traveling back home after the party.

I've stayed in the Holiday Inn quite a few nights now, and that made checking in very simple. They gave me a nice room on the 5th floor, 501.

We are leaving Jonathan & Irena's place now, and going towards Penn Station. Sasha will go back to D.C., I'll travel to JFK airport to take a 7:30 flight to San Juan.

We arrived about an hour ago at Jonathan & Irena's, in New Jersey.

The busride was about 4,5 hours, there was quite some traffic.

I worked in the bus -- no wireless internet of course, but a lot of e-mails to go through, and I was working on a document.

What's the difference between a canoe and a Dutchman?

A canoe tips sometimes.

Monday morning we woke up early, and at 9 am a small van came to pick us up for a tour to the rainforest in Puerto Rico. It's the only real rainforest in the US National Forest System, and neither Sasha or I had ever been in a rainforest. The name of the forest is El Yunque, and it's located at the east side of the island. Rain coming from the Atlantic Ocean first hits the island's mountain rim so there the most rain falls, forming the conditions for a tropical rainforest.

There are no large mammals in the rainforest. Puerto Rico started as a vulcanic island, so it never had any physical connection with the main land. There are some interesting exotic elements in the forest: humans brought over bamboo trees from Asia (to reduce erosing near the roads in the forest), and there are a lot of small pink flowers that are originally from Africa.

A national symbol of Puerto Rico is the coqui, a little frog that makes a very characteristic sound, more like a bird than a frag.

We spent about three hours in the rainforest and a visitors center, a very interesting morning. Later the tour guide brought us to a local shop in the forest, where they served "authentic Puerto Rican food". When we looked at the menu and how the place looked liked and smelled, we decided that it would probably be better to try authentic Puerto Rican found in a less "authentic" restaurant.

Pictures from our tour in El Yunque.

Saturday night we went for a drink in lobby of the El San Juan hotel, a few minutes walking from our place. Because we had a heavy lunch, excellent hamburgers in the Holiday Inn's restaurant, we wanted just a small bite so we had a salad and soup, with a glass of red wine.

The wine was very delicious, and we were having a really good time looking at the people in the lobby. There is a large nightclub in the El San Juan, so we were watching the dressed up people going out for dancing. White clothes are all the rage in San Juan, it seems.

Went the waitress served me my soup, she accidentily hit my wine glass and I got the full contents over my clothes. A rather dramatic incident, and I was afraid I might not be able to wash it out of my clothes at all. The supervisor told me I could borrow a shirt from them and they would immediately dry clean my stuff. Because our hotel was so close, I choose to go back to our room and changed clothes and had a very quick shower. When I came back the waitress had brought me a new glass of wine, and a warm onion soup.

I was very nicely surprised that when I picked up my clothes the next day, they were completely clean.

Saturday night Sasha and I visited "the Waterclub", a bar on top of a hotel at the beach here in Isla Verde.

The style of the hotel is very futuristic, with blue lights and a lot of water decorations everywhere. The elevator doesn't have a roof so you can see the internal working of the machines; pretty neat I found.

We stayed out in the city till late and we had a really nice evening.

View from the bar.

Just after I wrote and saved a long article yesterday, the computer with this website crashed.

I couldn't reach it at all, so that meant that either my parents' internet connection went down, or the computer itself crashed.

My father went to check on the server, and found out that the CPU fan was broken. The main board had detected that, and shut down the computer to prevent damage to the CPU. Jaap immediately installed a new fan so when I woke up it was up and running again.

Thanks a lot paps!