Manny Laureano – principal trumpeter for the Minnesota Orchestra, and a longtime friend of this blog and me personally – went back to his native Puerto Rico. Nothing new there – he goes back roughly once a year.
It’s a little different this time – it’s his first visit since hurricane Maria.
Manny’s got a blog, now, and yesterday he published the first of many parts of his account of his trip home. Check the whole thing out.
Thanks for the link to my page, Mitch. It’s my way of exposing folks to a culture they may not know much about. If they do, then it’s just a nice reminder of visits they may have taken there. Anyway, they’re written with the idea of sharing something important and a little personal to me. Maybe folks will choose to take a vacation there just to satisfy a curiosity I might plant.
I checked it out. There are many similarities between PR and the Big Island. Living on an island that is semi-detached, culturally & politically, from the US mainland, makes for a stronger local community in many ways. On the other hand, it is easy to leave, and if you are career minded, there are incentives to leave. Locals leave and newcomers arrive, so the community doesn’s get to, er, insular.
Also, we now have coquis on the Big Island. They are Puerto Rico’s gift to the Hawaiian Islands 🙂
Cool. I seem to remember that Manny was a teacher/professor/on the faculty at the U of MN music school when I was a music major there back in 1990-1992ish.
(However, I was piano and choir so I never would have had a class with him for anything)