Let’s Hack the town! Yup, that’s what this initiative is all about: Citizens coming together to hack communities and engage them in the process of planning its improvement. You see, nobody knows better what a community needs than the community itself. Through Communihack, college students and other professionals work together with the residents to establish integrative designs that will help improve the quality of life in the area by establishing a working, coherent, development plan that will beautify the town as well as maximize the use of space to increase self-sustainability. And that’s just phase one. After that, phase two intends to actually do the proposed plans, leaving run-down communities like Santurce looking like they used to or better. The plan intends to target a different community every year or so, until hopefully, Puerto Rico gets completely hacked. Just imagine…

Although still in developmental stages, ComuniHack is already lining up…

I suspect every culture has a very peculiar and personal way of celebrating the New Year. As traditions go, this celebration is quite universal, even if very different from one place to another. An interesting life goal could be to experience a New Year celebration in a different country every year. But in order to get the real experience you need to celebrate with locals, otherwise you’ll just be in a hotel with cheesy music and muted versions of the real thing.  So here’s a taste of what it’s like to celebrate New Year’s Eve in Puerto Rico:

The Menu: Some items vary depending on who’s hosting the party, but certain things will always be there.

1. Lechón (pork), usually left with the skin, is a favorite of all. A traditional way of preparing it is to roast the entire pork “a la vara” in a pit occasionally turning it.
2. Arroz…