Francellys S. Maysonet Rodriguez 

Prof. Cynthia Pittmann

INGL. 3135-002

3 May 2018

Tourist for a Day 

Today I’m a tourist, and I need to act the part fully, or at least follow the routine I’ve created for when I’m on vacation. I woke up around eight in the morning feeling relaxed considering I don’t have work to do since I’m on vacation. I got out of bed and prepared some breakfast and started thinking of who I could recruit for this mission; People to accompany me in a day of looking and acting like tourists, at least two people who fitted the stereotype of looking like they may not speak Spanish and obviously at least could decently speak English, being straightforward, people who spoke better than my broken english. Then it dawned on me I had the perfect candidates. 

I have a cousin that’s Boricua but lived all her life in the states until this summer when she moved to Puerto Rico with her family and we’ve become inseparable. She’s going to be great because if someone asks us where we come from her amazing whit and way with people will definitely be useful in the credibility of my team throughout this mission. But I needed at least someone else, at least that’s how I saw it in my head because if someone decided to engage in a conversation with us as “tourists” and I were to talk I would’ve gave it away instantly. So just to be more convincing I recruited my boyfriend. He’s a tall white guy with straight light brown hair and when the sun hits him he gets burned like a toast, so fitting.  I called them up explained the assignment, how they need to dress up if they could and since we all had a free day at college they were in on our touristy trip. The meeting point was my house, then “Islote” awaited us. 

It wasn’t as sunny as I thought it would be in Arecibo’s “Islote” beach for us to catch a little sun burn. On the beach there where around twenty something locals since it’s kind of a surf beach. So when we arrived we got down to business. We arrived with an umbrella, chairs, towels, food to munch on, and of course we bathed ourselves in sun block. I believe that is a classic move from tourist they either bathe themselves on sun block or put none at all. We also started taking a lot of pictures. This is also very common when you see a group of tourists. I decided on this beach because it’s not really a tourist spot, so we would look more obvious than going to somewhere that is popular among tourist. We would have come off like something normal. We definitely received some looks of curiosity, but nobody really approached us. So, we decided to go to a group of people and ask them if they were from around here. We shared that the island had beautiful beaches, and more small talk but they were so not up for it, so we left them alone and started packing everything up. 

Once we got everything in the car we buckled up and started heading back to home when my cousin and I noticed a little restaurant we had gone to in the summer with a friend of hers from Virginia. We remembered that the food was nice and inexpensive, so we parked, remembered we had to speak in English and headed in. Mind you we were slightly extra, and we applied a good amount of sun block on our checks and nose just to have that extra tourist touch. Like on the beach when we entered with our faces covered in sun block we receive some funny looks, we ignored them and sat down on a table. Then a waiter came and instantly started speaking what she could in English right off the bat without even asking. She may have started speaking in English because we looked like tourist with the sun blocks, my boyfriend and cousin are really light and kind of “fit” the stereotype of an American looking person and we put our best effort, addressing each other in English yet we weren’t talking loud or for other people to listen. But I guess we “gave it away”. She was definitely politer, patient and smiling only to us. She also asked where we were staying and where we had gone in the island, tried suggesting places for us to visit and was extremely nice. 

I must say it was fun doing an experiment like this where we pretended to be different people and see how other people looked at us. Usually for us it’s totally different, as locals we are the once that give curious and funny looks, some of us engage with the tourist and talk and some of us don’t really. That’s why it really impressed me when the waiter treated us extra super nice, because I’d gone to that restaurant before and the service was normal, it’s not that it was bad, just that I noticed that as a tourist she really tried to portray herself better this time. I can so that I really felt a little hurt by the group that was on the beach since I know if we were to tell the we were from they would have acted different towards us. After all it was nice, fun and different which I loved. 

Imagine my cousin in the back seat, just roll with it .