Tourist for a Day

For an English assignment, all the students of the course where supposed to play the role of a tourist for a day. I went to the city of Old San Juan in order to experience first hand what's like to be on the shoes of a non local. That way, see how people treated me positively and/or negatively. By having looks of a North American I easily blend in with the tourists around the area. It was also cruise day, so they where everywhere. It was around 11:00am. A friend of mine tagged me along on this fun and interesting experiment.

First, we walked around the area for a while with camera on hand and some backpacks. We where looking for a map of the city, so we entered this gift shop where all of the tourist restaurants where and we asked for one. This was our first experience of the day. The cashier, a woman in the mid forty's, was suddenly surprised that we came into the shop asking for a map. She didn't know how to act or say at the beginning, but then she remembered she had an old touristy map of the fort San Felipe del Morro just below her purse. She gave that one to us. My friend decided to open it immediately. We exchanged some uncomfortable glances when we started speaking english. The woman didn't know how to respond to us and in a broken not so perfect english she told us to keep the map. But no sentence was used. Just a "kept it" and some hand gestures. We could obviously see how uncomfortable she was with our presence there.

Some time passed before our next experience. We were walking around the city with stops along the way for pictures and confirming locations with the map. After minutes of intense walking on the streets we asked two police officers where "Señor Paleta" was. A new establishment where they sell artisans popsicles. One of the guards didn't know where it was. The other one knew, but he was scared of speaking in english or giving us directions in that language. They took our map and kept talking between them in Spanish. Of course, we knew what they were saying but we kept the act going. They were seriously struggling with trying to give us directions in English. We could see they were trying to help us. So we acted we understood everything they told us. They police officer that was pointing us in a direction was speaking in both languages. He was really bad at it though. But he was trying to help us. We said our thank you and off we went to where we told us.

On the streets, we came across this store where they sold lots of souvenirs that changed colors with the sun.  It was pretty cool. The girl who worked there spoke perfect English and she eagerly showed us around the store. We didn't wanted to buy anything - a lot of the things were kind of expensive - but we tried and looked everything they had. We happily said goodbye to the lovely woman and we kept on our way.

Finally, by mistake, we found "Señor Paleta". As locals we also didn't know where it was. It was our first time there. Before we entered we decided to end the experiment, but once we entered the establishment the employee greeted us in English. So, we went with the flow. We ordered the most popular popsicles they had. The strawberry mojito - which was delicious by the way - and a coconut one for my friend. When we finished eating our popsicles we wanted more. To this day we still want more. I really loved how they tasted. That is a must now overtime when visiting Old San Juan. Oh, it's located at Teutons street, just near the Fortaleza.

The experience went pretty well. Around the city, locals looked at us differently rather than when we are dressed normally. The energy we felt was completely different around the streets. We could obviously feel the stares and the looks passing by locals gave us. But we didn't care. We where on the zone, and we wanted to get to know how tourist felt. As the person conducting the assignment, I was shocked about how weird the energy was. I have never felt that way before in San Juan. I am normally comfortable there, but with a slight change of language big differences were experienced.