My Experience as Tourist

     My weekend as a tourist was almost completely a failure. I traveled to Ponce with my friend Juan, in order to attend the ACS Senior Technical meeting that was being held at the Hilton Hotel. That must have been the best possible scenario to pretend to be a tourist, in a town where nobody knows me, but specially a hotel, which is exactly where tourists are supposed to be found. Well that wasn’t even close to the case, as I barely talked to any strangers during my stay in the hotel. Most Americans seemed unapproachable and not inclined to make small talk, while the Puerto Ricans where with their families so there wasn’t much I could have done to talk to them.

     

     My only experience making somebody believe I was a tourist was when we went to the town square in Ponce, and went around to the different bars. After a couple of beers I felt more comfortable telling the white lie that I was a tourist, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to pull off saying that I was from another country, so I decided that I was going to be a Puerto Rican raised in Florida and visiting family, which seemed like the most believable lie. I started talking to a girl in a bar, and she asked me where I was from because she thought I had an accent (that’s actually just how bad my Spanish is). I told her my spiel, and I thought she believed me, but I think the reality was that she must have seen through my poor disguise because the conversation fizzled from there on out. Everyone else I met during the trip was either a friend of mine, or a friend of a friend, so I didn’t feel comfortable lying. A better story might have gotten at least one person to believe me, and because of that I didn’t really get to feel what being a tourist is like in Puerto Rico, but I did get to enjoy the sights and nightlife of Ponce, which was completely foreign to me, so in a way that could have been considered my tourist experience.