Tourist for a day

So the idea is to be a tourist in your own country or in this case island for a day. I chose to go with one of my best friends that actually physically looks like a United States American so as to make my "cover", as I'm deciding to call it, a little bit more believable. I felt like a spy or an undercover agent so I titled it with my best friend "The Tourist" and it was our mission to experience life as an American in a Caribbean island. Was the objective met? Read on and see!

We went to El Viejo San Juan and started off taking pictures of El Paseo de las Princesa(Princess Passage) acting like tourists even asking people to take our pictures. They seemed to believe we were a couple and we’re treated like we were in our honeymoon or something. We decided to play it out and act like it if they seemed to believe that. We went down the path past the wooden bridge until we encountered a security guard. We asked him where exactly the path went, his response came in a broken English “El Morro. Nice tourist place.” So we went up the path until we got to La Garita, not “El Morro”. There we decided to sit with the view and talk for a while, specifically since he has a condition and the walking tired him out a little.

After he rested for a while we continued with our mission and the road took us to where I used to take art clases so acting like a tourist there was a moot point. My cover was blown. Luckily it was only until we got to El Morro. We bought kites, I got a princess one and he got a Spongebob kite. He actually had to show me how to fly a kite for I have lived my whole life in this island but have never flown a kite at El Morro. Kids were actually laughing at us because of our failure at flying a kite but we had fun.

Unfortunately we picked a rather rainy day to go to Old San Juan as undercover tourists. The place wasn’t so filled and we could barely hit the touristiest of places because of the rain. We still encountered some locals that were very helpful and even went as far as to apologize for the weather! The experience with the locals was good. We only encountered a man that was very mad over the fact we only spoke English. We approached him to ask for directions, he responded rather angrily “Just go down to the boats!” I actually don’t know if he was telling us the directions to “Bahia Urbana” and/or telling us to get off the island all together.

When I asked my friend about this he told me he was used to this type of treatment. As I said he looks American but is actually Puerto Rican, Mexican and German, so he gets mistaken for a tourist a lot. We got to the Bahia Urbana with a couple of drinks and just experienced the view. We hadn’t gone there after it was finished so we weren’t undercover; in the sense that we really were experiencing this part of the island for the first time. It was a beautiful and breathtaking view of the ocean and the vast expanse that it is. We decided to eat at a very touristy place called “Señor Frogs”. We partook on all the activities and then our cover was blown again when a waiter recognized me from my camp years. All in all going to Old San Juan wasn’t the wisest of places to go under cover.