Tourist for a Day

     Last Thursday I tried to act like a tourist for a day, but it didn't work out as planned. Having worked in the restaurant, bar and hotel industries you could say that I stuck out like a sore thumb. Everywhere I went, everybody knew somebody who knew somebody that seemed to fit my description. I started the day (noon to be specific) at a restaurant on Isla Verde, dressed with a hawaiian shirt, shorts and some loafers.. I walked in and sat at the bar, and to my left there was some guy watching a rugby game on his telephone so I started a conversation with him about rugby. By the time the conversation ended I learned that the guy was actually Puerto Rican and he played and coached rugby in England. At the same time, I learned that he was the guy that took over the rugby team that myself, Chris and Preston started on 2015. Apparently he hasn't been able to recruit many people either.

      After stumbling out of the restaurant (the guy I talked to must be a professional alcoholic since he walked out like it was nothing), I went to the beach to sit down and retake my senses. I took 2 bottles of water with me from the restaurant and as I drank them I started noticing a few things about how the locals treat the tourists and other locals. A family next to me where trying to get the attention of a seller selling trinkets on the beach, who seemed to be ignoring them. He went to all the tourists around us first and then he went to the family. As the seller showed his products to the family and told them the prices, his face showed that he wasn't expecting the family to buy anything. After the mother of the family yelled "That's really expensive", the seller could do nothing but laugh and continue with his day. The seller knew that his trinkets where too expensive and he knew that only outside tourists would buy them.

El Batey, one of the bars in Old San Juan in my list to visit

    Later that evening I decided to go to a cocktail bar in Old San Juan I never went before. As i entered the bar and sat down, the barman said that I looked familiar and asked me if I've worked in the Caribe Hilton and if I knew Papo from Il Giardino, a restaurant inside the Caribe Hilton. I told him yes and then we both came to friendly terms. As the night rolled around, I also started noticing how do the workers in tourists areas treat locals. The barman I talked to would always seem to treat the international tourists in a better fashion than locals. Heck, in a way the barman would treat locals as if they were a nuisance. As I saw this I actually started to contemplate about the tourist sector in PR and how they look at the local tourist. Most local tourists are seen and treated as secondary since most workers think that the real money and earnings come from international travelers. This line of thought, sadly, starts when people are being trained. Being a bartender myself, while I was getting the certification our instructors always told us to treat international tourists with our very best. Whenever the instructors talked about local tourists, consumers, and so forth, they would always talk about them with disdain, since they were "cheap".

     Being a tourist for a day I learned how local tourists are seen and treated in PR. Since most things in tourist sectors are expensive, workers already deduce that localswon't buy them. At the same time, sellers blatantly ignore the locals since they already know that their trinkets are too expensive and they can already what the answer of the locals will be when they're told the prices. Although I knew that locals aren't seen as the priority in the areas of Old San Juan and Isla Verde, I could never guess how bad they're treated until I actually started to notice these things. I hope this experience helps me and all other readers learn a bit more about how locals are treated when they want to do internal tourism in Puerto Rico.