Today was a day that I was very happy to be
Puerto Rican for several reasons. To get started, today I passed by many beaches,
which I had never been. We took a family trip along the northwest coast to near
Mayagüez stopping at various tourist destinations such as the Arecibo’s Lighthouse,
the face of Indian, etc. I have been amazed with how precious our island of
Puerto Rico is. Today I tried to act like a tourist and always look everywhere
watching everything. Since the morning I imagine that my bedroom was a room in
a hotel. I loved that I did
nothing more than leave my room, that I listened to music that my mom had put
on, so that made it quite easy for me to imagine that I was entering a lobby from
a hotel. In all the trips I have done I'm always checking on the food,
because I love to eat, and on this trip I did the same. I was observing the
dishes of all the restaurants we went to and tasted many of them. When we
returned from the trip through the island, I loved being able to have stopped
at IHOP because it is a restaurant I always look for when we travel to Florida
long before it was brought here to PR. I made this trip with my family to do
this journey as a tourist because I thought that as a tourist, the sense that one
more uses is the visual because you feel like an explorer in a new world. Something
that I observed about tourists was that before they do something, they first
let someone else do it so that when they do it, they don’t look so awkward,
such as when they were going to order something in a restaurant that they are
always watching other tables first. I found this journey very curious and loved
how we spent the whole day. I think I learned a lot from it.
Cara del Indio
Isabela's Coast
Music that I always imagine me listening to when being a tourist.
Lucy Honeychurch is the principal character on
this movie, she traveled to Italy with her cousin Charlotte which both of them
belong to the rich upper class. Lucy through the entire movie battles her
old-fashion Victorian values versus her more liberal ones. This movie starts at
Florence, Italy and it is based on a novel first publish in 1908. A reason of
why the movie may have began at Florence, could be that this place is very rich
and famous in art and culture. A mere observation of what principally made Lucy
change her mind about her values was that she expected Italy to be like
England, since in Italy you can see that social classes seem to mix. This could
be the best example of the advantages from being a tourist. For Lucy, this
whole trip help her open her eyes and see new things, as for example her
experience with the Emersons, which help her notice that she can find beauty in
the things that she found inappropriate. We can see that Lucy is a traveler
person, and we can see this when for example she realized that she fell in love
for George but at the same time she wants to stay single to travel to Greece
with Miss Alans, an aged woman she met in Florence. All these tourist examples
can’t be compared with the examples that Jamaica Kincaid mention at A Small Place, mainly because Kincaid
describe tourist as ugly and here on the movie are describe as being amazed at
things but in a real way and not for example wishing to live their rest of the
life on that “paradise”.
For movie critiques please visit IMDb and GoodReads.
I received a message
from the professor suggesting us to go to an activity in AJBR building on
Wednesday. It was something about a celebration of a tremendous work made by a
professor from the general studies department. I gave myself the homework to assist
and to see by myself who was this Eduardo Lalo.
I was late to the
activity because I was in class at the time that the activity started but still,
I went to AJBR to find out what was happening around there. As I started to
hear everyone else, I realized that Eduardo Lalo is a great writer who
considers himself puertorrican even that he was born in Cuba because he had
spent most of his life here in Puerto Rico. I also recognized that the award
that he received is called the “RomuloGallegos award” and that is an amazing
award for novels. It must have been an unforgettable experience when he received
that award because he was competing with his novel “Simone” with 200 other novels from people of 17 different countries.
The activity was
performed in the first floor of the AJBR building and organized by some
professors from the general studies department. In the time that I stayed, one of
his work mates of the humanities department discussed in an amusing one of his
novels that is named “Los pies de San Juan”. While he was talking I couldn’t
keep serious and laughed a little bit. I also noticed that Eduardo Lalo is a
person that sounds judicious but that keeps sounding young at the same time and
I admire that a lot from him.
I definitely enjoyed the time I passed there,
even that it couldn’t be that much as I would like.
My reaction to this movie may be a
little different form everyone else because I didn’t like too much the movie,
only a few scenes. I didn’t like the way that Puerto Rico is portrayed,
specially on the scenes when Paul Kempt goes to a very “poor” part of Puerto
Rico where you can see burning tires, little kids playing on the mud and
another kid alone in an old abandoned car. I didn’t like this scene at all
because there is a very big difference between been poor and been reckless.
That “town” shown was a mess. I know that back then roofs where made out of
zinc, and that very little buildings were made on cement but this place shown
appears what it could have been a dumpster.
Another thing that I didn’t like was
when Sanderson was talking to Paul about putting a tax in Puerto Rico. He was
explaining that if you wanted to put a 5% tax, you just have to tell the people
that you will need to put a 10% for some reason, then the people will start
shouting and fighting but then you could say that because you want to treat
them well and be a good person you could put a 5% and everybody will be happy.
I hate how he says it as if we were just irrational humans, as if we didn’t
notice every time the government does that to us, but our biggest problem is
our society’s short-term memory.
