New World, Old Soul: Old San Juan

In Old San Juan, Puerto Rico

There must be a word for the love you feel for the person you become when you're traveling. It's not narcissism or egoism and it's not mere self-care or self-preservation--the meanings of those words aren't the feeling I'm thinking of. Maybe the feeling and the appropriate word are something like actualization--that meaning combined with a sense of happiness and relief that a dream of yours is actually happening and here you are living it out and handling things quite well. Enjoying yourself, surprising yourself, looking out for yourself, being yourself--the self you've always known yourself to be beyond your work duties, parental or spouse duties, routine everyday settled-life duties. Because one of the great things about travel is that, while it never solves anyone's problems, it does tend to bring out the better qualities in a person--qualities like open-mindedness, creativity, adventurousness, self-reliance, gumption, patience. And from there (or here, or wherever the traveler happens to be) it can give a person a much-needed boost in self-confidence, give her back her faith in herself, and maybe some new or sharpened skills and strengths to re-approach her old problems.

Life goes in goes two directions. Rooftop in La Perla, Old San Juan

Mural in Old San Juan of Ricardo Alegria, scholar, archaeologist, and cultural anthropologist

It's easy to get into a rut when not traveling, and easy to start feeling as if you've sold your soul to the gods of routine and making-a-living. Travel is one way that people jump-start themselves out of a rut--and even if it works for just a little while, for the few days or weeks or (oh you lucky duck) months you're on the road, well, sometimes that's all that's needed for a person to reclaim themselves, to re-acquaint themselves with the soul that got trampled in life's ruts before you decided to pick it up, dust it off, and run off down the road with it, right out of the ruts.

Calle Fortaleza in Old San Juan

Blind creation, in Da House Hotel, Old San Juan

In Plaza de Armas, Old San Juan

Calle Sol, Old San Juan

All of this brings me to a question that came to my mind while I was in Puerto Rico, specifically while I was in Old San Juan, the historic section of the capital city of PR. The question is: How do you travel?

It's not meant to be answered with a mode of transportation, like "by car" or "by plane, first-class and nothing else!" And it's not a question about whether you like to travel solo or with a group, with family, through an agent or on a budget or according to a guidebook's recommendations, etc. It's a question about how you bring yourself to a foreign place, your real soul self, and how you let that self bloom and grow while you're gone. How do you bring your soul to the places you travel to? How do you represent yourself as a person worthy of love and respect, your own and everyone else's, wherever you go in the world--and most especially how do you accomplish this in places where your soul is most vulnerable, when you're away from home?

I don't know why this question came to me while I was in Puerto Rico. Maybe it came to me because I kind of fell in love with the place. I enjoyed every day I was in Puerto Rico. The weather was warm, even in the mountains when it rained. The sun shone a good part of the time. The food, coffee, and mojitos were delicious. The people I met, down to the locals who gave me directions, the taxi drivers, and all the customer service folks I encountered, were all friendly and nice. I never felt unsafe at any point I was there--and that's a crucial factor for any woman traveler. I never felt unwelcome either, like I didn't belong, at any time--and that's a crucial factor for me.

Pigeons in the wall at Parque de las Palomas

Gato on the city wall by Plazuela La Rogativa

Iguana alongside path outside Old San Juan wall

The iguana sat up to watch a cruise ship passing by, Old San Juan

Belonging matters to me when I travel because I travel alone. What I mean by belonging here is feeling accepted and respected by others regardless of where I come from in the world and how different I may appear in a new or other place. Feeling welcome, essentially. Traveling alone can make a person feel adventurous but it also very often makes a person feel awkward at times. Sometimes you get ignored or slower and poorer service in restaurants while dining alone and sometimes after signing up for an excursion or tour you find yourself the only person in the group on your own amongst a family or a bunch of couples or old friends, who may not want to even acknowledge your presence. If you're female and alone, you're likely to get more unwanted attention and even suspicion from both male and female locals. This can come in forms ranging from benign to threatening, from being barraged with questions as to why you're alone and how can you travel alone as a woman and aren't you scared to being accused of traveling just to hook up with the local men to being outright sexually harassed or followed or propositioned. If you're an American female on your own, you may find yourself getting boxed into corners by local men (because it's always been men in my experience) who want to give you a piece of their mind on American foreign policy and media and culture, usually without letting you get a word in edgewise and regardless of whether you were interested in talking to anyone about anything at all at the moment (I found this to be especially the case in Ireland, I hate to say). On the other hand, you also often find yourself much more likely to meet new people and make new friends while being on your own. And you are undoubtedly more free to do exactly what you want and make this travel experience everything you want it to be, without having to compromise with the interests of a travel partner. And you can be yourself or try on a completely different self because there's no one around from back home to betray or belittle you with comments like "You want to go salsa dancing??!! Since when do you dance?" You can let your soul come out, basically.

At the legendary Nuyorican Cafe in Old San Juan. I didn't dance cuz I wasn't asked.

Any time you travel away from home, you're essentially making a contract with the world based on mutual trust. You trust the world with your freedom of movement and sense of adventure and curiosity, and the world in turn trusts you with its diversity of peoples and cultures and environments. Every tour, every trip, every vacation, every holiday, no matter how packaged or free-for-all or far-flung or safe-playing, is an opportunity for an exchange in trust, respect, and acceptance between the person traveling from one place in the world and the people living in the places being traveled to. It's also an exchange between the person traveling and the world's other places in their own right. This exchange in trust is especially important, I think, to a woman traveling alone, because solo travelers and women travelers are more vulnerable, and that's a fact wherever they go. From the perspective of this traveler, I'll say that some of these other places in the world make this exchange easy. Puerto Rico, for me, was one of these easy places. And I think maybe that's why I enjoyed myself so much there.

I know some of the easiness came down to Puerto Rico's friendlier relationship with the U.S. compared to many other countries. Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, and I'm a U.S. citizen. There was no hassle, so, with passports or customs or exchange currencies. English is pretty commonly spoken as well, and I've been exposed to enough Spanish in my other travels and back home in Chicago (which has a significant population of Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and other Spanish speaking immigrants) to not freak out so much and panic like I usually do when confronted with another language. There's no doubt in Puerto Rico that the U.S. has heavily influenced the culture there--American retail and restaurant chains abound in San Juan and beyond, for one thing. There's also no doubt that Puerto Rico and other Latin American countries have heavily influenced the culture here in the U.S. Every day in the Chicago area, I hear and see the Spanish language and meet Hispanic people--from my next-door neighbors, who are Puerto Rican heritage, to half the people I work with, who are Mexican or Mexican American--and encounter various cultural exports from Latin America without even thinking anymore about where they came from--from tacos and burritos to chocolate to pina coladas to chihuahuas to Benicio del Toro movies to back-porch hammocks to probably 25% of the players in Major League Baseball.

The notorious Christopher Columbus, Plaza Colon

Wheat paste Jesus, alley in Old San Juan

Madonna and Puerto Rican flag (Virgen de la Providencia), Cathedral of San Juan Bautista

Detail of Raices (Roots) fountain at the Paseo de la Princesa

Puerto Rico felt easy me, but complex too. It's diverse ethnically, culturally, linguistically, just as much as the U.S. is--maybe even more so. And everywhere you go there are as many reminders of the Taíno people whose home Puerto Rico was long before it was ever called Puerto Rico, side by side with reminders of Columbus and European colonialism and African slavery and U.S. acquisition. In Puerto Rico, you're in the Caribbean, you're in America, you're in the U.S., you're in Latin America, you're in North America, you're in Puerto Rico, you're in Borinquen, you're in the New World, you're in the Antilles, you're in the West Indies, you're in Borikén. It's easy then for a traveler in Puerto Rico to decide she can take on whichever identity suits her and inspires her for the duration of a day or for her entire holiday--or is that just my Euro-American conceit rising to the surface, the same conceit that led a guy like Columbus and hundreds of millions Europeans after him and their descendants to think he and they could just come on over and take on and try on and change and rename and redefine and redirect a place that was doing fine without him and his European ways and Old World ideas?

Pale moon, Old San Juan wall

Isla de Cabras in distance, beyond Old San Juan wall

San Francisco, on Calle Sol, Old San Juan

Vejigante in Plaza de Armas

It might be conceit. Or it might be just my American-ness, the true American-ness of all of us who inhabit these two big New World continents and who've inherited all their messy, confused, complex, complicated, colonized, bloody, blending, building, diverse, pure, ancient, new, developing, developed, declining, rising, superficial, and soulful conceits and sincerities.

Back in the day, I used to travel exclusively to Ireland. I used to go there looking for my roots, thinking that was where I belonged, where I wanted to belong. Beyond Ireland, I dreamed of traveling throughout Europe, but I don't even know why--I guess I thought Europe was where you went to get cultured, to lose your American naivete. It never occurred to me for a long time to travel in the Americas. Again, I don't even know why. Eventually I did branch out beyond Ireland to other European places, and to Australia (where I met more Europeans than Australians--indigenous or otherwise), before finally considering traveling to countries closer to my U.S. home: Mexico, Bolivia, now Puerto Rico.

Cafe in Old San Juan featuring open mic poetry nights on Tuesdays. Stopped in here for the open mic and surprised myself by working up the courage to read two of my own poems. Had a great night--wonderful poets, musicians, comics, singers here. My favorite of the night was a young slam poet named Egedeme who performed the two poems I've posted above and below this pic. You should check the place out: https://www.facebook.com/poets.passage