San Juan, Puerto Rico is like a foreign home to me. My family and I have traveled to Puerto Rico a total of four times, and each time I have a great experience. San Juan is located on the northern shore of Puerto Rico bordering the Atlantic Ocean. While technically not an international destination as Puerto Rico is a commonwealth of the United States, I still like to consider it a foreign vacation because, as has been the theme with so many of my other trips, the culture is different from what I experience at home. Puerto Rico is known for its vibrant culture, outgoing animals, and a rich history being that it has been in the power of different nations for hundreds of years.

The animal pictured above is known in Puerto Rico as a “coqui”. While frog in Spanish translates to “rana”, Puerto Ricans have dubbed the animal “coqui” after the sound it makes in the forest. The coquis are everywhere, and can especially be seen in abundance whenever it rains. Another interesting animal in San Juan are the monkeys; they have a personality of their own. For one, they do not like to be woken up in the morning, and love to sleep late into the morning. If stirred, they are known to take their waste and throw it at oncoming traffic beneath the trees.

One of my favorite parts of vacationing in Puerto Rico is going downtown and walking around on the cobblestone streets, looking for new restaurants to try.  My favorite restaurant to go to though is called Parrot Club. Parrot Club is a vibrant, family owned restaurant that serves a blend of international cuisine along with local specials. A Puerto Rican favorite is mofongo served with saltfish. Mofongo is a plantain based dish and is served with just about anything. It is shaped like a mini mountain and is most certainly delicious.

From Pre-K to the 5th grade, I attended a Spanish immersion elementary school. At this school I learned all my academic subjects in both English and Spanish. I was also surrounded by culturally diverse faculty raging from Chile, Dominican Republic, Mexico, etc. My teacher from Mexico comes from a small province in the capital city called Tejupilco de Hidalgo. In order to foster cultural growth, he set up an exchange trip where we would visit his boyhood school one year and families would come to the US the next. After missing out on it during the first year of the program and hosting a family the next year, I was very eager to visit his hometown my 1st grade year.

Being that the trip was so long ago, I cannot remember every name of the people and places I visited, but looking back on this trip today, I have a greater appreciation for the cultural immersion we received. It went well beyond the food we ate and the language we learned; it manifested itself through art and dance, and the people and their way of life that was so much different than ours. The province of Tejupilco has deep ties rooted in ancient Aztec culture, and this was evident in many of their hobbies. My favorite, though, was the dance festival we attended. At this festival, we got to learn how to perform a ritual dance depicting a group of hunters preying on a deer for food, and the story that is told through this event. After learning, we were afforded the opportunity to watch professionals perform the ritual up close, and I remember being in awe of how elegant and fluid all the movements were and how they all intricately tied together.

My favorite part of the trip was witnessing another Mexican tradition. I found it odd at first that so many people gathered around in a decent sized arena to watch chickens fight for up to maybe 30 seconds until one of the two died. Thinking about it now, it’s a little barbaric, but my seven year old self was eating it up. I was thoroughly entertained not only by the action, but by the spectacle of it all as people danced on the floor after the fights were over, and waiters were constantly walking around serving food and drinks.

The part I appreciate most about this trip is that you got to get away from a big city that has all the things you could find in the US. By being in a small province, I got to experience real culture and family atmosphere from people who were not at all like me.

In the spring of 2016, I attended a youth soccer tournament along with my team on the Grand Cayman Island in the Cayman Islands. It was honestly a tough decision to make to go in the first place. In leaving for a week and a half, I missed all of review week, reading day, and the first two days of finals during my freshman year. While my teachers were not too pleased to hear that I would be leaving for a while at such a critical point in the school year (and one tried to convince me I was making a mistake), in the end I am more than glad that I left and went on one of, if not my favorite soccer trip ever.

On the field, there was a mixed bag of experiences. On one hand we did not do as well as we expected and would have wanted to. We lost the first game to Manchester City 5-1 after being up 1-0. We tied an inferior Cuban National team. We beat the Houston Dynamo in the last game of the group stage, and tied our consolation game against the Cayman Island National team. On the other hand though, while the results were disappointing, each individual game brought a cool unique experience. For those that are not soccer fans, Manchester City is one of the best clubs in the world, and have been dubbed to have some of the best youth teams in the world as well. In the game we played in, several of the guys we lined up against are currently playing professional soccer in England and Germany, and it was great to be able to have a chance to match up against them. In the game against Cuba, we played a team of boys that had never left the island of Cuba before this tournament.

Off the field, there were more opportunities to meet guys from all over the world and to enjoy the beautiful country. In our hotel, we stayed and had dinner with guys from Swindon Town in England, and Kingston, Jamaica. Guys from both teams had different and interesting outlooks on life that we did not have coming from Washington DC, and I’m sure the experience was just as enriching for them. We also got to share the hotel with Olympic Sprinter Usain Bolt, as he was on the island competing in Olympic trials ahead of the summer olympics in Rio that year.

The only regret I have about the Cayman islands is not getting to see more of the country. Our schedule was jam packed and our only day off we spent at the beach. Hopefully one day I’ll be able to go back and have more tourism opportunities.