Today, as I was sitting in the first day of Spanish Senior Seminar, my advisor began talking about what we would all be doing our topics on for our papers and why we had chosen them. Basically, we were given the options of choosing topics related to Cuba or Puerto Rico. Luckily for me, I had been planning on choosing to do mine over Puerto Rico for months, as I just studied abroad there this past summer. It was not, however, until I reached the island that I decided I had wanted to concentrate on La Perla.
La Perla is a neighborhood of Puerto Rico just outside the city walls of Old San Juan (one of the most popular tourist destinations on the island). Although it originally started off as a workers’ town, where many from around the island would move to in order to get a job in “the big city,” it quickly became the taboo town that was known for violence and drugs. Moral of the story: you don’t go to La Perla, especially as a tourist, and especially not alone. Well, from the title you can guess exactly what I decided to do.
I had learned about this neighborhood very recently, in a Spanish class last semester, and it immediately interested me. Actually, I had been to Puerto Rico many times and had never even heard of it, so the fact that there was this new, seemingly untouchable place was very much intriguing. The first day I saw it, I was like a little kid on their first field trip. I was giddy, taking pictures of everything, but still very much afraid to enter. The friends I had with me had little patience as they didn’t share the same interests as me for this quiet little area of the tourist town, so I simply walked past taking as many pictures as they would let me stop for.
Later that night all I could think about was the regret I had for not going in, not even stepping one foot into this place everyone says to never to go. For me, this is very strange because although I’m a rebel when it comes to rules I don’t understand, I am the BIGGEST scaredy-cat in the world. Nevertheless, I vowed that if I ever passed La Perla again, I would most definitely enter.
As you might expect, that time did come, and luckily I was with the more patient of my friends, but sadly they were just as big of scaredy-cats as I am on my normal days. Knowing how I usually am, full of fear of doing just about anything, but also knowing how much regret I had the night I didn’t go, I decided to go for it. I begged and begged my friends to go, but I didn’t let them hold me back. I went down the stairs into the seemingly unreachable, taboo town that one in my situation should never enter, and I didn’t die. But on a serious note, it was very quiet: the only living things down there was a flock of chickens. The only person I saw in the neighborhood was a man that followed me up the stairs out of La Perla (this time terrified me came out, as you can imagine), but he was well-dressed and didn’t even try to kidnap me. All I could think about was how “Beth wouldn’t approve” (a saying my roommate and I have that we use when we study abroad and our Spanish professor wouldn’t approve of something we are doing).
Fast-forward two months and here I am, sitting on my laptop doing research on La Perla for my last Spanish class I will take during my undergrad and I wouldn’t have changed that decision to go down there for anything. It just goes to show that although you should most definitely listen to locals when you are traveling to an unknown place, never let what people say leave you with regret because it just might spark an interest or an idea that you never thought you would have.
