I’m flying over the Atlantic now on my way home to Columbus via Atlanta. The sun is shining, and the atmosphere is hissing as we cut through it, echoing over the sound of my iPod. Punta Cana is silent behind me.
Gary and I took our only excursion today. It began with a low-key, guided trip to a cigar factory and chocolate museum (in which we had only about fifteen minutes to spend, though that was enough time to buy a bar of dark chocolate with salt—yum!).
The cigar and chocolates were followed by a quick tour of a Taino cave, bats included. The Taino are the now-extinct indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, and the cave is where some group of them once lived. Adjacent to the cave, and the real reason for the stop, was to have a rum tasting in the farmacia—yes, that’s what they call the place. Apparently, “farmacia” is an example of what my Spanish teacher called a “false cognate”—a word in another language that sound like an English word but that means something different. This farmacia seemed to exist only to sell rum in hand-painted bottles and perhaps a souvenir or two. We did get to see the artists working, and that was a minor treat. They would add your name or the date or whatever text you requested to your bottle if you bought rum; otherwise, they just painted a routine set of ten or fifteen designs, one to each bottle. We also got to sample eight different flavored rums. That was pretty much it.
I probably sound condescending but the tour actually was interesting, thought not necessarily in the way that the operators intended. And I did enjoy “getting off the reservation,” as Gary puts it, and seeing more real people, people not paid to smile at me and say, “¡Hola!”
After the cultural tour, we stopped at a beach-side market that was just too annoying. Every stall was filled with either tourist art or tee-shirts/scarves/other “souvenir” clothing. There were a few jewelry stalls, but otherwise, not much to get excited about buying. What made it so annoying, though, was the incessant harassment by the peddlers. It was a cacophony of “My friend…,” “Can I ask you something…,” “Now is my turn…,” “Come into my shop, please.” God forbid you express interest in anything; you’d never get away without having to buy it. One fellow caught Gary looking at his necklaces and just wouldn’t let up. Somewhat smartly, he offered both Gary and me cheap necklaces—a cord with a bit of bamboo on it—as a gift. My mind immediately jumped back to the woman in the Bangkok visitors’ kiosk whom Tony, Jan, and I consulted. “Nothing in this city is free,” she admonished. “If anyone offers you anything for free, back away.” I declined the necklace politely, but Gary ended up taking his. And buying another.
After about 10 minutes of the barking, we’d had enough and planted ourselves at a beach cantina for water, beer, and nachos. That’s how we spent the last hour outside of the resort. We were supposed to visit a mall, but it was getting late, and a couple of the women on the bus said that the mall, which they’d visited last year, wasn’t worth the trouble. I think one couple was disappointed, but we were behind schedule, and I had a plane to catch.
A quick dash to my room to change into winter clothes and a quick dash back to the shuttle, which the bellman kindly held for me, and my vacation had come to a close. The shuttle deposited me at the airport, and after much waiting in line to check in and more time in line waiting to get through customs, I found a seat in the noisy, crowded, but nonetheless charming terminal. That’s when I started noticing something that ultimately led me to the title of today’s post.
For four days, I had been hearing broken English and lots of Spanish. I had also practiced my Spanish as much as I could. In fact, I got ahead of myself sometimes. Several people laughed good-naturedly when, after I spoke to them in Spanish, they replied in kind only to find that I couldn’t follow what they were saying. I can put sentence together, but I have no ear for the language yet. Anyway, I had been trying to think in Spanish as well as speak it, so I had already somewhat destabilized the language center in my brain. In the airport terminal, the only seats I could find were in the midst of a large Russian tour group. Adding the Russian to the Spanish being spoken around me and to the highly accented English being broadcast non-stop over the PA system (rendered as the voice of Charlie Brown’s teacher by the poor speakers and hard surfaces in the cavernous area) caused me to lose all sense of language. Everything became just static, a din, and I half wondered if I’d be able to understand English again.
It was a bit startling when someone finally did pass by speaking English and I found that yes, I do have to work to get hold of what he’s saying. It was a curious phenomenon, and in some ways, a disconcerting one—to be a person without a language—but it was also a liberating one. It can be totally disorienting, but it is also a reminder that I’m a citizen of a world larger than the one where I spend most of my days. It reminds me that I can strip away all of the surface things that separate me from Dominicans and Russians and find that we’re not all that different. We all wear clothes that don’t fit right and that make us look a little bit funny. We all have accidents and break or legs or our arms. We all get old and need help boarding a plane. We all get tired of waiting in lines. We all get hungry. We all want to touch others and have them respond.
Losing language helps me get down to my humanity, and I think it’s one of the things I like most about travel to places where English is not the native language.