The past few days in Puerto Rico we’ve had the opportunity to explore the campus of University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez. The campus is beautiful and the roads are lined with palm trees. The university is made up of four colleges: Agricultural Sciences, Engineering, Arts and Sciences, Business Administration. We paid a visit to the Agriculture section of the campus and the site was excellent. The dean of the college of agriculture sat down and talked to us about our trip and the possibility of doing a similar study abroad trip with the students of UPR. I enjoyed seeing the campus and living in apartments similar to what the freshman students here are accustomed to.

Visiting Puerto Rico has been a great learning experience and there has been a number of cultural differences that our group has come across despite this island being part of the United States. The easiest thing to address first is the use of the Spanish language here. My expectation when coming to Puerto Rico was that the English to Spanish ratio would be roughly 2:3. But after spending all this time in the territory, I have noticed that Spanish is used most of the time and is used all of the time unless some tourists like us come along and only know English. Being in Puerto Rico for roughly 10 days now has been like a crash course in Spanish that is more real than any Spanish test I’ve taken in high school. It has required me to go back to my basic Spanish vocabulary and pull out any basic verbs and nouns needed in order to get what I need and go where I need to. Thus far I’ve been able to order food at any place I go to, ask where things are, and greet other people. I’m sure if I ended up studying abroad in a Latin or south American country I would pick up the language and/or study it more beforehand. But what I’ve learned so far will suffice for the things we’ve had to do.

Food is definitely an important part of this culture as it is in any culture. My expectation before arriving in Puerto Rico was that the food would resemble that of Mexico or Spain. We ended up learning firsthand what Puerto Rican food entailed before we even got to the hotel. We visited a food kiosk area that was right off Luqillo beach and were free to choose what Puerto Rican cuisine we would be dining on that night. Almost all of the food stands had the same things: rice, pork, chicken, crab meat, beef, empanadas, tacos, beans, etc. The first night I ended up getting a taco and an empanada. Tacos here are different from the American idea of tacos. Here tacos are generally wrapped completely around the selected meat and then deep fried and can be eaten and held in one hand. Nonetheless it was just as delicious as an American taco. Throughout the trip I’ve gotten to experience other types of Puerto Rican food such as mofongos and toastones. The fruit here tastes fresh and they have mangos that are grown here. Mangos are my favorite fruit when I go out of the country and the ones here do not disappoint. Coffee also seems to be very important to the Puerto Rican people and because it is brewed here for quality, it tastes extremely good. A cultural difference when it comes to Puerto Rican coffee is that it is combined with warm milk instead of the American equivalent of cold creamer. Coffee will never be the same to me now because of how good it was drinking it here.

Coffee Beans at one of the coffee plantations we visited.

The landscape in this picture is not something you would find back in Illinois.