NB: Our little picture wasn't this cute.
So off I go to Puerto Rico with 4 of my girlfriends for a week for Christmas. Can't get much better than that, right? It was pretty great. We rented a little villa with a kitchen, full-size fridge, bed, pullout couch and a loft. We chose our spots, unpacked our stuff, walked on the beach, checked out the hotel and environs, and headed right to the grocery store to get all the supplies we'd need to eat breakfast and lunch each day.
We also needed a few toiletries. One person needed toothpaste, we needed some sunblock, and since we knew we were going hiking in the rain forest later in the week, we needed bug spray - you know, like Off or something.
Let me back up for a moment and say that of the 5 of us, two are fluent in Spanish. One person routinely conducts group sessions for teens in Spanish in Boston and one has lived and worked in Mexico and Colorado and majored in Spanish. Two others of us are proficient. We can get along and basically be understood, but get a little lost when the conversation gets complex or higher level verb tenses are used. And the fifth of us has little to no Spanish at all. Of course, we sent the one with no Spanish to the toiletry aisle to get the sunblock and bug spray.
We were in a big modern grocery store, Amigo, which appeared to be a big chain in PR. It had anything you'd need, basically. Nobody working there spoke English, but they carried a fair number of products written in English from the Equate line, which is Walmart's. Christy found the sunblick fairly easily because it was Equate and in English.
While three others of us were waiting for the dude to come back to tell us if they had anymore half and half, finding out they didn't, and deciding to get the Tres Monjas milk because it was so cute with three little nuns on the carton, Christy was finding the bug spray.
She came up to the rest of us and said "This is all they have" handing us a little tub of yellow gel. On the tub, it said it was para ninos (for kids) and that it was to "repelar piojos" with a picture of a bug with the red circle and cross through on top. Sure, we said, this must be some crazy version of bug repellent for kids. We checked the shelf, and there wasn't anything else.
"But it's Tutti Fruity! How will that repel bugs?" someone asked. Someone smart asked that. But we just moved along, not really thinking about it, tossing it in the cart and buying it, along with a big bottle of rum, a bunch of mixers, and breakfast food. Ah, the life of 5 single women let loose in paradise.
The day arrived to go hiking in the rain forest. Someone went and got the bug gel jar and prepared to slather it all over their body. Suddenly, Kate said, "Wait. Piojos. That's the word for lice!" She looked at the jar again and suddenly we realized it was for kids' hair! You were supposed to use it regularly in their hair to ensure they didn't get lice! HAHAHAHAH. Much laughing and hilarity ensued as we tried to imagine if we'd put it all over our bodies and then hiked through a forest, just inviting the bugs to dine on our delicious tutti fruity selves.
As it turned out, we didn't need it anyway, because it was raining so hard in the rain forest, no bugs were even out. And, we'd escaped this mistake, but I'd still been the one to buy a small bottle of what I thought was body lotion, at Target, in Boston, and used it for two days before someone else noticed it was actually body wash!
We left the jar, unopened, in the bathroom of the villa. The girl checking us out at the register at Amigo probably wondered what our deal was, and so might the woman who cleans the villa - Amalia, who we met when we arrived. Will the next people who stay at the villa wonder too? Hopefully, they'll understand enough Spanish and won't open it up and use it on their arms and legs when they head up the mountain to the rain forest!
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