regarding tourists & short pants
Last week I wrote a post in which I described getting ready to go to work in Grenada. I included this sentence:
I wear a white sleeveless linen blouse and jeans that reach my ankles, because only tourists wear shorts, and I am not a tourist.
In response, an American friend asked:
I’m curious why only tourists wear shorts in Grenada. It seems like being cool (and holy cow, just the thought of jeans in a hot, humid environment make me break out in heat rash) would outweigh being “cool”, if you know what I mean. What’s the dealio?
The following was my response.
Grenadian locals do wear shorts sometimes, but not to work. This, like every declaration I make about the island, is a general rule and there are exceptions. *I* never wore shorts to work because as one of the only women and THE only foreign woman employed there, I needed to get a lot of things right if I wanted to be taken seriously. Most of the Grenadians I worked with took great care with and interest in their appearance. They were extraordinarily polished, even when dressed very casually. I tried to take my cue from them.
Regarding the heat? I got used to it.
Also, I really hate shaving my legs. I’m pale like my Scottish grandmother but dark and hairy like my Puerto Rican grandfather.
Speaking of whom. The shorts thing kind of reminds me how my Puerto Rican grandfather would get upset if one of us kids just bit straight into an apple, instead of peeling it and cutting it with a knife. It took me a long time to figure that out, but I think it’s because when he was growing up, that was something he associated with being poor. Eating fruit right off the tree.
But if he had grown up having money, he probably wouldn’t have cared about how we ate our apples. You know? It just wouldn’t have been an issue. And I suspect, though I have no way of knowing for sure, that that also explains why the only (non-tourist) guy I knew who regularly wore shorts to work was the owner of the place.
Posted on May 8th, 2010 under Grenada • Tags: caribbean, dressing in the tropics, expat, Grenada, tourists, working abroad. • 
Print This Post
• 
Email This Post
• RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback
May 8th, 2010 at 11:03 am
Maria – I can relate to your post. There’s a line in David Sedaris’s book, “Me Talk Pretty Some Day,” I loved in regards to the way many tourists dress. Sedaris describes his disgust with summer tourists in France when he says “Comfort has its place, but it seems rude to visit another country dressed as if you’ve come to mow its lawns.” My wife, me and my daughter (3 in June)travel to foreign countries often. My wife and I learned quickly that we were treated better when we dressed more similarly to the white collar locals of whatever country we were visiting.