Puerto Rico’s interior, away from fast food chains and franchises

This week we had a chance to visit Puerto Rico for the first time. We were in Culebra, not great, in Vieques, amazing, in Old San Juan which beats La Habana, and then came the rest of PR, the great and the ugly. The great is the interior of Puerto Rico, as you can see in the pictures below, it is beautiful and authentic. Ugly is the coastline of Puerto Rico. Ugly in the sense that it is all franchised. It is so fast food, gas station, double lane roads and intersections with big traffic lights, that you would not guess you are in Puerto Rico, unless of course, you are from Puerto Rico and know what it looks like. But the interior of the island, not easily accessible, is really nice, lost in time. Places like Maracao, where we had lunch, are so withdrawn from the Burger King odor of rest of the island that you think you are somewhere else. Indeed as we ate a simple but great meal in the general store, we thought that PR could be a great experiment on what fast food does to people. The study would simply consist of studying the average weight of people living in the interior of the island, say Maracao, and contrast it with the average weight of people in Arecibo. And in order for the science to be good, we also have to be open to the possibility that there is actually no difference.

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