Style

I would be remised if I left out of my online discussion of this experience, a comment about style. Style here in San Juan del Sur comes in three different flavors. The first is that of the young people who have essentially adopted the dress \of the surf tourists that, at this point in time, are quite common in town. Familiar brands sported by this subculture include: Billabong, Quiksilver, Ripcurl, Vans, and Nicasurf which is a local surf shop and clothing line started by a local surf guru. I’ve noticed that above all, there is one thing that unites the surf tourists who transported this sense of style here in the first place: tattoos. Their nationalities range from Canadian to American to German to South African but rest assured that these foreigners-turned-settlers, if they are between the age of 20 and 40 (which many are) have a tattoo of something either on the small of their back or their ankle or their arm or some combination thereof. That’s the “surf style”.

The next flavor of style is just plain regular. This category of clothes-wearers don’t have any sort of noticeable pattern, but generally dress themselves well in jeans and nice enough shirts. However, many people in this category cross over to the last flavor of style as well.

Calling the last flavor of style a “style” is really an ironic use of the word. It is in this category that the majority of garments and the majority of the population fit; it is, in some sense, anti-style, since the word “style” connotes that there is some attention paid to form over function. The point is that most people here don’t wear clothes because they look good or because they like the color or, as is so important to most Americans, subscribe to some sort of brand loyalty (although most have a set of nice clothes that are reserved for church and other formal occasions)—they wear what they can get to cover their bodies from the sun and for social norms. The result is that there are many, for example, t-shirts that people wear but likely don’t understand. Case and point: I was walking down the street and saw an old woman wearing a hat that said “Keene, NH”. I did a double take and just before blurting out: “Whoa! Keene, NH…I went to Dartmouth!” realized that she didn’t have the first clue where the heck Keene, NH is. And then there was the family that used a “Framingham Soccer” bag as a storage container in one of the communities in the Campo. Again, my knee-jerk reaction was to relate to them that Framingham is not to far from my home, which I quickly realized brought them no closer to understanding my home since they didn’t know where Framingham was in the first place. My favorite (this one is for you, Jon) was the guy I saw riding a bicycle with a shirt that said “Exciting Idlewild!” on it. What he didn’t know, and what you probably don’t know either, is that Idlewild was a ski resort near Winterpark, Colorado which closed it doors many years ago. Some altruistic marketing director, upon boxing up the items in his office, probably realized that they had a large number of unused and useless “Exciting Idlewild!” shirts which could serve a better purpose in a third world country taking up space and perpetually collecting dust in someone’s closet.

This is not to say that people don’t care about how they look here, it’s just that sometimes they don’t have the means to actualize their desire to look good, beyond combing their hair and donning the nicest shirt they have which says something in a language they don’t understand.