(alternate title: “life’s not always a beach.”)
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| photo credit |
The setting… Orient Beach, St. Martin
After a harrowing and sort of nauseating half hour cab ride, you can almost taste the salt in the air. Visions of white sand and gently crashing waves are starting to lure you in. You’re fifteen, and you can’t believe you’re in this strange land that alternates between Dutch and French within the space of a short drive.
Piling out of the car, you excitedly run out onto the beach. It’s a partly cloudy day, so the beach isn’t overly populated, and when the sun comes out you dart around in the waves, and then crash under a cabana. After the requisite splashing and arranging some shells in a pattern on the beach, you gaze out at the water on this idyllic island.
It’s a perfect day for bananafish! (This Salinger reference will make you all too uncomfortable in a moment, I promise…)
Being a young’un, you now have tired of this beach activity and are looking for some lunch. You gather sloppily around a picnic table at an outdoor restaurant while jealously ogling the sunglasses of the college-aged bartender (you are a shallow 15 year old, remember?) and you note to yourself that you MUST learn french so you can be just like her…
After eating something not memorable (I can’t for the life of me remember more about this restaurant than the picnic table and that girl’s sunglasses…) you need to hit the ladies room. Being very grown up, you are able to take on this task by yourself.
Off you dart through the labyrinth-like path to the bathroom. Ah, a sign! This way! You peer around corners of the leafy maze, must be nearly there…
WHOA!
The middle-aged (and seemingly European) man intersecting at the corner in front of you is your FIRST clue that Orient Beach is, in fact, partially a nude beach.
I think I forgot I had to go to the bathroom after that…
Like I said, it was a perfect day for bananafish…
Have you ever had a funny experience at the beach? Do tell!
Meri
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