Does this sound familiar? You’ve spent hours and hours thinking what you could buy your best friend or husband or whatever other significant other or loved one for his or her birthday. And after you’ve carefully picked out the gift, wrapped it up and given it to the person in question he/she unwraps it way too quickly and the only reaction you get is: Great! You shouldn’t have! And your present ends up a big pile, unused in some closet or worse; it gets re-gifted.

The complete opposite happened to me once on a trip to Santiago de Cuba on the Southern tip of the still Communist Caribbean island. I had spent two weeks learning Spanish at my private teacher’s home. She had spent 4 hours every day teaching me about the ins and outs of Spanish grammar, spelling and conversation. She had fed me exotic Cuban dishes and fruits that I had never seen or tried before. She had taken me on field trips to the market in town, to La Gran Piedra, a massive volcanic rock, La Moncada where the revolution started. We had even taken a motor bike ride through the cobbled streets of Santiago. All in the name of culture and language immersion. It was fantastic and I couldn’t have asked for a better teacher. The ‘classroom’ was in her modest living room that didn’t have much furniture other than some garden chairs and a wobbly table. On the walls there were some pictures that were cut out from an old magazine and pasted onto a wooden board to make it look like a painting.

My teacher’s daughter who happened to be called Jacqueline was 15 years old. It was her birthday on the last day of my Spanish course and I thought it would be nice to give her a present. So to the dollar shop I went. These shops sell everything that Europeans or anyone from a Western country would take for granted. Items such as soap, shampoo and toilet paper. You can only pay for these items with US money. So to many Cubans these things are hard to come by. I picked two bottles of perfume from a generic brand that I had never heard of before and maybe they cost me 6 USD each. 7 USD Tops. But to Jacqueline and her mom it might as well have been a bottle full of diamonds. When Jacqueline opened her present she started bouncing up and down the living room, jumping on her bed, and bouncing through the living room again with the bottle of perfume held tightly in her hands. My teacher started sobbing and only just managed to utter the words: Thank you so much!

I never thought that two bottles of generically branded perfume could ever make anyone as happy as those two women were then. And frankly I never seen anyone ever react to my presents like that before. Or since. So next time you get a tepid reaction to the birthday gift you’re giving, take it back. And re-gift it to someone in poorer parts of this world who will appreciate it! At least, that is what I will do.

Author Bio: Xanthipe is a freelance travel writer who writes original beach and travel stories for A Beach Holiday – Read other beach and travel stories, submitted by Xanthipe, on A Beach Holiday.

Category: Travel
Keywords: beach, travel, story, holidays, cuba, spanish, learning