A journal of places.

The doors open and the air comes in warm and dry, pushed sideways by a wind that does not let up. Across the curb the taxis wait in a line, engines running, drivers standing by their doors. You look past them for a bus sign. You have read that Aruba has buses, and you are a person who takes the bus.

Nobody has said anything to you. The tour office does not open for another hour and the sign on the door still lists the meeting time from last night. But the crew knows, because the crew was here at five, and the decision that governs your whole day was made somewhere else and arrived on somebody's phone.

Outside arrivals the heat reaches you first, and then the jetty. Two groups form along it. One stands under a resort's own sign, next to a man in a pressed white shirt who already knows your name and is holding a cold towel. The other is a loose crowd around a speedboat with a number painted on the bow, bags going down into the hull from one pair of hands to the next.

Walk out of the arrivals hall at Queen Beatrix and the heat finds you before the taxi line does. The line is right there anyway, a short stroll from the exit, cars with TX plates easing forward one at a time while somebody's suitcase wheel shrieks across the curb. A driver lifts your bag into the trunk, asks where you are staying, and pulls out. Nobody says a price. On this island nobody has to.

The question is whether you want to be charged in the local currency or in your own. Pounds instead of euros. Dollars instead of yen. It reads like a small kindness, the machine looking out for you, doing the math so you do not have to.

The woman running the store keeps scrolling. Two men on a tricycle wait it out with the engine switched off, one of them holding a plastic bag of fish that is going to be dinner regardless. A dog reorganizes itself under a chair. Nobody is treating this as an event.