After listening to the lecture today I began thinking about my family vacations. I have traveled to many places around the world and when we do my parents like to rent houses. A few places that I’d like to highlight are Mexico, Alaska, and the Bahamas. When we went to these places that are serious tourist attractions we didn’t stay in the common housing areas. In Mexico we rented a house south of Cancun. We saw amazing sights and visited things most tourists didn’t get to see. We went into caves and I even held a monkey but we also went out to an island and got back to the mainland late at night and my parents were extremely worried about what part of the country we were in. The area was not the safest at night and although it would have been safer in a gated hotel in Cancun we wouldn’t have seen even a fraction of the real Mexico. When we went to Alaska we went on a cruise to many of the major cities along the coast of Alaska. One of the most disappointing things we saw was how set up the ports were. The towns were all tourist shops and rows of knock off jewelry shops. After all of this we looked further at the ports and found a gondola that took us to a walking trail at the top of the mountain. This was so much better than the villages that we had previously visited. Lastly, we went to the Bahamas which had the greatest disparities between tourism and the real villages. There is a massive resort across a small inlet of ocean that is called Atlantis. Everyone that I’ve talked to that has been to the Bahamas has only been to that resort and gone jetskiing. When we went there we chartered a 40 foot sailboat and docked in one of the villages. We met locals and rented really sketchy mopeds that allowed us to travel all around the island. We saw so much of the ocean and the island without being trapped and swindled into overpriced jetskis and food. I loved what Professor Hilda had to say about the poets, artists, writers and musicians. She spoke about the misconceptions of these vacation destinations and the tourists’ and companies lack of regard for local residents. She also spoke about how these condominiums and hotel resorts take away from some of the locals not only their access to the ocean but sometimes also their livelihood.