Bahamas

“To feel at home, stay at home. A foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It’s designed to make its own people comfortable.”      – Clifton Fadiman

Day 1:  Just a really quick I made it and am starting to get super excited! It still hasn’t fully hit me (while I am writing this I’m still at my hotel in the Bahamas. I met a group of people at the Atlanta airport and it made me feel much more at ease about everything.  Everyone has been really nice and outgoing. 

Day 2: We boarded the ship this morning and it is AWESOME!  We explored the ship today and lots of meetings and forms to fill out and what not.  I’m deliriously tired today so sorry this is so short, but I’m going to try to get some sleep.

Day 3: We are behind and schedule and haven’t even left the Bahamas yet.  That would be a nice thing if we were allowed off the ship, but were not.  So it’s been like a tease to see this beautiful scenery but not be able to explore much here at the Bahamas.  Today is another looong day of meetings all day.  It’s been like that first week of school where everyone’s just trying to get situated and meet their “group” and get in the grove of things.  

We got in discussion groups to talk about the common reading, A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid.  It’s a good book, if anyone’s interested and it’s only 80 pages.  It’s a memoir of an Antiguan woman talking about tourists and colonization.  She has a hostile voice towards both.  We had a good discussion about it though talking about how Americans/the western culture is perceived by the rest of the world and how that will impact our trip.  In the book she talks in second person about tourism and it definitely makes you think about your own actions while at port.  It’s easy to point fingers at others but is necessary to be very conscious of your actions while visiting other cultures.  The book also brings up that some people at the ports have this angry view of us because on some level they are envious of the opportunities that we have to be able to leave our country and be able to experience other cultures.  Some people we encounter do not have the resources that we have in life to be able to ever leave their country.  This really struck me because that has never crossed my mind.  Now a days almost everyone you meet has traveled somewhere besides their home state.  These people will never be able to experience life from outside their hometowns.  We discussed how it is inevitable to run into a situation where a local has this attitude about us and we have to look at the situation from their point of view.  We are visitors in their country and we need to always be aware of our actions as a visitor and the image we are putting out there of ourselves.