Part 1 of this series can be found here.
Dallas, TX –
“I wouldn’t go to Jamaica again. It’s not safe.”
A while back, M, my boss was talking to one of my associates, D, about his upcoming trip to Jamaica.
“The place has changed from when I first went, when I was young.”
“I agree,” S, another associate had joined in. “It was great when I was living there, but it’s a dangerous place now.”
Then M turned to me.
“Would you go back?”
“Absolutely.”
“But, it’s changed so much.”
“Has it?”
“Yes,” S piped in. “The last time I was there, a young girl was lured into the mountains where she was raped.”
“Really? And that never happened when you lived there?”
Ah, now we get to the heart of the matter. It’s not that Jamaica has changed, it’s that M and S have changed.
Or at least their perceptions have.
See, they both originally visited when they were young, just out of school.
Back when they were young, immortal, and oblivious.
Now, they’re all grown up, have families, and responsibilities.
And lots to lose.
So, take them out of familiar surroundings, and drop them into a neighborhood with some people who are struggling to get by, and suddenly they get scared.
It doesn’t matter that there are similar neighborhoods back home.
So what’s the difference?
At home, everything’s familiar. While in some far-off exotic locale, nothing is.
Except that everything is the same.
I remember a cab ride from the airport in Paris a few years back. On our way to our hotel, our cab driver was taking us through one of the less-desirable sections of the city.
Not wanting us to get the wrong idea about his city, the driver was telling us not to judge the city by what we were seeing out the windows.
Let’s see, it was an area that was run down, with drug dealers and prostitutes on the corners, plying their trade.
Just like you’ll find in every large city, around the world.
Our driver seemed surprised when I told him this.
Yes, he knew that there were parts of New York like this. Everyone’s seen it in lots of movies and television shows.
But Dallas has run-down areas? You never see that in the movies!
Well guess what, what you see in the movies is not real life.
What you see on television is not real life.
See, in movies, television, books, and any other entertainment form, what you see is a story. So what you see of a particular location is only what is important to the story.
If it’s important to the story that a scene take place in a crime-riddled drug house, then you’ll see the crime-riddled drug house, no matter where in the world the story takes place. If, in the story, there are no scenes that take place in run down areas, then you won’t see them.
End of story.
So, let’s all understand that every large city has good parts, and bad parts. Every city has parts where it is probably dangerous to be unless you look and act like you belong there.
And this is where most tourists stick out like a sore thumb.
Unless they are at a tourist attraction, most tourists look and (more importantly) act like they don’t belong, wherever they might be.
Why is that? Well, a good part of it is because they leave their street smarts at home.
Many people, when they go on vacation, decide that they don’t want to have to think. They just want to relax and forget about exerting any mental effort.
They walk around gawking in wonder at the strange and exotic sights around them, completely oblivious to their surroundings.
Not that there’s anything wrong with wonder.
Or gawking, for that matter.
It’s the obliviousness that is the problem.
Several years back, I had a friend who went to Barcelona. Prior to going, he found a web site that listed the various schemes that were commonly used in the city to distract tourists while their pockets were being picked.
When he came back, he said that he had witnessed every single one of those schemes in action.
And he had a blast.
And he didn’t get his own pocket picked. He knew what to look out for, and was alert to the type of distraction that would so totally redirect the attention of most tourists that made them easy targets.
Not that you need to know all of the ways that people might try to take advantage of you. The fact that you are aware makes you a less inviting target, no matter where you are – even in your own city.
In short, you have to pack your street smarts.
So what about those that don’t have any street smarts to begin with? Those that are oblivious to what’s going on around them, even in their home city?
Well, there are these places known as resorts, where they take care of all your needs, and you can just sit on the beach, or by the pool, and drink all day and night. Places where you are cocooned away from real life.
As for the rest of us…
I look at it this way, you can choose to wall yourself off from the rest of the world, cowering in fear of the unknown, the unfamiliar, or you can choose to live in the world.
Featured image by Alan Cleaver, used under the Creative Commons license.
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