Student Conference

On April 10, 2013, the class of INGL-3135 reunited in the amphitheater of natural science for a student conference where eight of my fellow classmates read the essays which had to do with evaluating the concept of a tourist versus the concept of a traveler as well as the concept of an internal journey versus an external journey. The essays use the books: Holy Cow by Sarah Macdonald, Down on the Island by Jim Cooper, A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid and the movie A Room With a View. Most of the essays persuade the audience to explore the world, to journey into other places. They discuss the topic of a tourist versus a traveler and they advices us to be traveler’s instead of tourist. I think this is because a tourist is a person who has never gone to the place he is visiting and is going to be lost in that land. He is going to be seen as an outsider and is going to depend on other people in order to go around. If we compared it to a traveler, a traveler is a person that knows the lands he is visiting and knows more how to fit in. I believe that what they meant by saying to travel the world as a traveler instead of a tourist is that a traveler was originally a tourist which means that if a person is a traveler he or she was already a tourist and therefore has travelled and has had to experience of having a journey to a place she has is not from and has had the experience of being an outsider before. So in conclusion I agree with what they say which was that everyone should become more of a traveler and less of a tourist.