Saturday, March 24, 2012

If I Go Alone, The Cannibals will Eat Me Part II



          So cool, last time we all realized that when traveling, that no matter where we are or where we go, we live in a world made up of human beings with feelings and emotions.  Sure there are a few bad eggs here and there, but in general people will pick up on your signals and help you out, you just have to be willing to make those first moves towards saying no.  Of course, no one is going to make a movie about the girl who got away, only the girl who fell for the trap.
But wait what about Hostel?  People had asked you about that one two, and well, those guys were taken right out of their beds.  They weren’t even travelling alone. They were in a group of GUYS!!! I’m a girl all alone! If a guy falls for that, how am I supposed to be on my A game enough to not have that happen to me without using a private investigator?   Well first of all let’s remind ourselves that it just a movie.  While some hostels can be sketchy, most of them aren’t secretly operating as a way to collect people to be tortured and if they are they are probably being shut down by local authorities. 
In our modern age, booking websites provide endless supplies of feedback on hostels so you can actually feel them out before you book.  I mean if hotels and hostels are operating under a false front in order to collect people to enslave, and you happen to book there even after researching it and getting a pretty good vibe, I’m sorry but that is called really bad luck.  Of course, so is having a pedophile move in across the street when you were six years old and you hadn’t even left the house at that point.  Sadly, I can’t sit here and say that bad things don’t happen in the world, because they happen everywhere.  However, I can say that they happen everywhere and you are pretty much as safe abroad as you are at home. 
Sure, stories of fatal adventures pop up in our newspapers and create a panic against travel.  However, over 32 million single American women traveled in 2010, and made up 65% of people going on cultural adventure tours.  In fact in the past 6 years the single woman travel business has grown by 230%.  If all of them were being raped, murdered, and kidnapped abroad, not only would this number no longer be existent, but those news stories wouldn’t be news stories at all it would just be what happened when you are stupid enough to leave your front porch.  Think about it how many car crashes make the front page of the Wall Street Journal.  In all my time of reading that particular paper I have seen none.  However, I have seen enough plane crashes to make me never want to look at a plane again.  Funny thing is, you are 12 times more likely to die in a car crash than a plane crash.
People are funny that way, when I first decided to Virginia Tech, just after the April 16th shootings, people constantly said “Don’t get shot.”  I lived less than five miles from Baltimore City (and actually went to school in the city) and moving was to a place where in the past 100 years there were two incidents of people getting shot, one in the early 1900’s and the other on April 16th 2007.  Blacksburg is still one of the safest places in America and Baltimore is one of the most dangerous, but because every petty crime is a shock in Blacksburg, it becomes a big story which is scary and shocking to those on the outside.
            So, just remember to travel safe girls and live smart.
Sources:

No comments:

Post a Comment