It's 9 p.m. on a weekday, you're on a spring break, and you're in a country where the drinking age is being able to look the bartender in the eyes without flinching.
Naturally, you head to the bar where your friends have been for more than half an hour, sipping fish bowls and wondering where the heck you were.
You kick back, take a couple down and forget about life, stress and your grade point average for two to seven hours.
Then you saunter tipsily back to a seedy hostel and use your barely-passable-on-a-good-day language skills to convince the groundskeeper he should totally let you in even though it's past midnight and you smell like coco locos.
After some fraction of a good drunken night's rest, you heave yourself out of bed, stuff your face with coffee and pastries and run down to the local orphanage.
There you play soccer, tear down cultural barriers and play a formative role in young, orphaned children's lives. This is followed by coming back, eating, napping, eating and starting all over again. Although this time you might want to take it easy on the cocktails.
Sound like a pretty intense spring break? I'll say.
But here's what's weird. Suppose you're going as a part of some organization, and weeks or months beforehand you thought you'd maybe learn a little about this distinct culture you wanted to make a positive, enduring impact on.
With that—and just one of those mornings of playing games with local kids or painting houses—all of a sudden you've got yourself what's come to be known as an "alternative" spring break trip.
Alternative to what? Well, everything else I suppose: working, visiting friends, getting nine kinds of crazy with hundreds of people on a beach, etc.—all of which are respectable options.
But why is it a different category altogether when you actually want to interact productively with a community other than your own on spring break? Shouldn't that be a default or at least the ideal?
Spring break is just that—a break—but it's also an opportunity to step out of sheltered university life for a few days and make some new connections with the world outside of our socioeconomic peer group.
That can mean getting free shots from the guy who cleans the hostel toilets or just sharing a dance and an awkward conversation with a mysterious foreign lady, but it's better if it doesn't end there.
Learn a few more things about the real world; be open-minded.
And who knows, maybe some of us will get a better idea of what we actually want to do with our lives when we're finally out there for good.
But if nothing else, we should at least be sure to pick up after ourselves. Tipping well is good, too.
http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2013/03/a-spring-break-by-any-other-name
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