11th posting

I am choosing to write about my progress so far and the impacts of this blog on my overall writing skills. In the beginning of this project I thought that I would be doing little research and very little deep thinking. Well, I was completely wrong about that! Suffice it to say I have enjoyed digging deeply into research and soaking in the information.

Research and thinking deeply is harder than you think. Looking beyond the ordinary, or just thinking much more in depth is a very important skill to obtain. In my 7th posting I talked about a country’s hidden agenda to make a short-term profit. By looking a little further, I found some very interesting facts and opinions. For example, I found that the big resort hotels are sometimes hurting the environment by dumping their waste into the nearby lake or ocean. That was something that I would never have expected to learn while researching about long-term affects. Nevertheless, it is cool to learn something interesting that may not be directly related to your issue or point.

It has been an exciting journey and I have enjoyed writing my blog every week. It has been more than just boring homework it has been an interesting topic with a variety of eye-catching subtopics and diverse ideas each week. That figures high on my list of priorities. I am also happy to provide this information and be able to present it in a way so everyone can read it and learn something from it.

I have learned to write a movie review, a deeply written essay with a thesis, a progress report, a report with a numerical poll, a report with a data chart, and a variety of other literary writing styles that are related to this topic. Given this experience, I feel prepared to do this again if I were given the chance and also I feel lucky to have had so much freedom with this project. All the information that I have learned from my topic on exotic getaways has allowed me to decipher the true meaning of vacation and form my own opinion about it. Vacation is to do something solely for you, and get away from the distractions of life. Also, never look back on the stresses of living and always focus on what’s good in life and what you want to do.

10th posting

Movie Review

Who wouldn’t be willing to go to paradise to save your marriage? This was the premise used by Cynthia and Jason to convince three other couples into joining them for an exotic getaway. Couples Retreat is a comedy directed by Peter Billingsley and written by Vince Vaughn, Jon Favreau and Dana Fox, who have all worked together in the past. This fictional film is an enjoyable adventure to the incredibly beautiful setting of Bora Bora. Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau (actors in this movie) add a humorous touch to the film, and with the extremely young and attractive wives, it creates a typical man-directed film. 

One would remember Peter Billingsley as the child actor turned producer/director who played Ralphie in A Christmas Story. He has a lifetime of experience in filmmaking and producing movies since he’s been in Hollywood most of his life. He has an innate ability to create hilariously funny scenes. Peter was also behind the scenes as an executive producer in the movie Iron Man directed by Jon Favreau, who actually plays Joey in Couples Retreat.

“It looks like a screensaver!” says actor Jon Favreau as Joey when they arrive at Eden resort at Bora Bora. But what they didn’t know is that they’re not going to be undergoing the typical free-to-do-what-you-want schedule. Instead, when obtaining the agenda brochure from the Eden Resort receptionist they found otherwise. Although, Cynthia and Jason, the one’s driving the plan, already knew about this so called agenda of waking up at 6 A.M. and doing couple’s skill building classes and experiencing the French Fabio of yoga instructors, the other three couples remain clueless. The humor and hilarity of the misunderstanding generates the adventure that the couples will go through.            

Couples Retreat is far from an immaculate film, but is a light-hearted entertaining movie that teaches a lesson. Learning to live with your spouse by staying true to yourself is one of the messages that I perceived from watching this film. After the couples got over the agenda problem things got interesting, funny and free. They started to loosen up and have fun with it. The film accomplishes their goal by creating a true-to-life relevant and funny story line. Since the people who made this film were familiar with each other, by default, they added another success to their list of achievements. 

9th posting

In America people spend approximately 3% of their annual income on traveling. These findings were recorded in 2008, and it is my opinion that the recession has caused a decline in the 3% since then. The 97% portion of the graph incorporates mortgage payments or rent, food, utilities, clothing, insurance, entertainment and communication costs. Families work in order to pay for the cost of living, which is so high that people are not able to take as much time away from all this as they used to. One of the things I noticed about this graph is the 44% of that 3% is used for transportation. That just shows you that the price of traveling is dependant on the price of oil and gas. It also shows our dependence on outside countries that are in control of the indispensable energy of everyday life.

The Bureau of Labor has access to people’s tax records to use as part of their research. Because this site is a .gov I believe it is very accurate and reliable as far as factual information goes. Out of anyone who could come up with this graph, the US Department of Labor knows about this stuff on a national level. They have a lot of data to analyze and support. This data point is probably under the scrutiny of the BLS on a yearly basis. This is relevant to my topic because if Americans are among the most traveled people in the world this impacts the tourism industry negatively. The percent of  a households traveling costs will have an effect on the tourism industry because of the recession and because of what I said above (people having to work and pay the 97% of the graph just to live normaly). This data opened my eye’s up to all the things households pay for besides their travel costs. This also made me sad because Americans aren’t taking as much time for themselves anymore and their mostly focusing on making it financially on a daily basis.

Month, By. "Travel: BLS Spotlight on Statistics." U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. July 2010. Web. 05 Dec. 2010. <http://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2010/travel/>.