You can have these views:

These drinks:

And the sand between your toes with nothing to think about besides what you’ll have for your next frozen beverage.

I love resort vacations as much as the next girl, but one thing that has become increasingly irksome to me is how little I get to see of the city or country where my resort is located.  I was recently asked whether I had any local friends in Nassau after having visited the island almost annually for 16 years.  And I was embarrassed to admit that no, I don’t really have any local friends.  I’m sure you know this feeling, too- you get off the plane and take a car to your hotel, and then you spend an entire week never leaving the property.  And, you haven’t even noticed, right?

In the last few years, I’ve begun to notice how little I actually knew about the resort destinations I’ve visited, so here I am with some helpful tips to help you get both the needed rest and relaxation you’re craving, along with a good dose of local culture to keep your mind and spirit active.

• Get to know the geography. I know that this sounds like incredibly useless advice, but you’d be surprised at how important it can actually be!  I’m sure that you know all about the resort you’ll be staying at long before you get there, but do you know anything about the city or town closest to your resort?  Often times, resorts are located a bit outside the towns that host them, which makes the resorts such quiet and relaxing destinations, so you may need to get creative with how you get from your hotel to the town or local attractions.  With that being said, usually it’s fairly easy to manage with a taxi or local bus- this is something that the front desk staff at your hotel should be able to help you with.

• Find the locals. In the towns surrounding tourist destinations, you will often find restaurants created for tourists, souvenir shopping, and other places that you wouldn’t ever actually find a local person. Instead of going to those places, figure out where it is that the locals actually spend their time, and there you will find the most authentic version of the place you’re visiting.  For example, during a trip earlier this year to Nassau in the Bahamas, I heard of a place called Da Fish Fry, which was meant to be a local spot to grab great seafood. Despite my absolute loathing of any food that once swam, I decided it would be worth checking out.  Well, this experience absolutely changed my view of downtown Nassau, and I spent way more time outside of my resort, but also outside of the touristy Straw Market, and now I feel like I know Nassau a little bit better.

• Attend local events. Whether you’re religious and want to attend a service at a local place of worship, or you want to attend the Junkanoo festival that Nassau holds on New Year’s Eve every year, there are plenty of opportunities to get involved in the local culture through their local events and celebrations.  The local tourism website will typically have a list of local activities, from farmer’s markets and artisan markets to music or cultural festivals.

• Talk to the locals! Usually when you’re at a resort, all of the people that you meet are other guests who are also enjoying their vacations.  This might be a great way to meet people from across the world, but it’s not a good way to learn about the place that you’re actually visiting!  Lucky for you, there is an easy solution: talk to the employees at the resort.  Most of the time the people working at resorts are some of the friendliest you’ll meet as they work in a very customer service-focused business.  You can have a great chat with a bar tender, casino dealer, off-duty lifeguard, taxi driver, etc. to find out who they are, and maybe even what’s happening in town that night!

Resort vacations are an amazing way to relax and rewind, but they also offer a great opportunity to explore shockingly little-explored cultures around the world!  I encourage you to get off property for a day or afternoon to get some good local food, have some good conversations, and learn something new about the world around you.  The bonus to getting out of the resort for the day is the saved cost of buying typically expensive resort food in favor of less expensive food in town.  All around, exploring your surroundings while on a resort vacation will only help to improve your experience and allow you to make fantastic memories outside the confines of your hotel!

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By Katie Ford

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When I arrived at Susquehanna University in August 2009, I knew that I wanted to study abroad.  I knew even more specifically that I wanted to study abroad in this little French town called Aix-en-Provence.  I had visited it a few years earlier on a vacation with my parents, and even though we’d only been there for a day, I knew I wanted to go back.  I walked into the study abroad office that first semester, and told the lady at reception that I wanted to study abroad, and that was where I wanted to go.  She pointed me in the direction of the Director, who helped me understand my options for going to Aix, and got me set up with the study abroad advisor.  As they say, the rest is history.  My initial reasoning for wanting to study abroad is still a bit of a mystery to me; it probably had to do with the fact that some sort of study abroad experience was required at Susquehanna, and I figured “GO” big or go home.  It may also have had to do with the adventure that I knew I probably wasn’t going to get if I spent four years living in central Pennsylvania.  A little part of it was also probably to prove that I could.  No matter how I ended up going, it was absolutely the best thing that happened to me at university.

Most people do not end up studying abroad because of something like that.  In my experience advising students, most don’t know if or where they want to go until they’ve submitted their application, and they might not even know for sure at that point.  There are all kinds of hurdles that American university students must face when deciding to study abroad, like the money they assume it takes, the problems finding classes they assume they’ll have, and all of the bureaucratic non-sense that they’re sure to run into.  In reality, studying abroad doesn’t have to be THAT much more expensive than a semester at your home university, and I’m willing to venture a guess that almost any student will be able to find classes abroad that will satisfy some sort of degree requirement.  Of course, as with any really amazing experience, there’s bound to be some non-sense that must be dealt with, but you’d be surprised how much it’s kept to a minimum in order to encourage students to study abroad.  And even on the off chance that these things are still issues for you, the benefits you’ll reap from studying abroad far outweigh the negatives.  In the international education field, the skills students develop while studying abroad are usually referred to as “soft skills”- things like personal development, cultural awareness and understanding, responsibility, etc. I think that these skills are vastly underrated by university students, and I think the development in these skills that occurs while studying abroad is even more vastly underrated.  My entire life changed as a result of studying abroad for four months.  I not only developed personally, but I gained a greater respect for people.  Just people, everywhere in the world, what they go through, how the live, everything about them.  I also completely changed my life goals, but this doesn’t necessarily happen for everyone (usually you’ll just get the travel bug and will spend the rest of your university years figuring out how to travel hack so that you can go back…).

I think that studying abroad is vitally important to the undergraduate curriculum in the United States, and in the rest of the world.  If more students were to study abroad while they’re still developing their ideas and opinions, it will affect how their ideas and opinions in a positive way for the rest of their lives.  Learning to appreciate other people for the ways in which they’re both similar and different to you is a mind-blowing experience.  I sincerely hope that if you’re considering studying abroad, that you do it.  It will be worth it, trust me.