The concept of Spring Break is broken. One part is the wild, unrestrained antics of sex-crazed college students, their inhibitions completely flushed by drugs and alcohol. The other is the self-righteous backlash telling us that the week is better spent either learning or volunteering, not a time to escape responsibility but a time for self-improvement.
For me, it meant traveling to an exotic Third World country with cheap hotel rates where booze and babes abound. It also meant traveling back home. Bienvenidos a Mexico. Unlike my previous visits to Puerto Vallarta, this time I was not so much a native but more of a gringo-washed college student who was surprisingly fluent. Caught somewhere between being family and being foreign, I managed to get my party fix without getting sent to jail or catching an STD.
From Cancun to Jamaica, every foreign Spring Break hot spot now caters to the American college student. The girls are expected to go wild, and the boys are expected to pay a cover charge. But if you’ve gone this far without losing your passport, you deserve an experience that is beyond expectations.
Spring Break is too precious for pigeonholes, and the biggest Spring Break myth is not that you have to be drunk in order to have fun but that you have to be sober in order to soak up some culture. Language barriers become blurred over a glass of wine and cities are completely different beacons of culture after dark. Getting hammered in your all-inclusive resort filled with Americans sounds awful, but drinking with some locals at a nearby hole in the wall bar, now that’s what I call la buena vida.
Celebration can be cultural and having a mojito while in Cuba is vital to the experience. The Bahamas has junkanoo, Europe has the white nights and Rio de Janeiro has Carnaval.
While in Puerto Vallarta, my friends and I took a boat ride that, along with the alluring aspect of an open bar, took us snorkeling, then to the secluded beach of Las Animas and to a waterfall in Quimixto, a small fishing village south of Puerto Vallarta you can only get to by boat. The 300 native families that call this village home have a self-sustaining economy and no class distinctions. Their main form of entertainment comes from the tipsy tourists.
Perhaps if we were as alienated from MTV and Tara Reid, we wouldn’t be pressured to rock out with our cocks out or party with our panties off during Spring Break – bringing all of our American influences and paying to get that same fabricated concept of what a good time is suppose to mean.
Once you’ve been to one megaclub, you’ve been to them all. Flo Rida sounds the same in every country and alcohol is imported from all over the world. So when you export yourself to a foreign Spring Break spot, it’s best to explore what’s around the block from Senor Frog’s. Take it from a local: Spring Break is not a time to black out but to venture out with your Corona. You are expected to do things you’ll always regret, so instead why not do things you’ll always remember?
Weinberg senior Oscar Raymundo can be reached at [email protected].
