A relative of mine told me a while ago that he plans to visit China during a vacation. Other relatives and friends of mine have visited Egypt, Tunesia, et cetera. My mother visited Chzechoslovakia when she was young during a summer for some sort of volunteer work exchange project or whatever, and amusingly enough she and her peers stayed at what was called a "labour camp" - I kid you not.

My perspective is a little more limited. I have visited Berlin, Budapest and other cities for genuine sight seeing, but by and large most of my vacations were with friends at various tourist resorts and consisted of chasing girls (and sometimes succeeding), getting drunk (always succeeding) and other meaningless activities. The point is, I've never actually set foot outside of Europe.

Anyway, with said relative who intends to go to China, we eventually got into a discussion of morality. I casually asked wether he had no qualms about being a tourist, a privileged person, in what is essentially a dictatorship. For whatever reason he was personally offended and the "discussion" didn't last long - his stance was essentially that it was none of his business how the Chinese (or Egyptians, Cubans or whatever) govern themselves and that it shouldn't concern him even while he was in their midst.

It's not something that I've put a lot of thought in till now, because so far I've never seriously contemplated visiting any of "those countries". When I started thinking about it, however, I wondered wether I could in good conscience ever do so. The thought that every native I would meet and interact with has significantly less freedom than I do might make me uneasy (and get in the way of enjoying my drink)

Thoughts?