World Regional Geography – Term Paper (50 points)
You are a spy for the CIA. Seeing as how our government’s knowledge of the rest of the world
is poor attimes, your mission is to collect information on a foreign country. Create a
“reconnaissance” journaldocumenting each of your 4 daysin this country observing the
economy, culture, government/politics,and climate (this is NOT a vacation). The materials you
gather in preparation will beused as if you have actually made the trip. The project is due the
day of the final exam.
Instructions:
þ Choose one of the following locations:
Beijing Jakarta Santiago
Belfast Lima Seoul
Berlin Madrid Singapore
Bogata Mexico City Sydney
Budapest Moscow Tokyo
Buenos Aires Oslo Warsaw
Cairo Panama City
Cape Town Paris
Havana Prague
Hong Kong
þ Search the internet for the least expensive fares for a round-trip flight to your destination. You
willdepart from LAX. Document the source, price, flight & times in your journal. You have
maximum governmentmandated spending limits of:
$1750 in airfare (do not include hotel in this pricing)
$1750 in additional expenses (hotel and food, transportation).
þ Using information gathered in the text, the library, and/or the internet you will plan an itinerary
and report on each stage of that trip.
þ Your goal is to observe a little something about the culture, climate, politics/government,
currentevents and economy of a country (so don’t just go to restaurants, museums & tourist
spots).
þ In addition to culture, climate, politics/government, current events and economic issues, your
reconnaissance journal must include:
Major routes traveled
Daily destinations
Weather
Conversion rates
US State Department travel advisories
Maps of country & city visited (including location of hotel)
Bibliography
Pictures are acceptable
Print out source of airfare (www.expedia.com or www.travelocity.com as examples)
Print out 1st page of your country’s country data from CIA World Factbook
(www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html)
Please do not simply log in your journal “got up, ate lunch, drank wine with locals, went back
tohotel”. This is insufficient. Nor should you just say “I went to La Défense”. Well, what is the
“LaDéfense”? (It is actually just a bunch of offices but it sounded interesting…) The library and
theinternet travel sites will be very important to planning and experiencing your vacation.
þ Full reports/journals are due the day of the final exam. No latejournals will be accepted.
þ Length should be at least 3-4 pages of text plus maps & other documentation of expenses &
sources(web page print-outs). Anything more might be excessive and too much for government
officialsto read. The format must be daily entries of where you went to, who you talked to,
general expenses, and work in observations about the culture, etc. of that country. Do not put in
plastic sleeves or turnthis into a scrap booking project. Failure to bind your project together will
have a negative impact onyour grade.12 point font, double spaced. One inch margins.
þ Remember, you are gathering info about the area, and you are not a tourist. Seeing the
Mona Lisa,or eating escargot, may be interesting, but not too enlightening about France.
þ Do not spend too much time on your “story”. If you spend three paragraphs planting a listening
device andone sentence on what you learned – something is very wrong with your paper.
SampleJournal Entry:
July 15th
Today I spent the morning drinking coffee along Karl Johans Gate, the mainstreet in
central Oslo. Amazing how much the Norwegians enjoy being outsideduring the long summer
days. It was striking that the sun didn’t go downuntil midnight or so and was up only a few hours
later. Ingrid, who washaving her coffee next to me explained that the winters are just the
opposite- painfully cold and the daylight lasts only a few hours thus they enjoy thesummer days
as much as possible. She invited me back for ‘utepils’ thatafternoon. Though I had no idea what
that was, I knew ‘pils’ meant beer so ithad to be a good thing. I would re-schedule planting bugs
in the nearbycity hall building for later that week.
Turns out ‘utepils’ means ‘outside beer’. This fits in with my morningobservations. Over a
few beers Ingrid described how happy she was to live inNorway. I was curious about Norway
not being part of the European Union andshe said they didn’t need the EU. With all the wealth
coming in from theNorth Sea oil reserves, Norwegians were enjoying a high standard ofliving
and the economy was thriving. There was no need to pay the high costsof EU membership. I
would have to look into the oil money later this week… Idid see a ‘Statoil’ office downtown
somewhere. I assume ‘Statoil’ means StateOil. One drawback of the strong economy was the
high costs of items includingmy $14 ‘pils’ (beer) and a really high tax rate.
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You are a spy for the CIA. See appeared first on Course Hero.
