well I think about it now and if I were a parent I would be livid,
I went on a school trip to Italy and I was 15 as were most of us on the trip the funny thing was some of the older kids acted more like chaperones and kept us out of any real trouble for the most part
in Sorrento, it was not safe to be out unless in a large group, it was freaky, you talk about Islam, try rural Italy in 1976, all the local girls were locked up at supper time and the horny Italian boys would hang out at the hotels where the American and Canadian girls were, they would say you want to have sex, you want to go to bed, we couldn't believe that, like a mob scene......and yet still there were two girls in our group trying to sneak out with these two Italian guys....
when we went to Rome, more normal, but we were out until all hours every night, the drinking age is 14 there, I have no clue what our teacher/chaperones were doing, maybe each other, no, our Latin teacher was definitely gay, oh, hmmm...
I'd never drank alcohol until that trip
man it was crazy we almost lost one of my friends, also 15, we were frantic, we were just about to break down and ask one of the teachers for help when she stumbled into the hotel room, totally drunk and oblivious.....
regarding the hotel, many hotels have more than one entrance, that Holiday Inn is huge, for example the place we stayed in Aruba, down the road, all the rooms were on the beach, long rows of two story villas and you did not have to go through the main lobby to get to your room and you could walk from hotel to hotel along the beach itself, I don't even have any recollection of security guards in Aruba so if they were there they were unobtrusive
now if this had been Barbados, every hotel you have no choice but to go through a security gate, and they have guards on the beaches at night and they tell you not to go on the beach at night, even couples.....
I for one am glad to see that you are realizing that in 2005, but for the grace of God, many of us would have or did have terrible things happen to us. Frankly, I was concerned about your flippant remarks earlier. True, if a young person on a student trip truly wants to make an effort to slip a chaperone at 1 or 2 am, it's not too hard. I have heard of people using police tape on doors for middle schoolers, but for the inventive and combative teenager, used to getting his or her way, slipping a watchful eye on the last night out of port would not be too hard.
One night on a student trip, I remember staying up all night on a balcony with two other adult chaperones, watching a man on a slight hill smoking cigarettes--who was just waiting for us to go to sleep. We took turns keeping an eye out like we were on patrol. This was in France. To this day, I am glad he was smoking. I could count his drags, which helped keep me awake on my watch.
I knew a girl who went on vacation to Mexico (can't remember the city). Fell madly in love with a guy who worked at a resort. She came home, in December she bought a bunch of summer clothes (don't know where) and in January, packed up, moved to Mexico, and has been there ever since (last I heard).
"I'd never drank alcohol until that trip"
Must have been all that digital cable and MTV you were watching, IN 1976!