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Essay on The Airport on Thanksgiving Eve

Decent Essays
Thanksgiving holiday is one of the few holidays that we do not have in Thailand. I never understood the significance of this holiday apart from its two-day school break until I traveled on Thanksgiving eve this past holiday. A taxi driver who drove me to the airport hinted about its importance by saying that, “Tonight is one of the busiest travel periods of the year.” I did not completely comprehend his claim until I saw how crowded the airport was. It seemed to me that everyone headed home to celebrate Thanksgiving with his or her family. However, what was most amusing that night was a scene of tens or even hundreds of people waiting for their family members at arrival gate. I was not clear why there were lots of people so I decided to do…show more content…
In addition, because of the different constraints between controlled environment in laboratories and the real world, we cannot use experiments to answer the question. Therefore, ethnography is the most suitable procedure to answer this question.
To conduct my ethnography, I observed people who waited for their family members at the airport by sitting near the gate and watching their reactions. Without asking for their opinions or reasons about their behaviors, I eliminated potential Hawthorne effects which is people changed their actions once they realized that someone observed them. I paid attention to the number of people waiting together to determine the relationship between the waiting and arriving people, their actions while they waited and their reaction once they met their person. According to my observations, people brought the whole family with them if the person they waited for was part of a family and they were alone if the arrived person was one’s boy/girlfriend. They had similar emotions such as being tired and bored while they waited. No one had any positive facial expressions but they refused to sit and wait in the back. Everyone wanted to be the first one to see the person to whom they waited for. When the long awaited person arrived, their emotions changed dramatically. Everyone had smiles on their faces and they started to hug
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