Upon reading the chapter from Cresswell’s The Genealogy of Place I was immediately drawn towards the conversation we had in class about the article Consider the Lobster and its relationship to tourism. On page 22, Cresswell refers to author Martin Heidegger and asserts, “A properly authentic existence… is one rooted in place” (Cresswell, 22). To me, this helps explain the divide between tourists and locals in many “vacationlands,” or, more specifically, the lobster eaters versus the lobster catchers at the Maine Lobster Festival. The apparent bias against tourists coming from local Mainers could be attributed to the idea that tourists are commercializing and exploiting working class people’s livelihoods, but in the context of place I believe it can be said that local communities are fed up with people coming and going with the sense that they fully understand and appreciate their “place.” To a local lobster fisherman, a wealthy tourist coming to eat a lobster for a day does not inhabit the lobsterman’s place, but rather his space. In that sense, Cresswell’s argument can be easily supported, that “we are willing to protect our place against those who not belong and we are frequently nostalgic for places we have left” (Cresswell, 21). A tourist may claim that they had an authentic Maine experience, which, in many ways, could be offensive to the fisherman who woke up at 3:00 in the morning to catch the lobster at the fair. To me, this sort of situation is one of the main reasons that we are forced to make a distinction between space and place, and attribute more meaning and value to one’s place.