My father always says that when he moves to a new place, he likes to try to see it as if he were a tourist. While I was growing up in Southern Ontario, this meant we would frequent the same attractions over and over again. Of course, this meant we became intimately familiar with them, unlike most tourists. 

Only recently did I start to reconsider who deemed these destinations to be noteworthy, or what exactly I was supposed to learn from them. 

My parents had already been to some of these sites before they brought me with them. In the late 1980s, when they were considering immigrating to Canada from Pakistan, my family came to North America to visit my aunt and spent a few weeks travelling the US and Canada, stopping by a number of popular destinations in Ontario and photographing much of the trip. Shortly after, they applied ...