Ridiculous Complaints Made by British Holidaymakers

Often when you’re on holiday, you hear people making daft comments/complaints about the hotel, food, staff etc.  Obviously I only hear the English comments, aside from English,  I only speak a smattering of Spanish so I have no idea what the French, German, Russian holidaymakers say about the place. Our reputation is one of a nation of moaners and I sometimes think they’re right.

A couple of years ago in a Greek hotel we've stayed at for a number of years, one particular English family complained about the food.  Believe me the food was amazing. At lunch there were two restaurants serving lots of different dishes, meat, fish, pasta, vegetables, salad etc. There were, Chinese buffet two evenings, French & Greek a la carte two evenings, Italian & Greek buffets the other evenings and there was a fantastic choice of all types of hot and cold food.  My daughter and I don’t eat meat yet we never have a problem finding lovely food.  Well this family complained about the food and asked to eat in the Chinese restaurant every night.  They said that all they had to eat was pizza and chips for two weeks. What a load of rubbish!  I don’t know where they had been eating but it certainly wasn’t at the hotel.  They even commented on Trip Advisor that they had never been so pleased to see a McDonalds.  What a shower!

I read about the “Twenty Most Ridiculous Complaints Made by Holidaymakers” on the Daily Telegraph website today and maybe they were not the most stupid tourists after all. These complaints were taken from research by Thomas Cook and ABTA.

Here they are in all their stupidity:

• "We booked an excursion to a water park but no-one told us we had to bring our swimming costumes and towels." 
• A tourist at a top African game lodge overlooking a waterhole, who spotted a visibly aroused elephant, complained that the sight of this rampant beast ruined his honeymoon by making him feel "inadequate". 
• "On my holiday to Goa in India, I was disgusted to find that almost every restaurant served curry. I don't like spicy food at all." 
• "It's lazy of the local shopkeepers to close in the afternoons.  I often needed to buy things during 'siesta' time - this should be banned." 
• "I think it should be explained in the brochure that the local store does not sell proper biscuits like custard creams or ginger nuts."
• "I was bitten by a mosquito - no-one said they could bite."
• "It is your duty as a tour operator to advise us of noisy or unruly guests before we travel."
• "We had to queue outside with no air conditioning." 
• "We found the sand was not like the sand in the brochure. Your brochure shows the sand as yellow but it was white."
• "There are too many Spanish people. The receptionist speaks Spanish. The food is Spanish. Too many foreigners." 
• "The brochure stated: 'No hairdressers at the accommodation'. We're trainee hairdressers - will we be OK staying here?"
• "I compared the size of our one-bedroom apartment to our friends' three-bedroom apartment and ours was significantly smaller."
• "My fiancé and I booked a twin-bedded room but we were placed in a double-bedded room. We now hold you responsible for the fact that I find myself pregnant. This would not have happened if you had put us in the room that we booked." 
• "It took us nine hours to fly home from Jamaica to England it only took the Americans three hours to get home." 
• "No-one told us there would be fish in the sea. The children were startled."
• "We bought 'Ray-Ban' sunglasses for five euros (£3.50) from a street trader, only to find out they were fake."
• "Topless sunbathing on the beach should be banned. The holiday was ruined as my husband spent all day looking at other women."
• A guest at a Novotel in Australia complained his soup was too thick and strong. He was inadvertently slurping the gravy at the time. 
• "The beach was too sandy." 
• A woman threatened to call police after claiming that she’d been locked in by staff. When in fact, she had mistaken the “do not disturb” sign on the back of the door as a warning to remain in the room.

I wonder whether people from other countries are as daft as this! You start to think that maybe everyone should take an IQ test when they apply for a passport.

Well as my Mam used to say “Some folks are just not safe to be let out!”

Post 159

Change of Background

I decided to change my Blog background. I chose the clouds and aeroplane design because that's where I'd like to be at the moment. Even though the weather is lovely, I'd love to be on a plane going somewhere different where I wouldn't have to worry about cooking or cleaning. I can dream.

The biggest plus of all would be I wouldn't have to watch the World Cup either!


Post No 158

Anyone for a Tattoo?

I felt like a bit of a laugh today and so as I was on YouTube I watched some Victoria Wood. You just can't beat her when you need a bit of cheer!

Take a look here on my Telly Addict Blog.

Post No 157

Can you believe it?

I’ve been watching John Isner (USA) & Niicolas Mahut (France) playing tennis at Wimbledon on Court 18.

So what’s amazing about that you ask. Well they started to play yesterday in a first round Wimbledon tennis match. It has continued today and will go into its third day tomorrow.

The match has broken all kinds of records. The final set alone has lasted longer than any tennis match.

It's the longest Grand Slam tennis match ever played (almost 10 hours and not finished yet), has the most games ever played in a tennis match and the most aces served, 98 (Isner) 95 (Mahut).

The final set has just been abandoned at about 9.15pm due to bad light. The score? 59 games all.

Forget the World Cup! This is much better.

Post 156

Let the Great World Spin - Colum McCann - Book Review

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Set in the late summer of 1974, Colum McCann’s novel is the story of lives that touch and the centre of the story is Petit’s high wire walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre. The character’s seemingly disparate stories are interwoven around that walk.

There’s Corrigan the Irish monk who lives among prostitutes and drug dealers in the Bronx and his brother Ciaran who comes to visit and struggles to understand his younger brother and what motivates him. Have to say I couldn’t understand either of them. There are the prostitutes Jazzlyn and her mother, Tillie, struggling to survive in a world of drugs and violence, a group of mothers whose sons have died in Vietnam have formed to mourn their sons and support each other but find that too much divides them. An artistic, wealthy and decadent couple complete the list of characters and their actions have a great impact on the lives of other characters.

I’ll come clean at this point and admit that it didn’t take me long to realise this book just wasn’t my cup of tea! I had read glowing descriptions and reviews about it, so I kept going. All those others couldn't be wrong. Could they? However if I hadn’t been reading it to review I would have given up by page 31.

Why didn’t I like it. Well maybe I wasn’t in the right mood to read this book, I was feeling quite down due to family worries. I have to say that very few of the characters interested me and I found the themes and language depressing. I will admit that at times I found his writing absolutely beautiful. His descriptions of the training that Petit did were wonderful but I found I couldn’t get interested in the tightrope walker at all. There was nothing elicited about the character, only his tightrope walking.

The stories of the various characters varied significantly but I found nearly all of them depressing and a couple seemed totally irrelevant. The first story which set up the main tragedy of the book started really well with the two Irish brothers growing up in Dublin. However very soon it descended in to gloom and darkness, with the characters’ lives full of drugs, prostitution and death in New York. I would never have got beyond this part of the book if left to myself. Two of the stories just bored me, the photographer riding the subway and the computer hackers. There were touches of humour but not enough of them to lighten the novel for me. I sound as though all I want from a book is happy characters and a happy ending, I don’t. One of my favourite books is Captain Correlli’s Mandolin. That book reduced me to tears at times but then within minutes I was laughing my head off and the characters were so full of life. Let The Great World Spin just didn’t move me at all.

Still I plodded on reminding myself that luckily once I had finished, I had a PG Wodehouse Jeeves and Wooster book and a couple of the wonderful Patrick O’Brian novels about Aubrey and Maturin to lift my spirits. As I said earlier maybe I wasn’t in the right mood for this book and I should try it again when I'm in a more positive mood.

View all my reviews on Goodreads >>

Post No 155

Woe is Me! Post 152

I’m a real misery today. I’ve just waved off my daughter and her family who are off on holiday to Rhodes. So why am I miserable? Well we booked this family holiday a year ago and have looked forward to it since then.

We go on holiday every year with them and it’s wonderful. Mornings getting up to lovely sunshine and going to breakfast with them. Days lazing by the pools, swimming with my grandchildren, games, wandering around the shops in old Rhodes Town, lovely meals as a family and no washing up! It’s bliss. I spend a lot of time with my grandchildren especially on holiday, so I'm going to miss them so much.

This year however it feels like there’s been a curse on it. There were the flight problems with the volcanic ash cloud and then the troubles in Greece caused by their failing economy and closure of their airports. However these pale into insignificance in comparison with our family problems. My husband had to have a serious operation a few weeks ago and it will take him a long time to recover. It’s one of the reasons why I haven’t been blogging and also I have no energy. Things like this help you get things into perspective.

Well I had a few tears after they left about what we’re missing but I’m thankful Eric will hopefully make a good recovery and we can all have a holiday together next year. I’m also thankful that the ash cloud problems are less, the problems in Greece have subsided and my family are all well and are going to have a lovely holiday.

It’s going to be a long fortnight without them and a long year until I see this lovely view again.

Kalithea Bay

The Wireless - Post 151

Source: Wiki Commons

The word wireless means something totally different today to what it meant to me when I was growing up. It's an adjective today, when I was little it was a noun. The wireless was what's called radio today. Well most people call it radio. I don't, mostly I still call it the wireless.

I started wondering why it was called a wireless when it still had wires. So I looked it up and found some interesting stuff about it.

Apparently there's confusion over who invented radio, which at the time was apparently called wireless telegraphy, so understandably they shortened it to "wireless".

"Radio is the wireless transmission of signals, by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of light."

However, it still needed to be plugged in!

When I was little we used to listen to the wireless all the time, well we didn't have a telly until after the Coronation in 1953. Even after that we still listened to the wireless a lot as the telly programmes were only on in the evening.

My memories of listening to the wireless are mainly of Sundays after we'd been to church. Mam would be preparing the Sunday dinner, (we didn't call it lunch) and the wireless was always tuned to the BBC Light programme, (now Radio 2). The sounds and the smells of those Sundays are some of my strongest and happiest memories of my youth.

First was Two Way Family Favourites which had started life as Forces Favourites. It was a great request programme with Jean Metcalfe and Cliff Mitchelmore. There were other presenters but those two are the ones that stay in my mind. It must have had the most famous introduction to a British radio programme ever:

"The time in Britain is twelve noon, in Germany it's one o'clock, but home and away it's time for Two-Way Family Favourites".

Take a trip down memory lane with that famous theme music "With a Song in My Heart".

Don't know why they don't resurrect it again for the forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Would go down a treat. Crumbs, I nearly said bomb!

There were other programmes such as The Billy Cotton Band Show and The Clitheroe Kid. However my favourite out of all of them was Round The Horne. I laughed 'til I cried listening to this.

It was absolutely wild and brilliant comedy, written by Marty Feldman and Barry Took. I'm sure the Python Team must have been influenced by it.

Rambling Syd Rumpold was one of my favourites. Here's a video clip of Kenneth Williams on the Michael Parkinson Show. He's one of the funniest people I've ever seen or heard. However I still think it was funnier on the wireless where you had to imagine all the visuals.

I think we laughed because we couldn't understand half of it. The double entendres went right over our heads. I wonder if that's how it got past the powers that be in the BBC. My Mam would have turned it off if she had understood what they were saying. We were obviously very naive back then. I grew up pretty clueless as she always switched off the telly if anything even slightly risque came on.

Here's an example of what now seems very rude. It's Julian and Sandy ( Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick) with Keep Britain Bona. Very topical with the General Election coming up!

It could never be broadcast now, too politically incorrect, although you can buy the CDs. Not all of the stuff is so rude. There's a brilliant skit on the BBC where they recruit Kenneth Williams for a BBC job. Great to listen to when you're bored. Maybe sitting in an airport? Really makes me laugh 'til I cry, partly through nostalgia no doubt.

I really miss those Sundays and the two Kenneths, bless them. Thank goodness for the wireless, it takes me back to a really happy time. I often wish I could go back there, just for the day.

Post 151