A long hiatus
Well, Desiree and I are back from a well-deserved break… our first “real” vacation since our honeymoon. Almost all of our travel between then and our recent trip has been either for work or to visit relatives. As much as we love our families, travelling to see them is not really the same as leaving the country to go to tropical destinations. For the same reasons that ColdForged mentions, we weren’t inclined to announce our trip ahead of time, so I offer my apologies to our (semi-)regular readers.
Our vacation was a cruise, just like our honeymoon. I don’t think we’ll be doing it again. Don’t get me wrong - Desiree and I had a really great time and it was fairly relaxing. The time in the sun, the ocean, the pools, the hot tubs - all great stuff. But when it comes right down to it, Desiree and I have a very similar attitude toward people; let’s call it “hopeful misanthropy”. What I mean by this is that we strongly dislike other people in general, but we’ll give individual people the benefit of the doubt until they give us a reason to hate them, too.
Being in a confined space with so many passengers who were behaving so badly - both to the crew and each other - did not do a lot to enhance our dim view of humanity. The good times (which were thankfully the rule, not the exception) were punctuated by all sorts of infuriating behavior from people. We were on a European cruise line for which English is not the primary language and the dining and service customs are distinctly continental, so many of these cringe-worthy moments came from fellow Americans (the vast majority of the passengers). Our countrymen acted with such ignorance and were posessed with such an overwhelming sense of entitlement that Desiree and I exchanged the phrase “…and that is why the rest of the world thinks we’re obnoxious” several times a day. Add to that the sheer irritation of lines, crowds, and herd mentality in general, and pretty soon you’ve got Sartre’s “No Exit” on a boat. Don’t even get me started on the perplexingly high proportion of adult males hitting on girls that are clearly of middle-to-high school age; it’s creepy enough all by itself, but when it causes your SCUBA dive master to leave uncertified divers in the ocean - and by divers, I of course mean me - because they’re too busy trying to hook up with sixteen-year-olds, then it’s even more thoroughly unacceptable. Well, it could have been worse - there was a diver in our group who, due to lack of supervision and no fault of his own, drifted into the boating lane and nearly got his head taken off… just a few minutes before he ran out of air due to a leak in his gear. (He made it back ok, no thanks to the dive masters.)
So, in a nutshell - overall vacation: very good, close proximity to vast numbers of stupid people: very bad. I think next time we’ll go for the sun and surf minus the people… maybe rent a big beach house somewhere with some friends.
April 5th, 2005 at 8:32 am
Irritating quote number one:
“She don’t speak english but boy she can dance good”
*shudder*
April 5th, 2005 at 8:43 am
Irritating quote number two:
“Stop. We all speak English. Can you speak English please?”
(said to someone who was speaking English with an accent)
April 5th, 2005 at 8:53 am
Ack! What a goatscrew.
Cat and I share your overall outlook on humanity especially as regards our fellow countrymen. I always have to share this particular story when I come across missives like these:
Cat and I traveled to Austria and Germany once (she worked for Bosch and scored a trip for a demo). We had a fantastic time saw a lot of cool things, ate a lot of weinerschnitzel. We were having a nice quiet lunch — more weinerschnitzel — at a little bitty place in Innsbruck. In walks a bottle-blond middle-aged woman. “Entitlement” doesn’t start to describe her and I knew merely from the gold baubles at her wrist that she was American before she ever opened her mouth. But God, when she did…
“Do you have any crackers?” she loudly inquired of the proprietress in a thick J.A.P. accent. The little old Austrian lady had no clue what she was talking about and shook her head as though to imply this.
“CRAAACK… ERRS. Crackers. CRRAAACKERS?!,” she grated, louder and slower each time. Cat and I looked at each other, looked at her, and looked at each other again in utter astonishment. She continued in this vein while I reached in my backpack, pulled out my English/German dictionary, looked up “crackers” and said something in my faux-German to the poor Austrian lady that apparently sounded enough like “crackers” in German that she finally knew what the crow-hound was talking about. She reached behind the counter and picked up a box of crackers and held them up.
Blondie turns around, looks at us and says — and I, so help me Jebus, quote — “Thank GOD. What made you think to bring one of those books?” What indeed.
“And that is why the rest of the world thinks we’re obnoxious,” because, frankly, who is that Fraulein going to remember? The patently offensive loudmouth or the people who helped?
April 5th, 2005 at 10:44 am
That matches up pretty closely to our experiences - unfortunately. I rarely see this type of thing when I’m overseas on business, but I guess the “you will make me the focus of your attention, and you’ll do it on my terms in my language” attitude is amplified when people are on vacation.
Your question about who will be remembered is sadly revealing, though - to employ another Americanism, the cliche, let’s just say that the squeaky wheel gets the grease (or, in this case, the grease stain).
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