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Complaining sets you free

27/1/2016

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It's International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Let's look at some actual complaints about the memorial museum at Auschwitz that real, living people have left on TripAdvisor: 

"The tour guide was unfriendly and the headset was faulty. There is human ashes on display in one part of the museum."

"I didn't realize Nazis destroyed nearly everything and all that was left at Auschwitz were the brick buildings, cell blocks, with large rooms painted battleship gray, with large photos on walls, the same ones you can see in any book on Auschwitz or in any Holocaust museum."


"Auschwitz doesn't feel like a concentration camp."


"Movies of horribly starved inmates do exist and would have greatly improved the displays." 


​"Mass processing from 11 am till 3 pm."
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Conrad Hilton will f***ing kill you

3/2/2015

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We got excited when we saw a headline (sans photo) imagining an eccentric, aging hotel mogul having an old-person meltdown on a transatlantic flight. Sadly it wasn't to be, not least because the gentleman in question died in 1979 (it says on Wikipedia). I mean, the rantings of an elderly gazillionaire would at least have had some semblance of quaint charm. Less so when it's just torrents of abuse being distastefully ejected from the mouth of one of his more objectionable descendants, also named Conrad Hilton.

Among the delights from the 20-year old airborne charmer were the following verbal emissions:
- "If you wanna square up to me bro, then bring it and I will f*cking fight you."
- "I am going to f*cking kill you."
- "I will f*cking rip through you."
- "I will f*cking own anyone on this flight; they are f*cking peasants."

According to gossip-monging website TMZ, witnesses told officials that Hilton grabbed a flight attendant's shirt and informed him, "I could get you all fired in five minutes. I know your boss. My father will pay this out. He has done it before. Dad paid $300k last time." The sleepy little lamb then passed out, which was a cue for flight staff to promptly handcuff him to the seat. Reports say he was so out of control and aggressive that children (peasant children, presumably) on the flight were crying.

Recalling the 2002 protests of similarly wealthy flier Peter Buck (of REM fame), a rogue sleeping pill was allegedly the culprit, these little air-rage-bombs apparently the bane of celebrity flying. Buck famously attacked the flight crew on his flight with yoghurt (did any newspapers at the time go with the headline 'Everybody (yog)Hurts"? and if not, WHY not?). Presumably the HIlton millions will keep young Conrad out of official legal trouble, though as to his claims that he "buried" the flight attendants? Sure you did, bro...sure you did.





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I kind of hate I Hate Thailand

5/12/2014

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Full disclosure: I really like Thailand.

I’ve travelled there around 20 times, seen most of the country, had some really memorable experiences and promoted it in countless travel features as somewhere I recommend – I was even recognised by the Thai government for doing so and was given an award which, though relentlessly waning in relevance, is something I’m still proud of.

This video recently came out. It has been hailed as a masterstroke of reverse psychology and an impressively inventive way for travel marketing to go viral. It’s also been panned as cheesy, patronising and portraying a fantasy world.

Shall we watch?:

I think it’s important to remember the context here. Thailand is a recently-converted military dictatorship. It’s fine, I think, to approach this with a ‘love this country, hate this nation’ attitude, but the sub-plot is worth bearing in mind. The country is also reeling from the murders of two young backpackers – a horrific incident that was bound to have implications for tourism there.

Context aside, I think it’s a tweak heavy handed, especially considering the agency (and the Tourism Authority of Thailand) chose to film it in a way that looks as if they’re trying to disguise the source of the film. I’m sure they hoped that some people would watch it and think it was user-generated (no obvious branding/logos/mystical eastern soundtrack).

Fair play: for an official tourism video, it actually IS pretty edgy. How many promotional films for destinations have you seen where the lead guy says the word “fucking” in the first 30 seconds and then goes posh-white-boy raggo on a passing taxi with a brick? Is this a sly dig at foreigners by the Thai authorities (because if so it’s probably a fair one – I’ve been to Phuket and it’s essentially Magaluf in the tropics).

There are obvious signs – the way the camera switched to a third person filming things, the dodgy acting, the fairytale romance – but it’s a laudable attempt, especially considering the absolute excrement that tourist boards have been cinematically responsible for.

I think my problem with it is more with the subtle messages. Reddit user astronoob summarises the narratives of the video with impressive accuracy:

“I hate Thailand because I didn't keep track of my belongings! I love Thailand because I showed this hot woman my dick and now we're totally having sex!”

Hey, at first that island girl is all straw-haired and rural-looking (giveaway cheekbones, mind), and then in the end she’s made up and chic and talks great English and kicks water at his camera like a true Manic Pixie Dream Girl. James don’t care she endangered his GoPro! He’s in love!

“I lived the way of the Buddhist.” Ehhhhhhh….let’s just leave that there. 

And I’m not sure how James is staying there for two years in what looks like a pretty casual teaching job. I might be wrong but I think those freshly-tightened visa laws make that a logistical impossibility (unless he’s building up to burning that passport as he looks at it wistfully).

Is it even possible to promote an entire country without inherent cheesiness? Maybe it’s not. Maybe James and the Giant Beach is as good as it gets. At least there’s some curse words.

I love Thailand. I lost my bag there once. I just kind of hated myself for being an idiot. I’m glad it worked out differently for James, though. He seems like the kind of entitled farang things WOULD work out like that for. Now he's a Buddhist, I'm sure he sees things this way, too. We can only hope.
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The things we do at 35,000ft

15/10/2014

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There are things I do. Things I do that I only do on planes. These include, but are not limited to:

- Read current issues of The Economist, GQ and Esquire Magazines.
- Consult novelty gift catalogues.
- Take melatonin.
- Watch episodes of network sitcoms.
- Congratulate myself enthusiastically on not having children (actually I do this pretty regularly on terra firma, too, but the intensity of the self-congratulation
                                                                            is multiplied exponentially in the air).

It appears that one of the most common things other people do in the air - and only in the air - is drink canned tomato juice. Now, I do this a fair amount on land as well, mostly out of the perceived need to combat all the cancers that the Daily Mail say I'm going to get from immigrants, opening letters and, er, tomatoes, probably. Looking at my habits, though, I do pretty much exclusively drink tomato juice on a flight AND it's the only real time I drink it with Worcester Sauce. So far from being a lone freak, I DO have tomato-juice-based idiosyncratic behaviour on a flight.

This article was recently published, based on research by "
Guillaume De Syon, a professor at Albright College and an aviation historian." He submits that drinnking tomato juice is a long-standing aviation tradition (um, OK). The article goes on to suggest a number of reasons we drink tomato juice in the air - it tastes better at altitude, it's learned/suggestible behaviour, it's simply because it's on the menu...before settling on the deafeningly unedifying ALL OF THE ABOVE. Thanks for that. I hope in 20 years we'll have the same academic insight into why we're watching old episodes of The Big Bang Theory.





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The wrong side of jazzstory

4/10/2014

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Oh, how New Orleans loves to hate on the hipsters, moving to a city from places and living here with their clothes and their legs like it's the most natural thing in the world. Yet the animosity for their brethren is part of a dance that's as old as time, or at least as old as a 64-year old trombonist, as this newspaper clip proves. It relates the fist use of the word in this city's newspaper of record, as part of the Great Jazz Wars of the 1950s, when progressive jazz musicians took up brass against the be-bop hipster musicians, in a time that historians now call a watershed moment of jazz on jazz violence. Here, Stan Kenton is, perhaps, standing on the wrong side of jazzstory with his stance against be-bop, and name-calling of the "cool, phoney and pseudo" hipsters  - words now reclaimed by hipsters and used freely on the streets of the Bywater.
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Censor-y deprivation in paradise

25/9/2014

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The thing about yer Maldives, of course, is that although they are, on the surface, a bucket-list topping chain of islands that have visitors and journalists scrambling for beauty-driven superlatives, they are also a massively controlling Islamic state who barely tolerate visitors.
    Let's cast our minds back to 2010 and that infamous wedding ceremony, where a couple of unwitting newlyweds had a local ceremony to celebrate their nuptials, only to secretly be called 'infidels' and 'swine' in the local tongue. An isolated incident, perhaps, but since 2011 the government has been flexing its censorship muscles as the hardline Ministry of Islamic Affairs takes down dissenting blogs, arrests journalists and generally acts like an insecure bully.
    Having been myself, I can tell you that's a side of the islands that tourists rarely see, being whisked off to their hotel-chain-owned islands (if you don't know, each tourist island is basically run by a different hotel) and there's little need to worry about human rights when you're sitting down to your coconut shrimp starter in the underwater restaurant of the Ritz-Carlton, on the Ritz-Carlton Island. Head to the capital, Malé, and you can see much clearer signs of fundamentalism, in the mosques especially.
    Anyway, the latest reports are that this (from The Guardian): "Poetry and literature will have to be approved by the Maldivian government before they are published in the country, according to new regulations which have been described as a “disaster for freedom of expression” by free speech campaigners."
    It's unclear as yet as to whether the Ministry will go so far as to snatch copies of 50 Shades of Grey from incoming honeymooners (OK, some of them might bring in Tolstoy, I'm not being presumptuous) because heaven forbid they leave a copy lying around for the underpaid hotel staff to glance at. But at best, the national bureau and its role as the enforcement arm of a creeping autocracy are sure to heighten the tense relationship that hardline Islamic countries which depend on western tourism all seem to have. Yes, Dubai, we're looking at you. As usual.


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Welcome to Meanhattan

23/9/2014

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New York, New York...so good they tell you to get off their island multiple times in a really snarky voice. The Manhattan tourism industry received a much-needed shot in the arm from professional curmudgeon Fran Lebowitz who, in an interview with Papermag.com, outlined her multiple objections to people not from New York visiting New York.
    Among the choice comments were:
    - "Tourism as a number-one industry is a terrible, terrible idea for any city, especially New York."
    - "I would like to see fewer and fewer tourists and I'm tired of hearing about how much money they bring to the city             because the kind of jobs the tourists bring to the city are the worst jobs."
    - "I object to Airbnb. I don't want these people to come here; I frankly do not care where they are staying. Stay home."
    - "I would like to stand at the border -- I would volunteer -- and say, "You can come here, but you have to live here. If             you're coming here for four days, you can't come"
Oh my. Here's someone with a little case of the Moan-days. If she sold flowers professionally, she'd be Florist Grump, amiright? The thing is, Ms Lebowitz, who presumably doesn't travel anywhere for less than four days, or anywhere that has a residential centre, is unwittingly making us want to go to Manhattan more than ever.
    Doesn't she realise, half the fun of going to NYC is seeing the most abrasive, pugnacious and outright rude people on earth (outside of Paris, natch) in their natural environment. Every server who overtly belittles me as I very slightly mis-order something from the unnavigable breakfast menu in a diner, I tip with extra gusto just for the typical NYC experience. I figure they get paid to do that by the tourist board, just so we're not disappointed. Going to Manhattan for me is like sneaking back to the haughty mistress who I gladly pay to humiliate me.
    I hate to break this to you, Fran, but if you really want us to stop coming to Manhattan, you're going to have to start being much, much nicer...
(photo via cc, Christopher Macsurak)

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I feel the need...the need for...a repeat of the safety demonstration

15/8/2014

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Among the more spurious surveys that pop onto the Shandy Pockets radar was this one, carried out by travel compensation-garnerers, refund.me. Air passengers were asked which characters form the big screen they would like to see in their cabin crew, the winner by a sizable nose (no offence), being the character of Maverick from Top Gun, played by thespianic colossus, Mr Thomas Cruise, esq.

Yes, the majority of the great flying public would choose an emotionally unstable, borderline sociopathic risk-taker with a gung-ho military mentality as the pilot of choice for their charter plane to Majorca. Presumably because he looks good in uniform. Forget your chances of survival and the person responsible for them being one step above Howlin' Mad Murdoch from The A-Team, as long as our man has a winning smile and lustrous hair, we'll take our chances, thank you very much. 

Among the other preferences expressed were Little Leo DiCaprio from Catch Me If You Can (borderline sociopath engaged in massive fraudulence with no formal training but good looking) and Dishy Denzel Washington from Flight (borderline sociopathic substance abuser, albeit a heroic one, though even more albeit: very good looking).

Among the female dream crew were Catherin Zeta-Jones (Terminal), Kirsten Dunst (Elisabethtown) and Ellen Pompeo (Catch Me If You Can), a list containing a noticeable lack of sociopathic risk-takers, partly because you can better imagine being offered chicken or beef by them, but mostly because Hollywood has yet to give out those kinds of parts to women. Who would you like to see showing you how to orally top up your life jacket?

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You are free! To stay where we tell you!

20/6/2014

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"Now, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ground you. But look, you've got LOTS of great things you can do in your bedroom. You've got that jigsaw you've never opened, and how about a game of Monopoly or something with your brother?"

"Aw, mum...all my mates are out drinking strong continental lager and snorting suncream on a sun-drenched tropical idyll..."

"I really think this is the perfect time for you to rediscover how much fun your bedroom is."

And so seems to be the rhetoric of Helen Grant, as she issues forth her regal decree from a five star suite in Rio as she watches England try and play football. The Passport Office - as badly managed and beleaguered as our national side's defence - has collapsed under the weight of its own application process with a similarly reassuring sense of predictability. Grant - Minister for Tourism (and Sport - coincidence?) spins this by telling people whose holiday plans lie in ruins that they've won the summer lottery and they'll have so much fun just, er, staying in Britain. Hear are the actual, real words she spoke from her mouth:

"If they don't want to go away, we have some fantastic places to visit and holiday not that far from here. I think there's a lot to be said for the 'staycation'. People need to do what they like."

She added: "I think we are going to have a great summer, we are certainly going to have a great summer of sport, too, there's lots of opportunities to build your holiday around a spoilt-for-choice list of events, the Tour de France Grand Départ, we've got the golf, we've got the Commonwealth Games, we've got football that we can watch on the TV. It's a wonderful place to have your holiday."

Cue bouts of everyman and woman fury in the press, as people perhaps rightly see their basic right to cross international borders with timely applications for a passport being stripped away before their astonished faces. And then being told how lucky they are. A bit like...being peed on and told it's a refreshing summer rain shower.

All together, now: There ain't no staycation like a Helen Grant staycation 'cos a Helen grant staycation is COMPULSORY.

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An unexpected journey

2/6/2014

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Alright, we KNOW that the title is a reference to The Hobbit and the post is about Game of Thrones, but you think we've got all morning to think up strictly accurate fantasy-related travel puns? OK, we DO, but that doesn't mean we're going to.
    So we've been indisposed for a week or so, but we came back to someone sending us this Buzzfeed link.
    As if arsing around on aggregating travel sites isn't time consuming enough, Kayak are now offering the chance to spoddy dork geeks to work out the holidaying possibilities in completely fictional worlds.  Yes, if you're the kind of person who uses a 20-sided dice to make major life decisions, you can now fritter away your finite life by working out the best way to get from Westeros to King's Landing OR WHATEVER, I KNOW THEY MIGHT BE THE SAME PLACE I DON'T CARE. I hope they ARE the same place, just so it's vaguely annoying. Anyway. Your vacation from reality can take place via ships, carts and the backs of flying unicorns (probably). We take enough time trying to get cheap ACTUAL flights to indulge in this kind of thing, but if you're already imagining your and Danny's honeymoon in a dragon-themed boudoir in a castle somewhere pretend, then this search engine isn't too much of a stretch for you, we expect. Happy trails, nerds.

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