And the Kumquat saw the thread, and was bored. Behold, for in his infinite 14 post wisdom, he commanded the Mod to close it. And he thought it would be done.
You don’t get off that easy, prick. You want to close threads when you are bored? Try posting at alt.sci.doxa.GaryKumquat.
MR
[Just fixing the vB code for ya, M --Alphagene]
[Edited by Alphagene on 09-13-2000 at 12:11 PM]
As you may notice, I never said you did.
All I’m saying is that if this thread turns into another nationalist war of words I’m shutting it down. You’ll pardon my suspicous behavior, but in the past 24 hours or so, there’s been a rash of Brits opening threads slamming Americans gratitously.
I’m just making sure this doesn’t turn into one more.
My junior year in high school (I’m not sure what that would correlate to in British schooling; I was 16 going on 17 and a year away from graduating HS) I signed up for a school-sponsored trip to France. The entire itinerary was to go to Switzerland, spend a day there; go to Northern Italy, spend a day there; and then spend 7 days touring France.
We left Baltimore-Washington International Airport at about 6 PM*. At about the point the plane was over Conneticut, all of the lights inside the plane go out. A voice comes over the intercom- “This is your Captian speaking; we seem to have a minor technical difficulty. We’re going to go to Logan to see if they have the facilities to repair us.” We did not realize how ominous this statement was. After an hour of circling Logan (in Boston), we get another message over the intercom. “This is your Captain speaking; apparently, Logan does not have the facilities to repair us. We’re going to have to return to Kennedy.”
So another two hours of flying back to Kennedy, then three hours of circling Kennedy due to bad weather. We finally land and get offloaded into an empty terminal, and told that the plane won’t be ready until noon tomorrow. We’re herded onto buses and shipped off to a local hotel for a free night’s rest.
Now, a quick note on hotel. Generally, they have a lot of staff hired to work behind the desk. Generally, most of these staff members are assigned for the busy times of 10 AM to noon (check out) and 4 PM to 8 PM (major check in). Generally, they do not have a lot of staff behind the desk at 3 AM (which is when our bus of 120 people showed up). In general, if they hire someone who doesn’t have a good command of the English language, the early morning slot is where they put them. So imagine, if you will, 120 annoyed, nervous, angry and frightened people trying to check into a hotel at a desk staffed by two people who don’t speak English very well. And as this was a plane to Switzerland, many of the passengers were Europeans returning home, so they don’t speak English very well, and they don’t speak the same not-English as the not-English that the people behind the desk speak.
At about 4:30 AM, I and my friends finally get our room. Exhausted and irritable, we go up to the room, prepared to sleep in, and then we see the huge sign on the back of the door stating, “All occupants must be checked out by 9 AM.” They had waived that for us, but hadn’t bothered to tell us that. So we get up at 8:30 AM after a miserable four hours of sleep. Luckily, by getting up that early, we could partake of the free continental breakfast. Which was chicken. Undercooked, slightly bloody chicken.
Eventually, the bus shows up and gets us to a new plane (which makes us wonder about the shape of the plane we were on last night) which takes us to Switzerland without further delay.
Now, a side note- I went to a school that was in the Washington D.C. suburbs. As such, some of the students who attended- and one who took the trip- were not American natives. This became a problem when one of our compatriots tried to present his Ugandan passport to the Swiss customs agent. The custom agent freaked and began shouting things at this poor kid. We had no clue what was being said; we were all French students, but none of us were good French students, and certainly even our better students couldn’t have understood rapid-fire accusatory Swiss French. Luckily, our teacher was there to intervene, and he and the customs agent shouted at each other for a bit. Eventually, our teacher came back to us and explained that while we could leave the airport, our bus had to leave Switzerland by the quickest possible route.
So we’ve lost the chance to see Northern Italy due to plane problems; now we lose the chance to see Switzerland because of passport problems (I still have no clue what happened; I firmly believe that Switzerland had declared war on Uganda that morning and didn’t sign the peace treaty until after we had gotten into France).
So we toured France on a bus. And I made some general observations, that while somewhat stereotypical and generic, tended to be applicable in every situation.
1.) Shopkeepers, Innkeepers, and various vendors apparently are criminals who are forced to work these jobs by the French government instead of taking prison time; as they are forced to work in such fields, they have no interest in actually doing their jobs. That’s about the only explanation I have for why people who ran stores seemed horribly put-out by requests to actually buy things, or show you where certain goods were, and innkeepers who felt that the location of nearby points of interest was information to be guarded like a state secret.
2.) If one were to replace the occasional broken-down castle with an Amish farm, France would look exactly like Pennsylvania. Especially when viewed from a bus window. Traveling through such shit just to go to a place that 80% of the time looked exactly like the location I had just left did not seem to me to be an efficient use of time.
3.) When traveling to a foreign country, make sure you time it well. We traveled to France in April of 1989. Guess what was coming up in June of 1989? The Bincentenial! So guess what in Paris was closed for remodeling? Everything! No Louvre. No Eiffel Tower. No Cathedral of Notre Dame. Sure, you could stand outside and look at those things, but you can also download a picture of them off the 'net, which is thousands of dollars cheaper and generally much faster.
4.) Even for horny seventeen-year olds, nudity gets boring. We went to the Folies de Berger (I know that’s spelled wrong) and saw nude dancing. At first, this was amazing and exciting. About halfway through, though, the fact that we were watching ballet began to seriously outweigh the fact that it was nude ballet. We were stupified at how the French had managed to turn nude dancing into the most boring thing we’d ever seen.
5.) Walking tours are not good if you like to wear boots. Especially when walking through broken ruins with only barely marked paths. I sprained my ankle the second day of the trip and had to shell out $40 for a cane so that I didn’t spend the rest of the trip skipping the walking tours and sitting on the bus, wondering how my grandparents in Pennsylvania were doing.
To finish up with a nice note of horror, as we were in the airport preparing to go home, someone else on the tour said to me, “Hey, John! Let me see that cane!” Whereupon he proceeded to unscrew the handle to reveal… a cap gun. That’s right, my cane had a cap gun as a pommel. This was not a good thing to be revealed in the middle of a busy airport.
So, all in all, a misery of a trip, and one which generally convinced me that shelling out weeks of my life and thousands of dollars to visit foreign countries- where the things that you like about the place are the things you see at home, and the things you hate are the things that make it foreign in the first place- just ain’t worth it. There’s plenty enough to see and do around DC, and when I get bored by that, I’ll start driving up to New York (which I’ve visited about ten times and still haven’t seen any of the sights of).
Good enough reasoning for ya?
*Side note- on the way back from dropping me off at the airport, my mother listened to the news of how terrorist organizations were publicly vowing to blow up one plane headed to Europe in retaliation for the downing of the Iranian airbus. Needless to say, she didn’t get much sleep while I was gone.
Good godDAMN, John… I’ve written papers that weren’t that long and well thought-out!
“You don’t get off that easy, prick” Oh dear, do try to find insults that don’t involve swearing, it will at least improve your vocabulary. Won’t make you any more interesting, but one step at a time, eh.
The last recourse of the logically inept. He criticizes my vocabulary. I will swear whenever I deem it appropriate. Don’t presume to tell me otherwise, unclefucker. Maybe I wouldn’t think you so worthy of the dirtier side of my tongue if you had anything coherent or logical to say. Perhaps a reasoned response to my last argument would have been in order, since you did suck your own toejam when you tried to pass John Corrado’s remarks off as trolling.
Right now I’ve got you filed in the dirty word bin.
MR
can I use that as my sig for a bit? 
gilly- by all means. The more sigs that are direct quotes of me (and I think I’m up to three so far), the more my ego swells.
By the time I get to ten, it might actually be up to an average person’s size.
thanks! LOL
grrr! I even previewed it and it looked fine! Try again here…
You want to use that as a sig ??
It was said in The Pit, so fine. But I always understood the idea of the general forums was to fight ignorance, not further it.
Either I’m seriously mistaken or things are getting a little out of hand.
Yes.
There are personal reasons why that way of looking at the country a person lives in appeals to me…so, fuck you.
I have no idea what you are talking about, and frankly, I don’t care.
Wow, John, you got indirectly involved in an international incident, visited France when Paris was shut down, got treated rudely by the merchants there, broke your leg, had your gun-cane taken and bandied about in an airport, all this while suffering from serious jet lag that affected you the whole trip. No wonder you are so cranky.
Dear Gary:
I have had extended visits and worked in London (England), Scotland, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Venezuela. I like some things about the UK, in fact in each country I visited I found things I liked, and things I disliked. Having had a liberal education before going to Engineering School, I even know a great deal of the history and culture of Europe.
I, for one, simply like the US better, esp. where I live. It’s not that the other countries had anything “wrong” with them, they simply were too foreign for me to live in comfortably.
If you care about a sample size of one, this is one opinion.
But PS: London women are hot!
Maeglin, that’s an interesting theory - The last recourse of the logically inept is to criticize vocabulary. Personally, I’d say that a better example of logical ineptitiude is to make statements like the above with no reasoning to back them. Please, I would be fascinated to see you try and it would be far less dull than your postings to date. If it’s a bit hard for you, feel free to go back to the usual insults and swearing.
Gilly,
I’m not American. I’m Irish. I love Ireland. I love people to visit Ireland. There is nothing I love more than have different nationalities and cultures blending.
I found what John said offensive. Not offensive enough to flame him for it, though, for the following reason.
It’s his opinion.
He had a bad experience while travelling. If that happened to me, I could understand whey he might not want to travel abroad again.
To say that line seriously would be ignorant. It would indicvate that there is no greater place on earth than the place you are from, and that everywhere else is positively sub-par to anything in your home country.
I also have respect enough for John to respect his opinion.
Methinks that post was tounge in cheek. which is why I will agree to differ with him if he believes it.
Now read this post, and Insert “British” for “Irish” and “UK” for Ireland.
Do you see where London_Calling was coming from? Did you really need to jump on his ass, for being offended by that remark?
as an aside to everyone
Goddammit I hate this latest brood of Fuckwads. their “USA SUCKS” crap has made 2 of my favourite posters make statements that offended me.
goddamn wankmops.
Wankmops? 10.0!
I agree with TwistySkates. London_Calling was just expressing his surprise at Corrado’s statement. A surprise I share, since I generally know Corrado as a very intelligent and openminded guy.
Then again, it’s his opinion, and he’s entitled to it.
But there’s no way in hell a poster like London_Calling deserves a “fuck you”.
Thanks Loopy Larigan and Coldie – I’m glad you both share my perspective (I was starting to wonder if it was just me being ‘sensitive’).
I guess after 500 ish posts and making points in The Pit, it’s about time I got a little abuse. Having spend my formative years being told to do much worse by 30,000 Arsenal Gooners on Saturday afternoons, it is kind of refreshingly naïve. And I doubt if Gilly wears Doc Martins with quite the same intent.
As for what Mr Corrodo said well, it is The Pit so anything goes. It’s unfortunate but it’s his integrity. Live and let live.
I’m amazed that you don’t think that just a little narrow-minded. I had a bad experience eating out ONCE but it didn’t put me off ever eating out again.
London_calling, I dont know about the doc martins, but
Dirk wears white socks 
(hope you get the reference)
As for the comment about being narrow-minded, There is no correlation between eating and travelling, unless of course you travel to eat.