We’re on a scuba diving tour/school in the Philippines. Our guides’ differing levels of English vary from good to excellent. One of them asks:
Guide: “Any last questions before we start your first open water dive?”
Tourist: *Raises hand.* “Yeah, why do we always go backwards out of the boat?”
Guide: “Well, that is because if you went forward, you’d still be in the boat.”
Always love a technically correct answer!
It’s New Year’s Day, and I’m working at a London tourist attraction.
Me: “Happy New Year! Welcome!”
Customer: “Thank you. And you, too! We’re surprised you have New Year’s over here!”
Me: *Confused.* “Uh… why is that? It’s New Year everywhere!”
Customer: “Oh, it’s just the first New Year was when Jesus founded America 2024 years ago, so we’re surprised to see it out here too.”
I smile, take their tickets, and wave them inside. My coworker, who also happens to be from the USA originally, is shaking their head.
Me: “Is that a joke?”
Coworker: “That’s the sad part. It could be real.”
Me: “Is education just… not a thing in America?”
Coworker: “Depending on the state, it’s not generally encouraged.”
Related:
Please Be A Prank, Please Be A Prank…, Part 6
Please Be A Prank, Please Be A Prank…, Part 5
Please Be A Prank, Please Be A Prank…, Part 4
Please Be A Prank, Please Be A Prank…, Part 3
Please Be A Prank, Please Be A Prank…, Part 2
I’m American, planning a vacation to Norway with a friend who has never traveled much, and never left the USA, but recently decided he wanted to explore the land of his ancestral heritage. I’ve been all over the world and lived overseas a few times as a freelance English teacher, so he’s asked me to go with him and help him with things like planning and getting around without a car.
We get together a few weeks after we decide that the trip is definitely happening – still several months before the actual trip itself – to talk about our itinerary.
Me: “Have you looked up some things you want to do?”
He proceeds to list off nearly twenty things, making it clear that all he’s done is open TripAdvisor and list every possible result.
Me: “[Friend], we’re only going for two weeks. There’s no way we’re going to be able to do all of that.”
Friend: “I think we can. It’s only like twenty things, and we’re there for fifteen days. We’ll have to double up for a few days, but we can get it all in.”
Me: “You’re really overestimating things. First off, you’ve never experienced jet lag before, so it might take you a day or two just to feel good enough to leave the hotel room after we check in.”
Friend: “Then we’ll just double up a few more things later in the trip, or even triple up.”
Me: “Even if we did find a magic schedule that lets us cram everything in, with travel time, food, and everything else, that’s going to leave us completely exhausted.”
Friend: “Okay, then what do you suggest we do?”
Me: “The way I plan a trip like this is to plan on doing one big thing for every two or three days. So that means taking your list, and choosing five things you DEFINITELY want to do, and we’ll make sure to schedule those at some point. After that, find three or four things that you want to do, but don’t really HAVE to do. That gives us something to do if we have extra energy someday, or if it’s close to something else that we’re doing.”
Friend: “But that’s only ten things. We’re there for fifteen days. What do we do with all the extra time?”
Me: “Find a nice place to hang out and just experience the culture and how things work in Norway. Or walk around for a while and see if something looks fun even though it’s not advertised on TripAdvisor. Maybe find a restaurant that looks like it has good food instead of eating at McDonald’s or some overpriced tourist hotspot.”
Friend: “That sounds boring.”
We discuss it for a while, and then I propose a solution.
Me: “How about this? We’ll take the first five days of our trip – starting with the first day you feel like getting out of bed after being jet lagged – and do it your way. You put together a list of things you want to do, and we’ll do them. After that, we’ll spend five days doing it my way. Any extra days at the end of the trip, you can choose which method to follow.”
Friend: “Sounds like a deal.”
We proceeded to plan the trip following that plan, and we arrived in Oslo. As predicted, my friend was in bed jet lagged for a day and a half after we landed, pushing his five-day schedule back because he had planned on doing something big in the evening a few hours after we landed. He finally dragged himself out of bed for dinner on our first full day in Oslo and declared that we would start following his itinerary tomorrow.
We spent three days following his INSANELY busy schedule, basically trekking back and forth across Oslo for twelve hours a day or more, before he asked for a day off because he was exhausted. I suggested that, after taking a day to rest, we try out my method for a day or two and went back to his schedule when he was ready to go again.
We never went back to his schedule. By the second day of traveling my way, he admitted that his planning had sucked. We spent the rest of the trip doing what I had originally suggested – wandering around finding cool, fun things to see and try, with the occasional “must do” activity every few days. It ended up being a really fun, rewarding trip, and we started talking about other trips we should take.
I know some people do enjoy having a firm and busy itinerary when they travel, but sometimes it also pays to slow down and just… be there.
I posted this story. And because good things always come in threes, and bad things always come in twos, it’s time for the story of the second time my family went to Las Vegas.
This time, at least, I was over twenty-one, but the group was larger: I brought my girlfriend, my brother brought his girlfriend, my other brother brought his wife, and my sister brought her boyfriend. So, in addition to the six people in the family already, we had four more people for a total of ten. And the one thing that we could all agree on was “how cool would it be to see the Grand Canyon?” So we decided to organize a trip to the Grand Canyon for all of us, but due to conflicting schedules, my oldest brother and his wife could not make it.
They were the lucky ones.
To keep costs down, we took redeye flights into Vegas. By the time we checked into our hotel and got to our rooms, it was 2 AM. In our infinite wisdom, we determined that we would go to the Grand Canyon on the first day of the trip. Get it out of the way, you know?
The bus picked us up at 5 AM to take us to the gathering point. That’s three hours of sleep.
We milled around the bus terminal for about an hour (thankfully, there was free coffee and donuts), mostly still feeling like we needed another ten hours of sleep. But the bus eventually picked us up and we climbed on board. The trip would take us over the Hoover Dam in about an hour, and we would stop there to do the tourist thing for about an hour before continuing on. Total travel time to the Grand Canyon: about five hours. Excellent, an opportunity to sleep.
Quoth the bus driver: “No one sleeps on my bus. If you sleep on my bus, I sleep on my bus, and that’s bad for all of us.”
And if you’re wondering, yes, he DID call people out when he saw them nodding off.
The Hoover Dam was pretty spectacular, but we were all feeling the exhaustion already. Surely it would be worth it: the Grand Canyon is one of the natural wonders of the world!
By the time we got there, we were all exhausted beyond reason, to the point that I got the Call of the Void looking at the Grand Canyon. It was truly amazing, breathtaking, and scary. It was now about 3 PM. I think. It’s a little fuzzy on the memory.
We were at the Grand Canyon for about ninety minutes (I think), and then we clambered back on the bus, where the no-sleeping rule from the bus driver was less strictly enforced, but still enforced if he saw too many people asleep. We figured, no problem, we’d be back to our hotel by about 8 or 9 PM, and we could sleep.
As the sun fell below the mesas of Arizona and the world grew dark, we realized that was optimistic.
I still don’t know the route we took to the Grand Canyon. I don’t know how we got there, how we got back, what took so long, or how time seemed to stretch and contract at the same time to make everything a nightmarishly torturous experience.
What I do know is that we got back to Vegas around 11 PM.
By this point, my brother and his girlfriend were sitting far away from each other, evidently to avoid getting upset at each other. My sister was curled into a tiny ball – legs up against her chest, arms around her legs, head down – and her boyfriend was across the aisle from her. I found out later that she was so tired and angry that she was trying really, really hard not to lash out physically (she is not a violent person, but she was pushed well beyond her limit). My parents? Passed out. I was still struggling along, and my girlfriend was asleep on my shoulder. Surely, surely, we were almost there.
The bus driver dropped everyone off in order, from one side of the Vegas Strip to the other. And it was our (un)lucky day: we were the last to be dropped off.
We finally managed to get off the bus and into the hotel at midnight. No one said anything. We just went to our rooms and passed out.
We STILL tell this story twenty years later, not because it’s a fun memory, but because it’s an example of how something so wondrous can be surrounded by absolute Hell. And it’s kind of funny.
And the kicker? The reason that my sister was ready to absolutely destroy someone? Around 9 PM, another passenger on the bus asked the driver if there was an advantage to going to the part of the Grand Canyon we had to, the long trip.
“If you’ve never been there before,” he said, “not really. The shorter trip or the longer one will get you an amazing view either way. I recommend the shorter trip to new people. It’s only about five or six hours.”
I am giving an English-speaking tour of the Colosseum to a bunch of tourists.
Tourist: “Why didn’t the Romans build a parking lot for the Colosseum?”
I laugh, thinking she’s joking.
Tourist: “Look, I’m not an idiot, I know they didn’t have cars back then and stuff, but they had horse and carriages, right? My husband and I tried to find parking to be here today, and it was really tough finding a spot! Those Romans should have thought of that!”
Me: “Uh, well, this is an ancient historical site, so there’s not much opportunity to forward a complaint to the original designers.”
Tourist: “This is why America is better. We have no issue tearing something down to make it better.”
I look at the rest of her tour group for a sign – any sign – that she’s joking. Alas… she is not.
