My Europe Trip: Rage Quit Edition · 7:41am Jun 10th, 2014
So I've recently gotten back from my Europe trip, and my internal clock is still messed up. So to pass the time, and give you guys an update while I'm still sorting through all the photos I have, I figured I'd give a condensed version of my Europe trip, venting everything I didn't like about the trip in a swear-laden, Michael-from-Achievement-Hunter like session of bitterness and anger. That way, when I go over the trip in greater detail, covering a few days at a time complete with pictures, I'll be able to present a more fair picture for Europe.
WARNING: The following blog contains excessive fucking coarse language, and is intended for comedic purposes.
So a few months ago, my mom asked me if I wanted to go on a trip to Europe. It was a pilgrimage, because we were both practicing Catholics. She was honest about that, and I was interested. I'm a history student, so why the fuck not?
Because Europe is horrible, that's why the fuck not. So we get on a plane to Toronto first, a five hour flight. Not easy, but doable for me. Then, we have the second part of the trip where we go to Frankfurt. But Musketeer, you say, doesn't Germany have like more protestants than Catholics in those parts, so what is there to pilgrimage to? If you asked that, you're an absolute fucking genius and deserve a job more than our group's travel agent. You see the actual tour/pilgrimage took us through Portugal, Spain, France and Italy. Now Portugal is like the closest to North America, but because my group's travel agent doesn't have a globe, he sent us all the way from Toronto to Frankfurt, 12 hour flight over the Atlantic Ocean, and only then do we get on a plane to Lisbon Portugal.
So we get to Lisbon, and I'm like thanking God we didn't crash, and because it's a pilgrimage, when we get on this tiny-ass bus. I'm six feet four inches tall, and the buses all have like four inches of leg room, so it's cramped. And it's Southern Europe, so it's hot too, and the AC sucks. But most of the group are old Italian immigrants living in Canada who speak Italian as much as English, so they're complaining that the bus is too cold. It's 25 celcius in the bus. That is not too cold, that is molten lava by Canadian standards. So its cramped, and hot. Also there's a group of men from Kayralla, India, including our priest for the pilgrimage, who has the worst body odor ever. My mom became physically ill this guy was so stinky. And when we tried sitting in different parts of the bus he followed us for no reason. So the bus is cramped, hot, stinky and noisy, because the Indians like to sing at the top of their lungs to, but never in English.
We never spent more than one day without having to get in the damn bus.
Now another thing about Europe that you have to remember is that people who emigrated from it to North America are the people who realized life in Europe sucked, leaving all the people who didn't realize this behind, so they have a lot fewer things that make life nice. Like for instance thermostats that work. First hotel would set the temperature automatically to 30 degrees celcius. Now my mom and I are part Irish, we have a melting point of 37 degrees, we reach that point and physically melt.
Also, tiny elevators that can only fit two people inside including luggage, and if the doors close on your arm, they don't open back up because your body is blocking them. No, the doors will try to physically crush you rather than just wait two seconds for you to get inside. Now a lot of the hotel bathrooms had bathtubs with no plugs, so you couldn't take a bath, and those that did leaked. Furthermore the shower curtains were all so short that if you weren't careful, you'd spray the entire bathroom. There were also no face-cloths at any point in the trip at any of the hotels, and no Kleenex for half the trip either.
Lastly, Europeans have these things called bidets, which are hoses that are used to shoot water up your asshole, and clean it, like a pressure washer, so you don't have to wipe with toilet paper. So you want to take a shit, and want a clean ass? Fuck you, you gotta use the hose. I kid of course because if they didn't have toilet paper then nobody would travel there, and their economy would be even worse. Which brings me to the cost of things.
The Euro is worth about $1.60 Canadian, but everything is still priced like it's in Canada. Bottle of water in Canada? $2. Same thing in Europe? 2 Euros. Which is interesting because there are people protesting pay cuts and government spending and complaining about the economy. So they have theses really high prices, but a shit economy.
Europe also has Gypsies. They don't call them Sinta Roma or anything politically correct because they're in Europe, and fuck it, they're Gypsies. And a lot of them beg, like almost all. That or they pickpocket, and this is what our group's guide told us when we were travelling.
On the note of our guide, she had a terrible taste in food. She brought us to places for lunch. One place my mom had sheep knees that were all bone, fat, grease and gristle that had no meat, while I had fish with enough bones in one square inch to choke an elephant on them. Then the guide took us to a place that charged 15 Euros for a tiny plate of bland, tasteless, greasy calamari. After that we stopped having lunch where she told us to.
So, if you go to Europe, you're going to be hot, have to deal with high prices, dirty faces and assholes, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
Tune in next time when I cover my time in Fatima, Portugal with a candid and fair assessment of things in large detail, and with pictures, alongside my real opinion of the place.
Hey, musketeer! You couldn't have picked a worse time to come back! Welcome.
Sounds like the guide might be involved in a tourist racket.
2195012 How did I manage that?
2195015 Both my mother and I suspected much the same. Although the guide she chose for our visit to Florence was quite good.
2195028
Boatloads of drama have inundated the site. Summer has descended upon FiMFiction.
2195030 Oh, what did knighty do this time?
Man, that sucks. I'm so ready to go to Europe.
2195151 You're alive at this hour? How are you?
2195158 I'm just getting ready to go to work. It's 7:30 AM. lol
I hope things get better on your trip. Quite eye-opening, isn't it? Culture shock.
2195167 Oh, I've already finished the trip and am now home once again. As for culture shock, if I had to generalize it, I'd have to say that in terms of personal amenities, the absence of a great deal of certain items despite being part of the developed world served to add to the sense that the places I visited had gone rather stagnant.
Last time I went to Europe was five years ago for a two-week excursion to France and Spain (one week each), and I spent the entire week in Spain sick as a dog because I must've eaten something funky on the way there from France. If that didn't happen to you, I'd say you had a pretty good trip.
Oh, and in terms of the bus, didn't you mean to say that the AC blows?
2195215 Doesn't work.
2195220
Dude,
I have lived in Hong-Kong. I have lived in Sweden. I have probably spent several cumulative years all over the US. All these experiences amply demonstrated how good we have it here in Canada. Either that, or expectations and upbringing are 90% of perceived happiness!
Doesn't come to Brazil if you think 25 celsius is a molten hell. We had 43 celsius last summer, and it was worse than death.
2195377 I'm only ever going to go south for winters now I think.
2195381
Winter is fine, but 25 celsius is the common temperature during the day. You will need a lot of Ice Cream, and probably, make touring at night, lol.
2195390 Why aren't you on Skype? Is it still being uncooperative? We can catch up on there if possible.
2195402
That's because I am on my lunch break, and I do not turn my computer on. Typing from my cell phone. I will be available in 6 hours or so.
2195412 Ah, best of luck to you then.
2195220 I'm guessing the joke went over your head. Oh well. It was bad anyway.
2195423 It didn't. I was briefly tempted to write "The AC sucked" as an explanation of why it blowed, but decided to just give the real reason, it just didn't work. It blew air, but it was the exact same temperature or warmer than the air in the room. Which defeats the purpose of air conditioning really.
2195429 Sounds like another day in the life of a service master employee. I love my job though.
2195150
For once it wasn't Knighty. Someone faked their own death and made their account into a "memorial," while their sockpuppet account remained active and they went on Skype repeatedly. Then there was an art thief drama queen who claimed to be raped one day, then two days later claimed that she had gotten a positive pregnancy test (biologically impossible, btw), and she also said she was two different ages, 20 and 23, when she joined the site like two months ago or something. somebadauthor revealed her bullshit, and then she got hordes of dumbass defenders who said things like "SHE WOULD NEVER LIE," which was pretty damn funny, because SBA included a ton of evidence. Para made a blog on it too, and naturally there were a few dumbasses there, too, and one of them turned out to be threatening suicide because he was losing the argument. Tons and tons of fetid bullshit.
2196229 I refute dumbass defenders! She was a friend of ours, we trusted her.
As far as we knew she WASN'T the kind of heinous bitch who would lie like that. (Though it did make fucking sense to me when someone said it, who blogs about a rape HERE before telling the cops or the boyfriend?)
We were NOT dumbasses, we were.... noble idiots.
2196496
Well, there were also the multiple instances of claiming other artists' artwork as her own. I would think that would be at least somewhat easier to notice, as "her" style was different for every piece.
2196616 it would've been if I hung out on deviantart.
2196616 I'm not defending what she did. It was awful. But she was one of the first people to fav one of my stories, one of my first followers, and she was just generally nice to me
I lost a friend here. Nothing about this wasn't terrible.
2196229 I'd have to hear the specific dates of the purported rape and the positive pregnancy test, rather than in articulated references of relative time before I deem something of the sort biologically impossible. However given the other things surrounding this, I'm inclined to just stay out of it.
If all is true, and she lied about being raped...
Just...
stream1.gifsoup.com/view3/1290449/picard-facepalm-o.gif
2196728 It's painful to admit one was wrong, but a person who does those things should not be validated and supported in their ways by their betters. You did the write thing in leaving.
2197858
She said that she was raped, on that very day, and then two days later she said she got a positive pregnancy test. It's total bullshit.
2197862 Yeah, the best pregnancy tests can only detect when a woman is like 1-2 weeks in, right? And that's like with lab-work in the doctor's office, not some take-home kit. Not to mention that conception can regularly take place 24 hours after the actual act of coitus.
2197876
Pregnancy tests detect a discrepancy in hormones that usually manifest in pregnant women several weeks along. As far as I'm aware, the hormone levels only change after the fertilized zygote has embedded itself in the uterine wall, which can still be a great while from fertilization, even after that potential 1-2 day delay as the sperm travel to the egg. I can't say much more beyond that, because then I'd be completely talking out of my ass, but yes, pregnancy detection in two days is pretty much impossibru.
2198851 Good point.
Memo to self, don't go to Europe.