Yes, well, I've been on package tours many times before, so your advert really 'bought' my eye. Yesss I'm sick and tired of being treated like a sheep!
I mean what's the point of going abroad, if your just another tourist carted around in buses surrounded by sweaty mindless oaves from Kettering and Boventry with their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios, complaining about the tea: "Oh, they don't make it properly, do they?" And stopping at endless Majorcan bodegas selling fish and chips and Watney's Red Barrel and calamaries and two veg.
And sitting in their cotton sun frocks, squirting Timothy Whites sun cream all over their puffy, raw, swollen, purulent flesh, 'cos they overdid it on the first day.
And being herded into endless Hotel Miramars and Bellevueses, Continentals with their modern international luxury roomettes...
...and swimming pools full of draught Red Barrel and fat German businessmen pretending to be acrobats and forming pyramids and frightening the children and barging into the queues.
And if you're not at your table spot on seven you miss your bowl of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup, the first item on the menu of International Cuisine.
Every Thursday night there's bloody cabaret in the bar featuring some tiny, emaciated dago with nine-inch hips and some fat bloated tart with her hair Brylcremed down and big arse presenting Flamenco for Foreigners.
And adenoidal typists from Birmingham with flabby white legs and diarrhea trying to pick up hairy, bandy-legged, wop waiters called Manuel.
And once a week there's an excursion to local Roman remains, where you can buy cherryade and melted ice cream and bleedin' Watney's Red Barrel.
And one night they take you to a typical restaurant with local atmosphere and color and you sit next to a party of people from Rhyl who keep singing
"Toray Mahlina!/ Toray Malina!"
And you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic camera and Dr. Scholl's sandals and last Tuesday's Daily Express and he drones on and on and on about how Ian Smith should be running the country and how many languages Margaret Powell can speak and then he THROWS UP all over the cuba libres.
And spending four days on the tarmac at Luton Airport on a five-day package tour with nothing to eat but dry British Airways-type sandwiches.
And you can't even get a glass of Watney's Red Barrel because you're still in England and the bloody bar closes every time you're thirsty. And the kids are crying and vomiting and breaking the plastic ashtrays.
They keep telling you it'll only be another hour, but you know damn well your plane is still in Iceland, and has to come back and take a party of...Shut up!...take a party of Swedes to Yugoslavia, before it can load you up at 3 a.m. in the morning. And then you sit on the tarmac for four hours because of unforeseen difficulties, i.e. the permanent strike of air traffic control over Paris. When you finally get to Malaga airport, everybody's queueing for the bloody toilet, [he slips away from the man in the white coat by climbing over the audience] and queueing for the bloody armed customs officers, and queueing for the bloody bus that isn't there, waiting to take you to the hotel that hasn't yet been built. When you finally get to the half-built Algerian ruin called the Hotel del Sol, by paying half your holiday money to a licensed bandit in a taxi, there's no water in the pool, there's no water in the bog, there's no water in the tap, there's only a bleeding lizard in the bidet, and half the rooms are double-booked, and you can't sleep anyway, 'cause of the permanent twenty-four hour drilling of the foundations of the hotel next door. Meanwhile, the Spanish National Tourist Board promises you the raging cholera epidemic is merely a mild outbreak of Spanish Tummy, rather like the previous outbreak in 1616 even the bloody rats are dying from it!
Meanwhile, the bloody Guardia are busy arresting 16-year-olds for kissing in the streets.
And finally on the last day in the airport lounge, everybody's buying little awful horrid donkeys with their names on, and bullfight posters with their own names on, like Antonio ----, Mr Brian Pules of Norwich. And then finally when you get to bloody Luton, you're ---- ---- for another four hours, while they find a plane that has to take you back to Manchester. And when you finally get to Manchester, there's only another bloody bus you have to wait sixteen hours for...
posted April 20, 2003 16:32
posted April 20, 2003 16:36
posted April 20, 2003 16:38
posted April 21, 2003 13:00
