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The constant harping and belittling “banter” from Brits that stopped the second I started telling folks I was Canadian.
I would say the overall experience of United delaying my outbound flight, causing me to miss a connecting flight, causing me to miss the rehearsal dinner at the wedding I was going to, and then on my flight home turning the plane around due to mechanical problems and not being able to get me on a flight until the next evening, causing me to miss work.
Wedding was a blast though.
A German, who was being extremely racist, walked over to a friend of mine and I and asked me why I was hanging around *this* person as if it were a problem. This happened in Mannheim.
Getting roofied and coming to in the middle of the night in an industrial area of Bergen with no phone or room key definitely sucked.
My family and I got mugged in broad daylight in a pretty busy place in Paris. We already knew pickpocketing was an ongoing problem but thankfully my dad knew to wear a fake gold wrist watch. We told some police that we’re standing at the next few blocks and they were just like “what do you want us to do about it?”
Something like this has never happened to me at NYC so it was jarring seeing it happen on first account.
Getting my change thrown at me at a cafe in Rome’s main train terminal. I have no idea what I did to set off an international incident, but it happened.
Had a bad experience with a hostel in Melbourne that cancelled our reservations without telling us before we arrived. Ended up having to sleep in our car that night.
Being in New Zealand and mentioning I’m an American and I own guns. My god the depth of the self-righteous pool they tapped into touched the core of the earth.
It might be a tie between 1. Having snow+general dysfunction and incompetence tack a spontaneous 4 hours on the ground IN THE PLANE at SeaTac Airport in Washington on the front of an already brutal 10 hour flight to France, and 2. Getting OFF a 10 hour transatlantic flight to Germany, escaping the airport, braving the unbelievably crowded DeutscheBahn ticket office, only to board the train and discover that on DB trains, a ticket does not guarantee you an actual seat. Cue 4 more hours of travel, except now on a metal train floor.
I got spit on in Paris and robbed at knifepoint.
LaGuardia Airport.
Was pickpocketed in Italy, which sucked. Overall it was still a fun trip, though.
Back in the day, the Hovercraft ride across the Channel, on a day when the sea was choppy. I don’t know if I vomited, probably did, but I felt sick for a couple of hours afterward.
I found Prague to be rude, and I have found people from Prague to be rude when I tried to talk to them in other countries. Nothing traumatic, but noticeable.
Trains in Germany. I could never figure out which tickets and reservations I needed. No matter how many tickets and reservations I bought, it seemed like I always needed more of them, or that I purchased the wrong one. I started to suspect the train people were fleecing me. I took trains all over Europe and only had this problem in Germany.
I was in Edinburgh and had to get to the Glasgow airport by 7am to catch a flight out to one of the smaller Scottish islands, there to begin a self-guided tour. So I woke up at 4:30 to get an early train, and barely made it in time for the flight.
…Except the flight was delayed because of fog at the destination. Cue a 10 hour wait in the airport. Once, there was a slot where they could have left, but apparently happened to be refueling at the time. Whomp whomp. There weren’t any other planes going there that day, and the planes for the next several days were totally booked out.
In the end, I had to stay the night at the Glasgow Airport Holiday Inn, which was small, dirty, and had problems with the fire alarms resulting in an evacuation at 2am. Finally, the next day, the tour company chartered a bus for a 3 hour drive to a ferry terminal, where we caught a 6 hour ferry to the island.
In Alaska a truck drove past and threw shit at my 60 year old mother. That really sucked.
Everything about my three hour layover in Frankfurt. Just horrible.
It was hard to sleep in Iceland because the sun was always out.
We also got E. Coli from a famous ice cream stop. It was worth it though.
UK can be really sketchy, absolutely terrible conditions in “minority neighbourhoods”, gangs of kids on motorbikes assaulting people, everyone is angry if you mention any flaws, it’s also not exactly a plus to be an American usually. Racism isn’t as hated as it is in the US. My Nigerian neighbor got harassed by our landlord & company for a year (to try to get him to move out, like they do with all Africans) eventually they set up a scheme with other tenants to frame him. They broke his ankle breaking into his room, called police and all lied and got him arrested all lying saying he tried to stab them when he tried to break into THEIR room. My other Greek neighbor got his ankle broken by a group of young chavs trying to protect his wife. Now that I mention it, what’s up with the UK and ankles?
Canadian downtowns can looks like the walking dead met skid row but you’re not allowed to protect yourself. It’s even worse to be an American here. It’s hard to afford living too.
Ironically these are the only two places where, regardless of law, I felt the need to carry a weapon for self defense.
Not me, but my friend went to London for a trip. He said he went to a bar and got called a fat American unprovoked. He turned around and lo and behold the people calling him that were fatter than him lol
In Ireland. On a self guided horseback riding trip. We were putting our horses in the paddock and a white van drive past us into the parking area of the BnB we were staying at. Didn’t think much of it. It’s a BnB.
But as we were walking back up to the house we heard honking, then the van peeled out. When we got back to the barn where all of our saddle bags were, they were completely torn apart, our stuff was all over the barn.
Went into the BnB and the wonderful woman who runs it was freaking out. Saying she found a stranger(not what she called them, she had a more colorful phrase for a Romani) rifling through her stuff in an off limits area. She was really upset(her husband had been take. To the hospital the day before so she was trying to do everything).
That’s when we realized what had happened. Luckily they didn’t take anything if value, I just don’t think they had enough time as they saw us coming back(hence the honking to warn the others).
I’ve been all over and almost every experience was fantastic.
The worst experience I had – really the only bad experience – was in Germany. All my ancestors came from Northern Europe – I am a blond, pale, blue eyed woman. I blend in in much of that region and I’ve done a lot of solo travel, so I try to blend in. I was sitting at a train station waiting to meet a friend when an older man sat down next to me and started talking to me (in German of course). I replied back (in German) that I don’t speak much German – and he asked (in German) where I was from. I replied back that I am from the US. He started screaming at me about Americans coming to Germany and not bothering to learn any of the language – blah, blah, blah.
I don’t know what his deal was, but I walked away as quickly as I could.
I loved Germany, but that was no fun.
In Italy, had to make a connecting flight. Da Vinci was closed for some reason, so they were routing large amounts of airline traffic through the other airports.
But they hadn’t staffed up for the extra traffic, I mean why have people work more hours *just because there’s a lot more work to do?*
So first of all, there are multiple corridors coming from different terminals and flowing toward a central area where passports and tickets are being checked. There was such a jam-up that people coming out of corridors ahead of us were cramming themselves into the main area, and our corridor was actually moving slightly *backwards*. And we had about 40 minutes to get to our connecting flight. I tried to press through a bit, but in terms of pushing and shoving your way forward, this polite Southern boy was playing checkers and these Italians were playing grenade launcher skeet shooting. What I am saying is, Italians can push and shove with the best of them.
I snapped when a frail-looking octogenarian lady stuck her bony elbow into my ribs and *twisted* to nudge her way in front of me.
What the fuck. OK, Italy, we will play it your way. As an American, my instincts, all my training, had to be suppressed if I was ever going to get out of this fuckin airport. And although I don’t have the experience with fighting my my to the front like a savage, I do have the advantage that, in Italy, I am a giant. I told my wife to loop her arms around my backpack and lace her fingers and hold on for dear life, so she wouldn’t get left behind, and I went all storming-the-beach-at-Normandy on that crowd. I pressed forward without any consideration that I could be suffocating or crushing people, I stuck my arms forward and pried people apart to make a hole for us to take two small steps forward, and then I did it again and again. When someone tried to push in front of my I just shouldered them to the side, and in this way I fought us inch by inch to one of the stalls. Minutes to spare at this point.
For people who don’t hail from one of the Great Queuing Nations, you have to understand how terrible this felt. It wasn’t rage, but desperation that fueled me, and I felt like absolute human dogshit the entire half hour or so I was doing this. To the American psyche, this is Hague Tribunal level, crimes against humanity type shit.
And then the whole thing went FULL ITALY. I will point out here that there were six stalls to process travellers, but only two of them were manned. Because, as I said, why staff up just because of a completely predictable chaos situation when you can just carry on as usual despite a 200% increase in volume? We were one traveller away from the window, and this motherfucker (the passport/ticket checker) looks at his watch, puts a sign in front of his window, and takes out a sandwich and a book. WHAT THE EVERLOVING FUCK. Nevermind that there is a scene going on that is teetering perilously close to a recreation of the Altamont Free Concert, nevermind that there are *thousands* of people backed up and struggling to breath while they try to fight for access to one of only two stations, it’s my union-guaranteed lunch break so I’m gonna take every second of it, right on time, and all you travellers can fuck off if you don’t like it.
I fought my way sideways to the other booth, eventually, and by this time we were way late for our connection, but I figured they have to be delaying the flights at least a little because of the madhouse down here. We ended up being about 40 minutes late, and we made it onto our flight by sprinting to the gate and arrived just as they were about to shut down boarding.
I consider myself pretty mellow about people having their own ways of doing things, and accepting that things won’t work in other countries like you’re used to at home, that’s part of the experience of travelling, but after all that I was not feeling the cultural relativism. That shit was just a stupid, grabasstic clusterfuck of a mess. I couldn’t come to any conclusion other than that they planned to reroute all that air traffic and then this airport did absolutely nothing to prepare for the massive volume increase. That’s like a *belligerent* level of incompetence.
Not sure if Russia counts as developed, but was on a train trip in Southern Russia about 20 years ago. The travel advice was to stuff a towel under your door at night, because of the possibility of a train robbery. Robbers at the time were using military grade knockout gas before they fleeced the cabin.
Nothing happened, but the idea wasn’t very relaxing.
The amount of people trying to scam and harass me in Rome was tiresome. Sure, it was peak tourism season and I’m American, but I’m pretty well travelled and I’ve not seen anything comparable.
Lisbon, 2016. On the day we were supposed to leave the Portuguese Airport Security people decided they were going to have a 24 hour strike. Stood in the security line for 4 hours to get through the security line and missed our flight. Saw a dude have a heart attack in the line too. After that we said fuck it, got on a train to Madrid, and flew home from there.
British Rail makes Amtrak look like a Japanese high speed bullet train. Shocking how terrible it was to ride the train from Edinburgh to Southampton.
The malicious racism of some airport security is so staggering that its clear they want many people from certain countries to miss their connecting flights. Italy is particularly bad, 2-3x I flew there from Africa and they’d ALWAYS make everyone go through security three times: twice immediately after getting off the plane and then once again later.
The Tokyo Police once randomly stopped me and my buddies as we were walking down a sidewalk. They weren’t being assholes, they were actually pretty friendly and all they did was ask for our passports (at which point we freaked the fuck out since we were all military and were originally in Okinawa for a UDP. We only went to Tokyo for a 4-day weekend and didn’t need passports, nor did we have any either). Luckily state IDs were ok so me and one of my buddies used our state IDs while the other two used their military IDs. Pretty pleasant experience though, all things considered (we talked about it later and came to the realization that they probably stopped us because one of my buddies had a camera and was taking pictures while we were near foreign embassies).
Later that day though in Akihabara we tried getting a taxi and the driver aggressively told us to fuck off basically. 🙁
I’m like 30% sure that The Atlanta airport doesn’t count as a developed country, but that would be it.
I’m not wealthy but saved my pennies to get a first class ticket in the US. I just wanted to try it once. The guy sitting next to me was drinking from alcohol he snuck on in little nips. started sexually harassing me. I finally told a flight attendant. Instead of moving him they maybe me sit in the fold down seat near the cockpit for the whole flight. Didn’t even get an apology and they let him keep drinking.