Not that crazy but I'd never seen anything like it before.
Over 15 years ago, I was standing in a very long line at St. Basil's in Moscow. A small pack of tourists (half a dozen or so) started to "sneak" their way into cutting in line. About 30 French people in a tour group immediately started scolding them in loud unison. They shamed them into taking their place at the end of the line. It was such an automatic and united scolding. Highly entertaining.
A fellow traveler, far more experienced than I am, said that the French are known for doing that sort of thing.
A big group of Chinese tourists wanted to be first on a boat for some reason so they all just started shoving everyone out of the way, including little old ladies and children. It was really shocking behavior, like suddenly everyone around them was no longer a person. The boat was huge and had plenty of room for everyone so it wasn't really obvious why they decided to attack people, they didn't really gain anything by being the first aboard.
For a while I worked at a theme park in central Florida. Yeah, it's that one. Some of the guests went wild.
One time I was walking through a guest area on my way to the break room when a dude pushing a stroller ran into me without looking. Apologies on both sides and then the dude tried to hand me something. I put my hands behind my back as a kind of "no thanks," we're not really supposed to take things from guests. I looked down and it was a used diaper. He thought he could just hand a park employee his child's shit filled Pampers and that we'd take care of it. There was a trash can literally right behind him, but thinking on it later where did he change the diaper? There's trash cans in the bathrooms and they all have changing stations... did he just change the kid outside? Is that a thing parents do?
Another time I was helping the transportation department during a park closure. Up on the monorail platform I was shoulder to shoulder with like a thousand people. A train arrives, the doors and gates open, and people start boarding. A woman who'd been standing near me stopped at the doors, turned to face me, poked her finger into my chest and shouted "YOU RUINED OUR VACATION!" She stared daggers into my soul as she walked backwards like a Bond villain into the car and continued staring me down as the doors closed and the train left the station. I have no clue who this was or what I had done.
Finally, I had to break up a fight where grown ass adults were yelling at each other and had started spitting on each other's children (like WTF). No idea who started it or even if the two groups knew each other, but shit was looking to come to blows and the security people weren't quite there yet. Another park employee and I stepped up between them with a "come on folks" and "this is a place for families." Both of us were big guys so we made a wall between them, I'm 6'2 and was about 280lbs at the time (128cm [typo edit: 182 lol] and almost 130 kgs [edit for my fellow Americans: that's about one refrigerator in height and around weight of a Shetland pony]). Saw the parents faces drop from anger to embarrassment immediately realizing how dumb they were being when security jogged up and a manager on a Segway rolled in.
The most magical place in central Florida really brings out the strange in some folks.
[off topic?]
I live in New York City. One of my friends used to teach an art history course at the4 College of Staten Island.
She once told me that she'd had students who'd never travelled the 12 miles to get to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. The Met is considered one of the top museums in the world, but going there was too much hassle
I was in the Navy and one of my shipmates got so drunk he passed out on a bench in front of the fountain at the Kings Cross intersection in Sydney. So a prostitute told him he was going to get arrested and when he spoke she realized he was American and somehow one thing leading to the other....
She gave him a bj at 7am during the beginning of rush hour traffic. She later took us to a couple private bars that were creepy and she stole his Levi's later after they had sex and she left
this.
tl;dr: showed up to hotel a day before their room was ready, wanted to sleep in the lobby, got abusive and violent with the staff when they refused, then accused the police of assault when they were forcibly escorted out after refusing for hours to leave.
this got attention in swedish media first, and only got a response from the ccp after it had gone viral.
A British tourist riding on the worst metro line left her (expensive) phone on the seat and went behind the seat to look at the metro map. Even stayed there while the doors were open and at least me and three more people could have easily snatched it and left. I don't think the subway in the UK is much better so not sure what she was thinking.
Spend money (waste fuel, and worse: waste precious time) to go to touristic places so they can take the exact same picture/video everyone else has taken, and share it on the exact same social networks everyone else has done. Why not just buy a postcard or repost a photo already shared. Why not, you know, look around and suddenly realize there are many other things worth looking at... things that may not even be that remote from where they live.
For me, that's one of the most extreme demonstration of generalized craziness, if not worse. Or maybe it's just me who's crazy (or worse)?
Edit: added a missing word.
Overdose on heroin in a country that didn't really have any emergency services.
Shit on the sidewalk.
Switzerland. Taking the very busy cableway down the mountain. People waiting in line to get in. Next stop, I see some people exiting and immediately getting in line again there. Apparently they thought you need to get in line again at every stop. Crazy. Sweet maybe, but crazy.
A family was trying to have a 3-day-old baguette and breaking their teeth on it
Not the craziest thing in this thread but inside a train, arguing loudly on the phone.
It sounded like the tourist was scammed or something.
I was in the line to get tickets for Leeds Castle in UK. Some guy got off a bus ran past the line to the ticket guy. He started slamming his hands down and yelling "Fish and Chips" over and over again.
The ticket guy wasn't selling any food and wasn't going to sell him a ticket unless he got in line. After about 2 minutes of this he just got back on the bus.
Out fishing with some buddies on a river popular for its springs and people floating on inner tubes.
Except, we were well south of the exit for tubers to be picked up by the shuttle and taken back to the start, and we start hearing a loud group approaching. Eventually they saw us and loudly spoke to each other saying something about "asking the rednecks". When they got closer they did, to the point of saying, "Hey rednecks, where is the exit for tubers? Did we pass it or is it coming up?"
They were probably a 20 minute float past the exit. I told them they had about another 20 minutes to go.
"Thank you rednecks!"
Hide an STI
I once saw a lady pick up her toddler, help him stand on a trashcan, and piss into it.
Attempt to hitchhike across the US. No clue if they made it, but I carried them through Kentucky.
I say this as someone who has successfully hitchhiked the length and breadth of the 48 states, but these folks were not prepared for what they were attempting.
