5 Tourist Stories That Will Make You Want To Just Stay Home
In many ways, tourists are great. Visitors to other countries generate trillions of dollars a year, and that's not even including all the free marketing from endless Instagram posts of lightly grilled baguettes. But of course it's not like only nice baguette eaters are allowed to travel the world. In fact, a good percentage of tourists tend to be full-on buttholes.
American Student Pretends To Be "Birthed" From A Sculpture, Gets Stuck
College is a fantastic time to try new experiences. Whether it's taking a class in a subject you’ve always been fascinated by or pounding so much Natty Light your BAC could fuel a lawnmower, college is all about growing as a person. That’s partially why hundreds of thousands of American students study abroad each year. Traveling to another country affords young people the opportunity to experience different cultures, encounter different worldviews, and maybe even get wedged inside a 33-ton stone vagina.
Does that last one sound too specific? Well, it's exactly what happened to an American exchange student studying in Germany back in 2014. As a part of a dare, the young stud decided to cram for his female anatomy final by crawling inside a massive bajingo, sculpted by Peruvian artist Fernando de la Jara.
Tagblatte.de
"Crap. We might have to do a C-section."
Unfortunately, even his intimate knowledge of the ladies wasn't enough to help the moron avoid becoming trapped inside the rocky monolith. This wasn't a small problem, either. The student just barely avoided having his ensnared leg sawed off on the front steps of the Institute of Microbiology and Virology. It took five emergency vehicles and 22 firemen to drag him from the carving's stony loins. According to articles about the event, the rescuers were not amused, and the student was deeply embarrassed. Somehow that feels like an understatement.
Thankfully, a German hero was on the scene to take pictures of a future American leader in action.
Old Woman Throws Coins Into A Plane Engine "For Luck"
As a direct result of China's booming economy, Chinese tourists now spend more money than any other country while traveling. In fact, one elderly tourist had enough extra cash to just throw away. Right into an airplane engine.
No, she didn't believe the plane to be a large coin-operated rocket outside a convenience store ... she apparently just wanted "good luck." Because there's no better way to ensure safe travels than by crippling the plane you're actively boarding.
Passengers who apparently didn't want to leave their fate up to chance alerted the crew when they noticed the 80-year-old woman launch nine separate coins from the boarding staircase into the engine. Only one coin landed inside the engine itself, but surely the gods of luck would give her a break, considering her advanced age and limited mobility. Although, if her accompanying husband, daughter, and son-in-law couldn't keep her from wrecking their means of transport, maybe the woman was a lot stronger than initially reported.
SCMP
On the upside, she won!
Thanks to the woman's attempts to best LeBron's field goal percentage, the flight was delayed for five hours so mechanics could dig around for missing pieces of metal that could have, according to the captain, caused serious damage, including total engine failure. So really she's more like J.R. Smith.
People Keep Taking Selfies At Holocaust Memorials
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is a solemn monument, meant as a reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust. The memorial is essentially a sea of stone blocks stretching across a large swath of central Berlin. It's an excellent place to mourn, reflect, and, apparently, take a million damn selfies.
For some reason, tourists from all over the world come to the memorial solely to screw around. People love hopping up on the blocks and taking all sorts of goofy pictures, from sexy pictures for dating websites to juggling on top of the headstones like the world's most offensive clown (including Pennywise).
It's gotten so bad, a best-selling author, Shahak Shapira, launched a website called "Yolocaust" to shame these jackasses, and the whole point was to track down those ill-advised selfies, and Photoshop them into moments from the actual Holocaust. It has since been taken down -- evidently so as to not ruin those people's lives forever. But many of those pictures and the Photoshops can still be found. The results are ... disturbing.
SCMP
We don't normally curse on this site, but HOLY SHIT!
It's pretty infuriating to think about taking those pictures in the first place, but it really goes to a whole new level when they're composited with the atrocities they're inadvertently mocking.
Kids Won't Stop Touching Ancient Boobs
Entering puberty can be an exciting time of change. It's the first awkward steps into adulthood. Everybody handles it a little differently. Some are lucky enough to take the changes with grace, while others take their newfound interest in sexuality and channel it into groping 3,500-year-old statues of Egyptian queens.
Over the years, the British Museum in London has struggled to keep up with crappy tourists. Whereas visitors used to understand that, hey, maybe it's not okay to chuck your sticky Toblerone wrappers into a sarcophagus from 1500BC, modern audiences have trouble understanding that King Tut was already buried with plenty of delicious delights for the afterlife.
It got so bad that in 2006, curators received an email claiming one visitor witnessed 17 inappropriate incidents during a single visit. Apparently no matter where they turned, there was some 14-year-old furiously humping an ancient edifice.
Telegraph
At least tell us they made honking sounds. If you're gonna do it, do it all the way.
The museum used to display their extensive Egyptian collection -- the world's largest outside of Cairo -- without glass. But as the crowds got larger and crazier, it's become increasingly difficult to justify displaying anything at all. Weirdly, a lot of people got mad at the museum itself for not posting enough "Don't Touch The Sarcophagus" signs, as if that was somehow the problem. Because the guarantee of contracting an ancient curse or awakening an undead mummy from hell isn't enough of a deterrent.
Of course, nowadays the bigger controversy is whether the British Museum should have any Egyptian stuff, considering they kind of "stole" it from Egypt in the first place. So, maybe all those handsy kids are actually just protestors? Maybe they're the good guys? Maybe nothing makes sense anymore?
Norwegian Inexplicably Falls Asleep On Conveyor Belt
The ability to fall asleep (and stay asleep) is a true gift. Given that one in three adults don't get enough sleep, it's fair to say that insomnia and restlessness have become a legitimate crisis. So maybe instead of berating the Norwegian tourist who fell asleep on a moving baggage belt in an airport, we should laud him as a hero. At the very least, he's some sort of scientific marvel or C-level superhero.
Pixabay
For clarity, it WASN'T this thing. It was the belt that goes to the plane.
Since Europe is evidently a happy go-lucky place where you can do whatever you want without consequences, a tourist managed to hop over a check-in desk at an incredibly busy Italian airport and sneak onto the thing that carries your suitcase full of duty-free Whoopee Cushions to the plane. He then proceeded to ride that thing for a solid 50 meters (which is probably, like, a thousand miles in U.S. customary units) before anybody noticed what was happening. Even then, security officials only discovered the presence of a full-on human when the man slid through the X-Ray machine, and they realized he wasn’t just some Norwegian-shaped body pillow.
In case you're wondering, yes, the man was very drunk, and no, officials claim the Norwegian hero never could have made it to the secure areas of the airport. Unless of course you consider the cargo hold of an airplane a secure area.
