Who Loves You More Than All The Other Goats: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Charter Holidays

Someone said travel was too important to be left to the casual traveller. When he said that, 50 years ago, he might or might not have been right. But today, travel is too important to be left to the mear laymen. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought required for this complicated task. So as I took this to heart I made myself a reservation and left myself in the secure hands of the true professionals on a charter holiday to greece.

Before I went I had a kinda clichéd view of the greece island world and it's inhabitants. I expected toothless bearded small old men sitting and talking to donkeys outside of white chalked houses, screaming british tourists, bi-langual menus selling fish and chips in 5 different languages and tons and tons and tons of playing cards sold in every store depicting people having intercourse in weird positions.

This mental image turned out to be one hunderd percent true.

I did find it very interesting though, that when on a charter holiday, all normal human appreciation of what is is good or bad taste, what is beautiful resp. ugly and considered bad or good behaviour suddenly are put on their head, the rules of the society as a whole doesn't apply anymore, its like a small micro cosmos in it self that adheres to laws beyond man. The notion that your fellow peers should judge you by how smart, social or funny you are turns out to be a big lie. Instead what seems to be the only important factor in deeming if you are a person fit to live and not be shunned in society is your ability to be very very excited about very very small mundane things most people with any sense should think sucked in their normal enviroment. Try not oooohing -and aaaaahing at a kid who manages to eat two forks of some dry mousaka or as the guide explains just why these rubbles of rock are a very important landmark in the history of man, questioning the good sence of taking a collective 3 hours bicycle trip around the island in the middle of the day when it's 40 degrees celsius or perhaps the deadliest sin of all, refusal to leave the turist bus to eat some "traditional" de-frozen, frozen and de-frozen again meat at a "local taverna" from a lady which looks like hygiene is not on the top-50 in here list of priorities in life, and watch the general mood amongst the crowd turn sourer than that in a concentration camp where everyone is having a bad hair day and they just promoted you to Obersturmbannführer of the day.

My fellow travellers were also an interesting bunch. Divided up into two groups we had the family and the single travellers. The single travellers were almost all men and women in there late 30s/early 40s. Tied together by their almost scary physical abnormalities, they were almost all eighter extremely skin- bordering on anorexia or really, really fat, had weird acne-scars, were crossed-eyed, looked generally mentally retarded and so on. It was like everyone that visited this particular resort was last in line when god handed out looks to people and they were all
treated to a random potpourrie of physical deformities. Im seriously not kidding, I felt really bad for the cleaning staff, expecting them having to clean away random body parts from the pool area at the end of the day like in a modern suntanned lepre colony. The other thing that seemed to be a common denominator for the people at the serost was the total lack of irony. Picture this: A cover-band consisting of a trio of heavy set danish men nearing their 50s performing Neil Youngs "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)" to a packed crowd of 30 -to 50 year old couples and their children, and watching both the crowd and the band getting really wound up, sining along as they reached the cresendo part - "It's better to burn out than fade away". All ending in hysterious cheer and a general recognition factor with the lyrics..

I can picture the scene before me: Aliens have finally landed on our planet, at the Langley resort on crete. As they exit their saucer-shaped vessle, they greet everyone and promises peace, enlightment and unthinkable technical and medical breakthroughs. As they make their way into the crowd, start shaking hands, mingle and make small talk with the people, after five minutes you can see the aliens starting to get a bit uneasy, come five more minutes, the head alien makes a bogus made-up-excuse about how he forgot a really important appointment and they all make their hasty way, semi-running back to the ship, flying away never to be seen again.

...and i hate to be the one accused of racial stereotyping, but consider this: If you are man from the middle east, you weight in at around 130 kilos, you have a huge shady looking moustash accentuated by body hair in places i didn't even know was possible, and most probably was voted "most likely to approach me with a 'great deal', wanting to sell a small animal or a kalashnikov from the trunk of your old mercedes"- in your high school yearbook, seeing as you are in a pretty homogeneous environment, perhaps the low-key approach is in order. If there are any men fitting this description, the following approach is NOT in order, and should be avoided if possible: First off, letting your kids swim around naked in the childrens pool, secondly, when the inevitable occurs and you sit there together with you kid, turds swimming all around you while everyone else exits the pool. Don't make it a point of slowly removing the turds one by one and keep bathing. This is not a healthy enviroment for neighter you nor your small ones. Third, when being confronted by another parent on your behavior, Don't - I repeat, DO NOT brush it off with the phrase "How do you think kids in bangladesh manages", - they dont! Bangladesh has one of the lovest life expenctency rates in the world and a staggering under-5 years mortality rate for children due to the lack of just that, hygiene.

Another thing which seem to be a favourite amongst the charter crowd is the chineese sign tattoos. Without a doubt the king of stupid things to mark ones body, one might be easily lead to believe the tribal or any form of the classic 'hobo'/seaman tattoo is the epidome of general bad taste, this if of course not true at all, they all take a backseat to this, the utter mark that you suck as a person (specially if you are a man), have no fantasy and should generally be classified as something of a paria. On top of that, should the person wearing one wan't to approach you in conversation about his tattoo and in a "funny way" laugh it off, explaining that this was done a long time ago, take no note, if he was a moron 5 years ago, chances are his personal growth has not been all that great and he is most likely to still be one today, or even worse, should he start off on how it represents a major event or significant personal change in his life you know it's time to make a run for it. So unless your holding the seven sacred daggers of megiddo and are ready to use them, people with chineese sign tattoos should generally be approached (if all) with extreme caution as it's the closest man-made thing to a birth mark saying "666" on your scalp and chances are you are standing opposite a guy who is only born every
two thousand years when the planets are perfectly alligned and the earth is soon abouth the be scorched and drenched in human blood bringing an end to the rule of man and the ressurection of the dark lord...