Bad tourists

I don’t think I’ve quite confessed to this before, but Mark and I suck as tourists. We still haven’t been inside a single museum and the list of things that we should have seen, but haven’t, could be turned into a guide book.

But since Mark’s sister is in town, we decided to curb our bad habits and show her everything that Munich has to offer (because there’s loads).

Unfortunately our initial attempts started dismally. We promised Jessie a fantastic walking tour that would fill her with knowledge and memories, and instead we joined the ranks of a disenchanted, rude, arrogant and racist tour guide. His name escapes me but all you need to know about him was that he told a lovely-looking Italian woman that if her English wasn’t good enough to keep up with what he was hammering out at 100 words a second, she had better pay for a private tour because he wasn’t going to slow down for her.

We gave him several chances to redeem himself, but the dude just wouldn’t take them. The entire incident would have been painful and not worth mentioning if not for a misdirected ice-breaker. After ten minutes of insulting everyone in the tour, as well as some passers-by who were speaking too loudly for his liking, the guide decided to gain some rapport by getting everybody involved in a team naming activity. He threw up suggestions of past team names like Team Awesome and Team Beer…just in case you were wondering; we were a group of 36 adults.

People started to uncomfortably shuffle their feet, avoiding eye contact so as not to get berated by him any more than they already had, when out of nowhere Simon’s voice rang out loud and clear “Team Patronising?” Several people giggled. Several held their breath. The guide ignored it and chose to dub the team Team Poopy Pants.

We left shortly after.

Luckily when we started the tour we had bumped into Simon’s Deutsch Akademie friend, Julia, her boyfriend and a friend who was visiting from Russia and they – being good Munich citizens and tourists – suggested that we go to the BMW museum. So we went.

Minutes later there we were, surrounded by cars, diagrams, television screens, engines, interactive games and all we did was jump from bike to bike. 

 

We’re just bad tourists like that.