Anglophilic for a reason

(image by flickr user nicobilou; some rights reserved)

While reading up on things to do in Porto for my trip in 2 weeks*, I discovered that it’s a popular tourist destination for Brits on holiday. Awesome:

They are the ones, the locals say, who are carousing, brawling and getting violently sick. They are the ones crowding into health clinics seeking morning-after pills and help for sexually transmitted diseases. They are the ones who seem to have one vacation plan: drinking themselves into oblivion.

“They scream, they sing, they fall down, they take their clothes off, they cross-dress, they vomit,” Malia’s mayor, Konstantinos Lagoudakis, said in an interview. “It is only the British people — not the Germans or the French.”

. . .

In Laganas, on the Greek island of Zakinthos, where a teenager from Sheffield died after a drinking binge this summer, more than a dozen British women were charged in July with prostitution after taking part, the authorities said, in an alfresco oral sex contest.

More alarmingly, a 20-year-old British tourist partied with her sister and a friend into the early hours in Malia also in July, then returned to her hotel room and — although she had denied being pregnant — gave birth. Her companions say they returned later to find the baby dead; she has been charged with infanticide.

Drunken cross-dressing, interrupted by outbreaks of vomitous singing, describes my usual conference plans. (I think that my longstanding conference buddy will vouch.)

After sobering up, here’s hoping there’s time to go here. (Because I just had to purge my working library of 100s of books to accommodate being involuntarily bumped to a much smaller office–clearly I need to fly to Portugal to get new ones.)

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*Yes, that is the 2nd week of the semester. And, yes, that has been making syllabus-writing much harder than usual these past two weeks.