What is the worst place you have ever visited?

[Washingforweeks]

I saw a thread on instagram about this and found it really interesting and wanted to hear more. What is the worst place you have visited and why?

Me too 😂😂😂

Newtown, mid-Wales. Went for a family wedding when dd1 was just walking. Stayed at a hotel the couple had recommended as owned by friends of theirs and they said it was the nicest one they knew. Absolutely awful. Nothing worked, window didn't open properly (and looked out over huge stinking bins), room was like an oven and baby dd was red faced and screaming even with just a nappy on. 'En suite' was so small I had to reverse in and the only way I could clean DD was to hold her in the shower with me as there wasn't room to kneel on the floor in front of her. The whole experience (including what we saw of the town and the endless winding roads to get to it, for it to be such a letdown) was utterly depressing.

Much as I love the family member whose wedding it was, I wouldn't go back there if you paid me.

Most of my wider family work in the hotel industry and even those that don't were pissed off because it wasn't cheap at ALL. We felt completely ripped off. Just bleak and depressing. Beautiful countryside around it, though.

We live in Devon which can be similarly hard to get to, but that was as bad as any of the rundown towns in the SW I can think of.

Florida - did the whole Disney thing for the kids and it felt false. I’m sure there’s lovely parts, but we didn’t see them.
Paris - dirty, rude people, over priced.
Bangkok - dirty, very poor people living in shacks, noisy, smelly. No thanks.

Because over tourism and second homes have turned large parts of Cornwall into a theme park.

So what do you expect to when you visit a theme park out of season?

Noooo , we have some gorgeous wee Scottish seaside towns !
North Berwick for starters in East Lothian .
i know St Andrews isn’t a town but that’s lovely .
Portsoy , Cullen , Nairn ..I could go on and on

I absolutely love Naples. I did get harassed by men a lot though. Despite being with BF. I was wearing a tiny miniskirt. I noticed all the local women were in jeans. But it's got a lot of character.

I feel this way about New York, it was the small things like people not waiting for us to get off the subway before others pushed their way on.

I found NYC a bit soulless and like an endless Canary Wharf. I want to give it another go one day with someone who truly knows it, to go and find the best bits.

I would love to go to Egypt and see the historical sights but I don’t think I ever will. I have enjoyed most places I have visited but Lands End in Cornwall was an absolute bore, an expensive one at that. Wouldn’t go back to Marrakech, too much harassing.

I did Russian at uni and had a British Council organised student placement at Leningrad Uni for 3 months.

I feel like I want to know so much more. Russia in 1982. Wow.

Dublin is great. Though unless you’re really into museums/history one full day is arguably enough in the city. After that explore the county’s coastal towns and villages such as Howth, Dalkey, and Malahide, or perhaps take a day tour to the sites around Wicklow.

Gosport is awful 😂

I’m so sorry 😔 I stayed in Osaka for a month and felt safe the entire time .
Where did you stay ?
there are some not so good areas such as Nishinari-ku

Agree to some extent with Brighton. I grew up nearby and later it became the default social meet-up place for my friends, so this is borne out of years and years of going there.

It has a self-satisfied, superior atmosphere that I’ve not seen in many other places (closest comparison is in parts of Bristol). Some areas there can be like a concentrated pool of the most annoying, smug people. It’s like the joke -

“how do you know someone went to Oxbridge?”
”don’t worry, they’ll tell you”

but instead “how do you know someone lives in Brighton?”

While I liked Cornwall, the Eden Project was a letdown.

Athens 2002. They had a huge stray dog problem (presumably sorted it for the Olympics). The dogs roamed in packs and were terrifying.

Las Vegas - just not my kind of place. I'm not anti-gambling, I like a flutter on the horses now and then, but I find slot machines and casinos really grim and depressing. I didn't really like the way you were clearly expected to think 'wow' at the sight of a faux Roman building or whatever - I'd rather see the scant remains of the real thing in a field somewhere. I preferred the buildings in Las Vegas that weren't pretending to be something else, the neon lights sort of places.

The food there was horrible, synthetic cream at breakfast, enormous portions but all really bland and tasteless.

It was also a place where I felt a little unwelcome, it's hard to explain but the people - i.e. residents, service staff etc. were very reserved and almost seemed suspicious of tourists, apart from one coach driver who was friendly and chatty.

It was a two-night stop as part of a longer holiday - I am not sorry I saw it, it was an experience, but I wouldn't go again.

Beijing. Given, it was many years ago now, but I hated it. Smog, smoking men leering and hawking up phlegm, stinky horrible place.

Acapulco. So bad its almost good.

Huddersfield

Pattaya in Thailand - seedy as fuck

Southport, the same, very odd insular people
Melton Mowbray, same, more so as they are mostly cousins

people’s perceptions can be so different… eg I think Ramsgate is a dump
but my sister loves it - considering that she is well travelled and fussy I find
this quite baffling

Leeds City, including the railway station, is an emotionally cold and
inhospitable place too, yet students love it, witness the many Universities

there’s no place like home…there’s no place like home…

San Francisco - absolutely hated it, felt on edge the whole time

Tunisia for the reasons already mentioned

Oh I loved Florence 🥰 to be fair one of the gelato bars ( and I mean one which had the good gelato in the covered metal tins ) the woman serving had a face like a smacked arse despite me ordering ours in Italian .
Everywhere else they were polite and one waitress took a liking to us because I spoke in Italian , I tried my best and then it was like we were her besties 🤣 I didn’t like the queues for certain museums ( and that was off season ) but I’d go back off season again

Malta for me too although it was a long time ago so it may have improved but it was like a great big rubbish dump in the middle of the sea

LA, I lived in the states for a while wo decided to visit, awfu, nearly Weho however was nice and I really liked it.

St Ives, racial verbal abuse appeared to the the most popular hobby among locals. It was also quite dirty which I didn’t expect.

I enjoyed my time in Leningrad - much easier than Moscow, for various reasons.

We were supposed to have a year abroad. Shan't derail, but Cold War issues meant that you took what you could get, so my time was split - the Leningrad trip was actually a bonus during my Junior Honours 'reading term' - someone at another uni had dropped out and the lecturer in charge of travel abroad had put forward my name without checking with me first!

My first trip was Krasnodar for a month - 70+ British students who should have been on courses in Moscow, Kiev, Minsk, etc landed at Kuban' State University because all the student accommodation in the summer of 1981 was being used by tourists there for the Olympics.

That was interesting, but a bit of an ordeal. All the decent food was being sent to tourist areas, we all fell ill because of the water and - at least at that time - Soviet student toilet blocks were quite unsanitary. Plus the student hostel was infested with cockroaches. (God, I'd forgotten about that!)

I can't remember which way round it was now, but we had large brown and small black...They sent in pest control. That killed off one type and then the other type took over.

Can't remember which it was, but one type was referred to as Amerikantsi, I kid you not.

Apparently, the head of the Faculty for Russian as a Foreign Language used to be quite a benign chap. When we were there, he'd been replaced by a KGB factotum...

By the end of the one month course, I was dreading going back for my planned 5 months in Moscow, but I guess it toughened me up for the challenge...

In all seriousness, the Moscow experience was much better, but still had the same difficulties with regard to food and toilet blocks.

Leningrad was much easier because my Russian was so much better then and Leningraders were much more laid back than Muscovites.

Leningrad joke:

A Leningrader goes on a visit to Moscow. On the Metro, he gives up his seat to a strange woman.

She addresses him "Citizen, I see that you are a Leningrader!"

"Why yes! How did you know?"

"You gave me your seat!"

"Ah yes. And I can see, Citizeness*, that you're a Muscovite."

"Why yes! How did you know?"

"You didn't say 'Thank you'."

[Grazhdanin for Citizen; Grazhdanka was the female form. "Comrade" was reserved for Communist Party members.]