Is there somewhere that you would not return to? And why?

[Mothership4two]

Just commented on a post asking for places you would go back to and why. Thought it would be interesting to find out places you would never go back and why not. Not trying to cause offence! I'm going to get flamed arent I?

Mine are:

Amsterdam. Just found it a big unfriendly city. Away from canals, the buildings are pretty ugly. Staff in shops/restaurants/etc had a couldnt care less attitude. Didn't help that it was a really cold few days and we werent interested in getting 'cake' from cafes or looking at the red light district. I find Dutch people usually lovely.

Dublin: found it drab and old-fashioned. People lovely though and good pubs

Florence: I love Italy but Florence is just a working city with islands of lovely buildings imo. We'd just come from Venice and it didn't compare.

North Wales: beautiful but unfriendly. Everywhere we went people switched from English to Welsh when they heard our English accents including a staff member in a tourist info office! We knew it happened but it just makes you feel meh. The fact if rained every single day didnt put it in a good light for us. Have visited many parts of the rest of Wales, all good. My lovely fil is from North Wales and my lovely sil and dn is also Welsh.

Tokyo
I know- crazy that I wouldn't want to go back. Who wouldn't want to go to Tokyo again? Well, me.
I lived there for 6 months but this was like in the 90s. I was just overwhelmed. Bombarded, is the word. I hated the sense of being enclosed by concrete and my skull was flashing with bright lights and noise. I loved aspects of it but hated the pace and lifestyle. I found it totally lonely. The people were amazing. Loved and still love Japanese culture and history. I travelled around Japan, which is an absolutely wonderful country. But I became very isolated and depressed in Tokyo.

Marrakech. I found the constant harrassment by people wanting your money and pretending to be your friend very overwhelming. I am glad I have been because what i saw of morroco was beautiful but i wouldnt stay jn marrakech again.

Fatgirlonthebeach I have a friend who speaks English and Swahili and upon entering a supermarket speaking English with her companion the assistants spoke Swahili to each other. When she went to pay for her goods she spoke to them in Swahili, the assistants were both extremely embarrassed as they’d assumed she hadn’t understood the “fat English girl” comments they’d made as she’d arrived

I found Dubrovnik very scenic but more like a film set then a real place. No actually seemed to live there.
It was very, very full of tourists and we had left by lunch time. Pre cruise ships it would I think have been lovely.

Agree completely. Dubrovnik is, if anything, even worse than Venice for the way it has been completely overwhelmed and turned into a theme park by bloody cruise ships.

Another one who never needs to go to Singapore again. It's a sweatbox. I couldn't cope with the humidity and heat. Totally oppressive.

Zurich. Haven't been since the 90s.
The open drug scene/Spitzpark thing just put me off ever wanting to go there again. I am sure it's a great city but I have zero interest in going back. I found the people very cold and abrupt. No warmth.

I would have to agree with Morrocco and Egypt as I felt very unsafe. I didn't find Turkey anywhere as bad: men did approach me but accepted no as an answer.

I wasn't overly keen on Lanzarote but didn't hate it either. Just not that much to do.

I disliked Disney, and Orlando in general for that matter. I guess it's just not my thing but it doesn't mean there is anything wrong with it per se.

I didn't find Xian was worth the journey from the East coast of China but again, didn't hate it.

I love Wales though!

We should have a thread about the places we keep going back to!

The Venice comments are interesting. I have just come back from there and thought it was stunning, however their tourist rules are quite extreme! Can’t help but feel the tellings off I saw around me took the shine off things quite a bit..

I wouldn’t go back to Milan either.

However.. went to Bologna last year and it was perfect. Everything you love about Italy in a not very touristy place.

Wholeheartedly disagree about Northern Ireland too! Went earlier this year and thought it was wonderful.

Plymouth - bloody awful road system , and difficult to find a car park

Cool I think the answer is to visit places like Bologna just as beautiful but without insane crowds. We house swap so go to quite random places which are often stunning but not well known outside the country (inland Spain for example)

We should have a thread about the places we keep going back to!

I think there is a fairly recent one dotting about somewhere.

Re the cruise ships. When we were in Madeira earlier on this year we were advised not to bother trying to get on to the cable car if a cruise ship was in. We followed that advice and didn't have to queue. We could see the cruise liners from our hotel so it was easy to plan the day.

Likewise when we went to Dubrovnik. We stayed on the Lapad peninsula so could see these ugly monstrosities from the hotel. They really do look like floating blocks of council flats these days.

What are the tourist rules in Venice CoolcoolcoolcoolcoolNoDoubt? I had low expectations when we went to Venice as everyone had said how overrated, smelly and dirty it was. We went in October and it was none of those things.

@OneKeyAtATime

Here you go www.mumsnet.com/Talk/general_advice_tips/3668310-Where-have-you-been-would-you-go-more-than-once-And-why?msgid=89632973

When I am in a Bengali curry house in London, they often take my order in English and shout back to the kitchen in Bengali. I wouldn't complain about that either.

Something tells me that people who complain about the Welsh speakers speaking in Welsh probably would!

I think it's some bizarre mix of xenophobic paranoia, and an authoritarian mindset that needs control and uniformity.

(From a Londoner who doesn't particularly like Wales )

@nononever thank you!

I wonder what the correlation is between English people who moan about Welsh people speaking Welsh to other Welsh people in Wales and Leave voters?

About 95%, probably....

I wouldn't go back to Butlins Skegness - the Minehead Butlins is far superior. (Not disparaging Butlins, just the Skegness one!)

If we're allowed to criticise somewhere due to the weather, Scarborough. It was really wet and foggy. But I'm sure it can be a loverly place if the weather is right.

(I love Wales, both north and south, And Las Vegas.)

@Ginfordinner I saw people thrown out of St Mark’s basilica for taking photos and constantly being told off for sitting down on a step in St Mark’s square. In the past some tourists have been fined for this to the tune of hundreds of euros! I understand the heritage is to be preserved but it all seemed a bit much..

@CarolDanvers that was our feeling about most of Vancouver too. I’m used to wandering around London and I felt very unsafe in parts of Vancouver.

I wouldn’t return to Italy in the summer. Far too hot and Italians are a pretty unsmiley rude bunch.

I was in Venice less than a month ago and don't think I encountered a single 'tourist rule', other than covering shoulders inside churches, which isn't a Venetian thing, and moving down inside the vaporetto, rather than blocking the crowds by the embarkation point, which is the same on the tube...?

And I expected Venetians in people-facing roles to be surly and visibly sick of tourists at the height of high season and I wouldn't have blamed them if they were but in fact we thought nearly everyone was very friendly. People we saw regularly over our week, the people who worked in the bakery we went for breakfast, waiters in the bars along 'our' canal, were lovely, people were very sweet to our seven year old, and I had a couple of nice conversations with room guards in various museums, despite speaking only pidgin Italian.

‘Nothing to do’ and ‘not enough to do’ are pretty rubbish reasons though.

I totally appreciate ‘I felt unsafe because I had my bottom groped three consecutive days’ or ‘I got food poisoning so hard I had to go to hospital’ but ‘not enough to do’ just seems a bit... lazy?

Also I enjoyed that Florence DARES to be ‘just a working city’ as opposed to what.... Italian Disneyland? People do have to go about their daily lives too....

And ‘too busy’ or ‘too quiet’ or ‘nowhere to go for a walk’.... a bit of research normally sorts these sorts of quandaries before booking 👍

I agree lost. I really enjoyed lanzarote stunning scenery and gorgeous beaches plus felt empty and chilled. My reason for hating Egypt was non stop sexual harassment. Everywhere else I’ve been found something to enjoy. We love London Paris Berlin had fantastic trips there.

I found everyone in Venice friendly too, which I was quite surprised about considering the pressure they are under.

Thank you @ivykaty44 for reading my post properly!

I love hearing Welsh and quite a few of my dh's family have Welsh as a first language. I have spent a lot of time visiting other parts of Wales and enjoyed it there. I don't particulaly care what language people talk to each other in, Klingon if they want to. It's the deliberate 'switching' to make other people uncomfortable that I disliked. And would find it the same from any nationality. I'm not stupid and certainly don't consider Wales a 'county' of England.

Thanks to everyone telling me the 'switching' is an urban legend or I didn't understand that they were switching to help me out . That's not arrogant at all! It happened time and time again (pubs, cafes, shops, fish shop) and it was very obvious and it wasn't 'winglish'. People would be speaking in English until we spoke and then everyone nearby would start speaking Welsh. We had heard about it before but hadn't believed it. My FIL is from North Wales, but left at 16 and his accent has softened, and it happens to him. That one time in the tourist information office where a member of staff (middle aged woman and not a bored teenager) was talking to a woman in English and as soon as we (my dp and me) started talking to each other, they immediately switched. We understood perfectly what was going on. We weren't being arrogant, just felt a bit unwelcome.

I live in quite a touristy part of the country and grew up in a part of Devon that would get swamped in the holidays, so I know having to deal with lots of tourists can be irritating occasionally (but not always) but I would never be deliberately rude to anyone.

Maybe we were just unlucky. We were near Lake Bala btw but did a fair bit of travelling around.

This thread just shows that some people's heaven is another's hell.

@AgeLikeWine

Do you really want to bring Brexit into this thread?