Embarrassing travel culture shocks

[WildBalonz]

Since it’s summer and holiday season I thought it might be fun to share some silly or funny or embarrassing cultural shocks we’ve all had when travelling!

I’ll start with an incident that is both funny and embarrassing depending how you look at it. A few years ago me, my brother, his wife and her brother (my brother and sister in law) went on a trip all through China. We were on a tour bus traveling through some rural areas outside Guangzhou. We had a pit stop to stretch our legs and use the toilet etc and our driver proudly told us that the public loos we had stopped at had western toilets which were very uncommon in these areas. Great we all thought, however what he didn’t mention is that instead of individual cubicals they had very small almost like shower screens separating each toilet. Not much privacy at all! It made for a very embarrassing poo for me my sister in law and two other ladies on our tour 😂. I laugh at it now but at the time it was probably the most awkward and embarrassing experience our lives. Luckily she’s a good sport and we joke about it these days!

Kids toilet in a French museum, I took my son in and was a bit shocked that there were 4 small toilets in a row with no stalls or doors. My son asked to go to a more private toilet. I've never seen that before ever.

I'm sure that I read a long time ago that someone needed to poo in China and a pig's snout came through a hole in the wall. Apparently pigs can eat human excrement.

The only bad experience I have had abroad is when I went to Amsterdam and none of the cafes have fresh milk. It's either UHT or sterilized. I would either buy a small carton of milk and carry it around with me to put in the coffee or buy coffee at Dunkin Donuts where you have the choice of fresh milk.

And no one has thought it was only going a bit of gas when ...🙀😂

I was in Italy by the beach and went to a shop selling handbags. As I went to touch one of them, the owner ran over and angrily spoke rapidly in Italian; got the gist - do not touch the handbags. Someone told me later you can point and buy but not examine the handbag. To me that was a massive culture shock.

Just reminded me we visited an infants school in France a few years ago. I was 15 I think, so my sis would have been 12, my kid bro probably 6. He of course wanted to pee - until he saw the boys' toilets which were a communal urinal and 3 toilets without cubicles or dividers! There was just a wall about the height of a 7 year old to "prevent" the girls from watching them - tho I remember now the strangest thing was that neither boys nor girls seemed to mind.
However my bro decided he'd wait!

@Helpel didn't think I had one, but you have just reminded me!

Visiting a very nice French restaurant on a beach while on a family holiday in the south of France. Step Dad orders something that he thought was a steak or whatever. Turns out it was tartare of beef, raw egg and all. Rather than face up to the French waiter and admit that he could not bring himself to eat it, he picked the whole thing up in a napkin and hid it in a nearby vase/plant pot type thing 😬

Sorry France.

@JennyShaw ah yes! We recently went to Rhodes and tried to get fresh milk for our young boys. Every shop owner was like 🤷‍♀️ and just pointed us to the UHT.

Travelling in India we visited a monument. The toilets in a separate block, just holes in the ground no paper. I had to make a dash to use them as I had deli belly. I’ll leave the rest to your imaginations..

Oh you've reminded me of a culture shock between my family and DH family. Both Irish but mine from a farming background a couple of generations back, while his came from more of an upper-class background.

His family throw away left overs. My family keep every scrap and find a way to use it.

His family prepare portions that are barely enough for the number of people eating (it's been a learning curve for them to understand the appetite of teenage boys!) so they have little left over.

My family cook enough to accommodate a family of unexpected guests (which do sometimes appear!) so there are almost always leftovers, and guests are send home with a lunch portion & slices of cake.

DH has embraced my family culture, thankfully. It is absolutely against my nature to pare back on hospitality or to throw good food away.

Toilet tale again! 25 years ago we took our kids on safari in Africa. We were bold and went for an experience, traveling around in a large open sided truck and camping along the way. Outward bound at the start of the journey and a few hours in the truck pulled in. Toilet stop they shouted. We got off, blinking in the hard sun trying to spot a toilet block. We looked back to our African guide who just waved into the scrub and said. ' pick a bush'! We did so willingly and with humour but there were a few very stressed women on board. Within a day we were chatting side by side with our 'bush' neighbours without a care in the world!

UK born and bred and I can confirm that yes, indeed, before the regulations came in, it was pretty common to have to wire appliances into a plug, hairdryers, that kind of thing. My father taught me how as a life skill before I went to uni and gave me a little tool set which I still have.

PP’s disbelief is the culture shock of the present vs the practices of the past. As they say: ‘The past is a different country: they do things differently there.’

Visiting a gift shop in Greece and there was all these moving machines/sculptures of two people. As they moved they had a penis part that went in and out of the bum of the person in front. As a 12 year old it was a bit of a shock to say the least.

I needed your father! I had to go back to the shop and ask them what to do with the bare wires (my own father in Aus was none the wiser when I phoned and asked him 😂). They got me the plug and when I still seemed confused explained how to wire it in.

Oh bless you!
I moved 10 years back and Kensington Palace was on my list when I came few months prior as a tourist. Still there were flowers at that gate even every time I passed in the last 10 years, it was there. First time I didn't see it was last week. Probably due to heat. I was a huge fan. It's nice that people still remember her.

Young and with a friend doing Interrail
around Europe. We would go and have a coffee with people doing the same from the youth hostel.
After a while, when one of us visited the facilities, we would ask them what score out of ten I would give them. A 2 was particularly bad
.Sometimes though, a nice surprising 8.

Another toilet one 😬 The first time I visited family in Nigeria we travelled to the small village my dad was from. It would have been about 25 years ago now. We went to the house he grew up in and I needed the toilet. I was led out of the house to a concrete building with nothing in it. Sometimes I wonder if I imagined this but in this room you just did your wee and if you did a poo then I assumed you’d take it with you and dispose of it. There were no sinks to wash your hands and I found out after that the room was shared by several families in the immediate area but it was clean. Also there was no electricity in the room so I imagine it wasn’t used at night.

Also when we visited family in Lagos they had apartment style buildings and the toilets were again out the back. And again shared. But this time flushable and with a sink.

Try having bowel disease being haughty about using public toilets when travelling!

@BlueFlowers5 how is that a travel/culture shock ??

You don't get it do you! Myself and my boss both have bowel.disease and talk about it openly with each other, nobody would hate anyone for going to toilet at work! I'm in the office two days a week and because of my bowel disease I can be in a position sometimes where I've already been a few times after waking up in the morning and get bad stomach ache again on the way to work - would you rather I held it until I crapped myself on my office chair next to you if it was you I worked with! How can anyone in this day and age still be so cruel and ignorant to bowel disease! This is why for those that get it bad, they end up virtually housebound because people like you berate them as disgusting for wanting to use a toilet!
Bare in mind my bowels got trashed because of a trip to India that seemed to have damaged me for life, one day you might end up with bowel disease and you'll hate yourself for treating people as disgusting for having no choice but to go to a toilet! I was once in so much pain from a sudden bowel spasm in Italy that I nearly passed out! So I yes I do public toilets, bar toilets etc and it's not me that's disgusting I assure you

But people disease do work for a living and don't deserve to be ostracized or made to feel disgusting for using the toilet! Do you think we have a choice if we are suddenly in the grip of that kind of pain and urgency? Should everyone with bowel disease just stop working and claim benefits because we are too disgusting to work with? I will warn that there's a lot of us so that's a big loss of workforce!

i got a taxi from Naples to Sorrento and the taxi driver started steering with his knees along the coastal road as his Mumma had phoned him so he had to take the call but the road was too twisty to pull over. I just closed my eyes and hoped for the best!

My partner and I had our first long haul adventure in 2010 to Goa and it was a baptism of fire, ropey 3 star hotel accomodation with sparking light fittings, a boiler that used to bang against the wall and blew the water supply out to the whole block of you left it on too long, taxi drivers driving up the wrong side of the road until traffic lets them across, cows sleeping on the road being used as roundabouts, signs on the beach warning about predators that might do things to children, being served booze in teapots because Alcohol is illegal on election days, the worst diarrhoea and bowel pain I have ever had for the entire second week. It never felt like a holiday, it felt like a test of endurance!

Never feel shit shamed for using a public or work toilet, the bowel issues eventually lead to a IBS diagnosis 12 years later so I don't know if that's thanks to some residual damage that India did. Using a toilet isn't optional for those of us with bowel disease, we are as clean and discreet as anyone and if I felt it was disallowed for me to use public or bar toilets etc then I wouldn't now be still able travel extensively and have 59 countries under my belt. It also means I don't my affect my partner enjoying our life of travelling! Think long and hard before condeming people who have health conditions and don't want to stay at home 365 days a year in case you find us using a toilet outside our home disgusting!

I visited Saudi Arabia a couple of years ago and went to Bahrain for the weekend. On the way back to Saudi we stopped at a supermarket in Bahrain near the border and was taken to a small hidden section at the back that sold pork products. My friend bought some pork sausages and pork pies and asked for them to be 'Saudi wrapped' so the assistant wrapped them in lots of brown paper and put a label on them saying chicken sausages. This meant we could travel across the border without worry of them being confiscated if the car was stopped and searched-which it was. I was petrified that I was going to end up in prison due to a pork pie! Apparently 'Saudi wrapped' products are extremely popular so the authorities must know what is going on.

What I found worst was the loud wailing from people lining the street, during the actual funeral procession. Thank goodness it was short-lived - presumably enough of the others in the crowd either gave dirty looks or told them to FGS put a sock in it.