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!

fwiw the Catalans and Basques the OPs encountered were just being dicks. The equivalent of a Welsh person in Wales refusing to talk to a tourist with bare bones English in English. All Catalans and Basques speak fluent Spanish.

Thanks for that @CatherinedeBourgh as I had read the previous posts and thought, forget the Duolingo Spanish, I’ll just speak English if I go to those places. But maybe to learn the words for hello, goodbye and thank you would be a good idea as if going somewhere with no experience of the language.

Fact is, when people want to be dicks they are going to be dicks whatever language you speak.

I have had people be dicks to me when I was speaking my mother tongue in a different country because of my accent....

It's lovely to try to talk a language that is spoken in the country you are in, whether it is the main language or a universal second one. And most decent people will appreciate it.

That makes perfect sense now. The Germans definitely don’t apologise constantly in the same way Brits do. I speak some (very rusty) German and it would be completely unnatural to apologise as often as Brits do in the German language.

I agree it’s unfair. My French was fluent 20 years ago when I lived in Paris, but is now very rusty — but if I’m out somewhere with a US friend who married a Frenchman and has brought up two children there and is entirely fluent, it’s me that gets compliments because, despite her fluency, her accent is entirely American. It drives her mad, understandably!

I have just been consulting AI and it said this

"That anecdote has circulated in various forms, often as part of travel memoirs or cultural observations about rural China’s traditional sanitation systems. However, I wasn’t able to find a definitive source that attributes the story to a specific individual.
It’s possible you encountered it in a travelogue, perhaps by someone like Peter Hessler or Rob Gifford, who’ve written extensively (and often humorously) about life in rural China. These kinds of firsthand accounts often include memorable moments like that—where the pig toilet system becomes startlingly real for an unsuspecting visitor."

It also told me this

"The Pig Toilet System in Rural China In many parts of rural China, especially before the widespread adoption of modern sanitation, a system known as the pig toilet was used. This involved an outhouse built directly above a pigsty, with a chute or hole connecting the two. Human waste would drop down into the pig enclosure, where the pigs would consume it—alongside other scraps.
This wasn’t just a quirky custom—it was part of a broader ecological logic. The pigs helped dispose of waste, and in turn, they were fattened for food. The Chinese character 圂 (hùn) even meant both “pigsty” and “privy,” reflecting how deeply integrated this practice was."

I remember my headmaster doing that!

Boyfriend of a friend travelled extensively around Asia in the 80s. He told me he used one of those piggy loos but I can't remember where he said it was but that the pigs were snufflling and oinking for his erm load and even fighting over it. I felt mentally scarred & repulsed for ages when he told me.

Talking about wires into sockets- standard practice for many workers in Dubai. You would be shocked to see the bodged jobs inside the walls of those apartment blocks and villas. Imported unskilled labour.

Thanks for the reminder! Moroccan loo attached to a restaurant years ago..the usual squat, surrounded by chop bones. Lovely. ( And every loo on Greek islands where used paper went into a bin cos you couldn't flush it.,)

Okay, I’m off to rock back and forth knees to chin in a quiet corner. I may not be eating pork for a while

Oh pigs are AWFUL. There is a reason two of the major world religions forbid it.

yes - it's practical health reasons disguised as religious credo. Both are religions that originated in hot countries. Unlike most other meat, it is not immediately apparent if pork is off or dangerous to eat as it doesn't start to smell as quickly. Same with shellfish.

If you live in hot climates, it's very sensible to avoid these foods because you could unwittingly become very ill if you eat them thinking they are fine but in fact are seriously off or full of food poisioning bugs.

I encountered one of these pig toilets in a town called Arambol in Goa, India. The toilet was a small rickety wooden shack that was tacked onto the back of a building, balanced on stilts above the pig enclosure. On entering the toilet shack there's just a hole in the floor completely exposed to outside and looking down through the hole there's a pig staring up at you expectantly.

We came across a toilet draining straight into the pig sty in a guesthouse in a village next to the Great Wall in 2010. It also had an old style bed where they light a fire on a platform under the bed to warm it up and it stays warm all night even when the fire is put out before bed. No heating and sub zero temperatures so a trip to the outside loo during the night was pretty chilly.

When I went on a work trip to Chicago (big corporate company) I was shocked at their toilet doors. Not only how exposed you were at the top and bottom but also the sides. All of the doors in that huge building had a narrow gap at the side that anyone waiting could see in if they really wanted to. Supposedly a first world country and they had no privacy in the loo!

The "whole family on a motorbike" was also a thing in the Dominican Republic.

I'm old enough to remember the advice to only eat pork or seafood "when there is an 'r' in the month" ie not in the middle of summer.

These days most people have a fridge.

The Buddha was killed by a contaminated Pork meal #Trufax

Every US loo in my experience is like this. I find it weird ... they bang on about privacy and respecting rights etc .. and then do their business practically in the open air. I am always traumatised over this when visiting our NY office!

Yes, I remember my first time using a loo in the US before getting on a Greyhound at Port Authority bus terminal in NY, and the rather genteel parents of friends later screaming about how dangerous it was, full of lowlifes and muggers. I pointed out, quite truly, that it wasn’t the street people or dealers that bothered me so much as the wide cubicle door gaps meaning I was essentially having a wee in public.😀

What I can't understand is how they are so comfortable with the massive loo door gaps but have a fit at having to shower naked before getting into a thermal pool in Iceland. When we went to Geosea here were 2 American women who, having paid, were refusing to go past the (all female) changing room rather than shower naked. I don't know what happened in the end but they were with their husbands who were presumably waiting in the pool.

You lot would have been horrified by the lavatorial arrangements of my childhood holidays.

In a corner of the field, lift a strip of turf and dig a trench approx 1ft wide, 3 or 4ft deep and 6ft long. Erect a 5ft high strip of hessian around trench - giving some privacy, but enough visibility to see when the trench is 'occupied'. No roof. When nature calls, straddle trench and squat - easy enough in shorts, hard in wellies and full waterproofs. Throw in a trowel or two of loose earth when done.

At the end of the holiday, full remaining trench and replace turf.

Apparently the US argument is that it's good to have massive door gaps because it's easy to see when a cubicle is occupied.

My argument is that this is exactly the problem.

It is quite traumatising to think about this. I've just remembered something else that I read about years ago which was even more disgusting. Perhaps I supressed the memory. Something witnessed by a tourist or traveller in a poor country. I don't think I ought to tell you it but it was a dog not a pig.

Ewwwwww, my imagination is filling in the gaps!

tenor.com/en-GB/view/stewie-family-guy-rocking-back-and-forth-baby-depressed-gif-8543011