The September Anecdote

Tourists and travelers can learn a lot from unpleasant experiences. If you don’t know enough about the local culture and habits, you may quickly become a laughing stalk of the naughty locals, especially if you don’t double check the less probable information at several sources. But this sort of thing happens all over the world, for everywhere you might meet helpful people as well as incurable jokesters. Most travelers will tell you, they’ve met a few such people, who’d do anything, to make your stay in a country as pleasurable as possible. But everybody’s also experienced having their legs pulled, which also contributed to becoming wiser and getting to know more about the world around them.

A tea party, with tea bags in the mouth

This is a story that a local tourist worker told me, when I asked him if he had an interesting story to tell concerning foreign tourists. He told me this one:
It was once upon a time in the third quarter of the past century, when a local guide took a group of foreign tourists for a little rest in a café. Most of them ordered tea and they were served a cup of hot water and a tea-bag, covered in its package. Not knowing how to prepare the tea (obviously they weren’t familiar with teabags yet), they asked the guide what to do. He jested that they should put the teabag in the mouth, so that the little string would hang out of it (so they could pull the bag out). Then they should slowly sip the hot water allowing the bag to flavor the water. And many of the tourists did it. But the joke was obviously too harsh and the local guide resigned. In the country it happened, they are now more careful about choosing tourist guides, and they themselves are more careful about pulling such pranks on their guests.

Uroš Ivančič