My favorites:
At Windsor castle some years ago, I overheard a tourist complaining that nothing in the room looked old: it was obviously all new work, shoddily done to scam the tourists. He was very proud to have spotted this, and obviously felt quite cheated.
Well, the work was new - we were in the wing that had been burned to the ground and very recently restored. Now, a forign tourist cn be excused for not knowing this, but the only way to get into that room was by walkinmg through a five-minute exhibition about the fire, with huge photos of the flaming building and the ashen remains, and a further section on the new deisgns and restoration work. To this day I haven't worked out how he got all the way through the exhibition without actually reading it. Or at least glimpsing the four-foot pictures of the burning building.

The second one was heard at Stone Henge, on Sailsbury plain. It was a woman complaining to her husband that the British had used ugly stones, and built it cheaply, because "look, it's falling down". Apparrently we should drag the old ones away and have some nice new ones hewn and the henge re-constructed by professionals. That's us told, then.

American Bashing: The tourists I overheard were americans. I don't think americans are any more stupid than the rest of the world - every nation has its share of idiots. The fact these two are american is coincidence - plus they're almost the only tourists whose language I can understand. But in these lacking local knowlege doesn't apply - the first one walked through an exhibition explaining about the fire and thought the new stuff was a scam. If the second one didn't know that Stonehenge was fairly old, why the hell had she put effort into visiting a pile of rocks in a field?

No apologies for length, and I'm damn proud of my girth
(Not very much gravitas at all, Fri 11 Jun 2004, 12:37, Reply)