Welcome to Declassified, a weekly comedy column.
Summer is coming, so where are we going on vacation this year? And Dublin? An enterprising soul in the Irish capital has listed a ‘private room’ with ‘one bed’ for just €59 a night on Airbnb. Sounds like a good deal, right? People were less happy when they discovered it was actually a small tent apparently pitched in a concrete backyard.
The SEO was “no joke,” the Airbnb host said while offering people the option of sleeping on multiple couches in their living rooms.
So Ireland is out. And Greece? There have been many recent reports of exorbitant prices being charged by restaurant owners on the posh island of Mykonos. A pair of British tourists said they were charged €520 plus one €78 tip for two cocktails and a serving of crab legs (anyone reading this in Brussels is probably thinking by now “sounds like a bargain, I’m paying that for a sandwich in the EU quarter”). The same restaurant also reportedly charged an American woman and her friends €1,539 for a plate of calamari, an order of lobster pasta, salad and bread. Maybe the bread was filled with diamonds or the salad is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Someone has to do something about all these scams, so our big European tour takes us to Italy – Florence, to be exact – where a man called the police after being charged €2 for a coffee (and that’s not wasn’t even fancy coffee that went through the digestive system of a small mammal). The customer complained that the price was not displayed on a menu behind the counter. Spokespersons for all of the coffee shops in Brussels, London and Paris were unavailable for comment.
And the final stop in our European vacation search is good old Belgium and a shocking report that the country’s drivers are rubbish. It has been found that Belgian drivers go too fast on construction sites and regularly “forget” to use their indicators. According to the study, more than half of Belgian drivers also use their horns (stop making up your own jokes!) aggressively in traffic, putting them on par with Italians and behind only Spaniards and Greeks when it comes to, uh, honking.
So that’s crap accommodation, food, drink and transport covered. I can’t wait for summer to start.
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Thanks for all the entries. Here’s the best of our mailbag – there’s no price other than the gift of laughter, which I think we can all agree is far more valuable than money or booze.
“Thank you again Charles, for briefing me for my next job in 2027”, by Patrice-Emmanuel Schmitz.
Paul Dalison is POLITICS‘s publisher of slot machine news.
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