Obnoxious!

Well, yes, I suppose that title could just be talking about me and my social habits!
But in this case Im having a "vent" at others... It is after all a blog about "my perspective" and this has been my recent experience :)


So, after spending the last three weeks living in a hotel rather than a private room, Ive been reacquainted with other tourists again :))
Sadly, I have been reminded why, in my past travels I have disliked young Israeli travelers!
Now, I have a bunch of friends here in San Pedro who are Israelis and they are very nice people (really!) but they are for the most part quite different to the "generic Israeli traveler" (painting with broad strokes of course!) that I tend to otherwise run into. The difference is that the people I have made friends with are not in their early twenties... and it seems to make a big difference!

Lots and lots of young Israeli tourists come through San Pedro...Its a bit of a "Mecca" for them ... Though I think I just created a massive cultural/religious conflict there with that analogy!....Kind of like the middle east in general really :)

Anyway, the young Israeli travelers are almost universally just out of their national service, which for the most part means army service as I understand it. Now, I am incredibly privileged and have come from large peaceful Western countries and I have no idea what it is to constantly have suicide bombers and rocket attacks etc against my people and country, so my perspective is of course different to theirs but still there seems to be an enormous gap between what I think of as socially acceptable and what they think...

All that said, Ill simply put it out there as it seems to me at present...I have to say that the young Israeli travelers I have been exposed to (at closer than desired quarters) behave in ways that are OBNOXIOUS!...almost without exception!
They seem nice enough to start with and they are almost always very "good looking young people" but unfortunately, thats where the good impression ends for me. The first thing for me is that the Hebrew language its self, is very unpleasant to listen to (to my ear), though clearly, this is no choice or fault of the languages speakers. Its got lots of gutteral sounds and is quite harsh. Now I listened to my older Israeli friends and they dont sound quite the same. It seems that the sound of the language changes as the people age!... I asked my friend Indy about this and he said that yes, it does tend to soften up as the people age...wierd!
Ok, so the language is not nice sounding to my ear, but thats not the issue; For the young Israeli travelers, it seems to me that absolutely everything is an argument! They are always talking very assertively and at very high speed over the top of each other...If there are just two of them its just energetic talking, but if there are a group then it sounds like a constant loud argument!
Now, these young folk are very social and they love to be in large groups and unfortunately, they really dont seem to think about other people at all (I said they were very social, but for everyone else, they seem to me, quite anti-social !). They are happy to carry on their loud conversations with each other across the room, across the restaurant, across the street etc. It bother them not a bit to be shouting at each other while standing 20meters from their hotel room directly outside my (was your) door at 2am! And its not in passing...Thats where they were having the conversation... for an hour or more... They just seemed to have no clue about other people being in the world!

OK, so ear plugs would go a long way to helping me deal with the noise, but thats just the start...
Pretty much every morning outside my hotel room I have had to step over the detritus of the night before. They just leave their drink bottles, cigaret packs and butts, food wrappers, dirty dishes and leftover food wherever they feel like when they are done...I guess they are used to having their mothers clean up after them or something, but again from my perspective, they are plain disgusting with their waste etiquete!
Now if you are to be so unfortunate as to be stuck in the same room as a group of these people, for example at an internet cafe or in a restaurant, then you better be a smoker or pray there are less than two of them in the room...constant smokers all of them it seems! It takes about five minutes before the room gets clouded up and "atmospheric"as they seem to like it (or at least be oblivious to it). Actually they seem to have been constantly on pretty much any intoxicant they can get their hands on...coffee and tobaco are "de rigur", but ganga, alcohol and anything else thats available are being used by pretty much all of them for a good portion of the days and as far as I can tell, all of the nights... Bear in mind though that they are in their early twenties and just out of the army etc... I think psychologists would probably call it a "self discovery phase" or something like that. Whatever it is, I sure dont need it in my life thank you!

I have traveled about quite a bit over the years and Ive met a lot of travellers. On many an occasion I have been thoroughly embarassed by the way a fellow Australian traveller has been behaving (rarely the same experience with fellow Canadians though !). On many other occasions I have witnessed individuals or groups from other nationalities (Germans, Britons, Americans etc.... the list goes on) being quite unpleasant and thoughtless. I am also absolutely sure that on occasion, I have myself been "the unpleasant traveller" as far as others are concerned!
But I have to say, as a group, in my experience, the young traveling Israelis behaviors are "OBNOXIOUS without comparison" !


So thats just about enough of a "rant" for now, but after three weeks of this stuff constantly on my doorstep, I am, as a frind would say, "Done with them!"
I make absolutely no excuses for expressing my oppinions about this stuff. This is a blog and expressing oppinions about my experiences weather they be pleasant or otherwise is what its for.

and now, moving on :)

If you have read this blog then you should read a follow up posting titled "Touched a Nerve!"