35 Tourists Who Wore Their Stupidity On Their Sleeve By Making Really Ignorant Remarks

In fact, people quite often aren't very interested in the world around them - more precisely, the world outside their own town or country. In this case, travel really comes to the rescue - after all, Mark Twain wrote a century and a half ago: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, fanaticism and narrow-mindedness.” Today, travel is accessible to many people (compared to the 19th century, of course) - so people willingly share their prejudices and fanaticism with others...

It is always human nature not only to expand our horizons, but also to adjust the world around us to it, using the so-called 'availability heuristic' - that is, if we know some fact - about a person, animal, country or phenomenon, then we will unconsciously use it almost every time we encounter something like this.

An excellent example is a Canadian friend of mine who, having lived in Ukraine for almost ten years, sincerely believed that a resort village called Sanzheika on the Black Sea was actually pronounced San-Jacob. Simply because this kind of sound was much more familiar to his ear.

The availability heuristic sometimes does whatever it wants to us. We may have, for example, read a book or watched an adventure film about the travels of heroes through different countries in the old days - and these clichés are firmly deposited in our heads. And then, when fate brings us to this country, the subconscious 'shoots out' a half-forgotten fact, forcing us to do an instant facepalm. Well, or the people around us do it, in case we're entitled enough not to notice our own gaffe.

Be that as it may, tourism and travel have always been, are and will be - which means that people with prejudices will continue to roam around the globe and sometimes confuse local natives with their unexpected judgments and wordings. And we'll read these stories, crack up at them and, perhaps, share our own narratives too. For example, why not in the comments to this post, huh?