Natasha Whittam wrote:
Anyway, have you ever met a footballer in a jacuzzi or anywhere else for that matter? What was he like?
In 2001 my mate and I had about £600 between us (poor students) and booked a dirt cheap last minute holiday to Zante. We weren't exactly sure where it was, but it cost us about £140 each. (It's a Greek island).
The hurriedly packed and got the train to Manchester airport the next morning, so within 24 hours we were there, in a resort called Laganas.
Well, that holiday has become legendary. Just about everything imaginable went wrong.
On the first night, we got really pissed, and owing to a mix up, didn't lock the apartment door, a thief came in and stole my trousers. They wanted my wallet, but I had one of those security wallets with a chain between the wallet and a belt loop, so they took the trousers with most of our money in it.
So we turned up at the meeting with the holiday rep wanting to use a phone to contact my bank to see if they would Wire me the little money I had left in my bank account so we would be able to buy food and complete the holiday. They agreed, and gave me the address of a Western Union office in the next resort over. It took three attempts, walking in 90 degree heat 5 miles, to find this WU office, and then get there when it was open.
On the second night, we were tormented all night long by mosquitos.
On the third day, which was deceptively cloudy, I burned my back so badly in the Sun I had to lie on my front for two days, delirious and hallucinating and in agony. My mate also got burned, but I was far worse. At one point I was lay on my front on a li-lo on the apartment floor while my mate stuck a cigarette in my mouth and lit it for me, it was an inch off the ground, and he came out with the immortal line, "this is like the war". He then mummified my back in strips of toilet roll which had been dipped in a bowl of cold tea, a herbal remedy I had heard about.
By the sixth day I was recovered sufficiently to leave the apartment. We went for a meal at a restaurant and we were loving it because the food was fantastic and these two waiters, who were called Spiros and Nikos, were really friendly and kept bringing us free beers and different samples of food to try. We were there for hours, and they kept coming to sit at our table when they were quiet. They invited us to join them in a club after closing time. What a nice couple of fellas. Eventually, I asked for the bill. The bill was completely normal except one of them had written at the bottom, under what we had ordered, "One arse fuck - free". We looked at each other in stunned silence. With a shared nod, at an opportune moment, put the money for the bill on the table and absolutely legged it into the night.
On the seventh day things started to go our way. My mate found the equivalent of £20 we had forgotten about and we jumped up and down like lottery winners on the balcony and booked a boat trip. That went OK, except for a morbidly obese Swedish fellow passenger who insisted on parading around topless and jumping into the sea whenever the boat slowed down enough. The deal for the boat trip included a free packed lunch, the centre piece of which was some tuna sandwiches. They were rank. We stopped in a lagoon for people to swim or relax, and fish surrounded the boat. In a bitter moment I fed tuna to the fish.
That final night, we had about £30 left and half a camera film unused. We decided to spend it all in the bars, and for a laugh, we decided that we would approach every pretty girl we saw in the bars, and get talking to them, and tell them we wanted to use up the rest of our camera film having our picture taken with pretty girls. They loved it.
In the third bar we went in, there was this really pretty blonde in her early 30s alone at the bar, she laughed and agreed to have her picture taken. We'd been chatting to her and telling her about our wacky experiences when her fella came back from the loo. We sat down as a foursome for half an hour chatting, before the conversation turned to what we all did for a living. At this point I found out that the couple were Mike Jeffrey and his missus!!! Well, it made the holiday for me, getting pissed and having a right laugh with a former Wanderers player at the arse end of what had been a disastrous week. At that point he was playing for Grimsby Town. They were lovely people.
That wasn't the end of the eventfulness of the holiday. The following day at Manchester airport, a lot of the suitcases were coming round the carousel and they had obviously been slashed. Obviously, mine was one of the slashed ones. The suitcase was very old but those of us who had had our bags slashed were entitled to claim against Groundstar, who were the baggage handlers. We waited around the baggage reclaim area for over an hour, just desperate to go home, until someone turned up to take our details. She was so pathetic and incompetent, in the end I told her to go fuck herself and taped up my suitcase with some gaffer tape so my sweaty socks and underpants didn't piss out all over the place on my way home, and ended up binning the suitcase.
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