The buses disgorged swaying centurions, singing pirates, men wearing drinking helmets, a girl with a blow-up doll slung over her shoulder, and a guy wearing something that looked like a diaper.  Photograph by Peter Dench.

 

Letter From Poreč

The British Invasion

A Croatian town embraces an onslaught of partying.

by Lauren Collins April 16, 2012

ABSTRACT: LETTER FROM POREČ about British tourists in Eastern Europe. British holidaymakers, who basically invented European tourism—snapping up Canalettos on the Grand Tour, sliding down the Cresta Run, and, later, transforming Spain’s Magaluf into “Shagaluf,” and the Costa del Sol into the “Costa del Concrete,” where steak-and-kidney pies outnumber paellas—are a potent bloc. Britons made 56 million visits abroad last year, about the same number made by Americans, who outnumber them by a factor of five. Eighty per cent of the British population possesses a passport, versus America’s thirty-five. An old joke asserts that the British weather is the world’s most powerful colonizing influence. A recent poll calculated that the average Briton first goes abroad at the age of three. In “Cream Teas, Traffic Jams, and Sunburns,” a history of the British vacation, Brian Viner writes, “I would wager that more of my countrymen have seen the inside of Faro Airport than have seen the inside of York Minster or Lincoln Cathedral.” At some point, as foreign travel became more accessible, the image of the elegant Englishman abroad, wearing linen and studying friezes, gave way to a coarser stereotype. Lately, British tourists, particularly young male ones, have inundated Eastern Europe, to much publicity. A concentrated influx of Brits (or, for that matter, of any nationality, in a place that is unused to their ways) can be a welcome boon to an economy, or it can be a pestilence. After EasyJet began flying to Prague, signs went up in local bars: “Please, no groups of drunken British men allowed.” In 2008, Latvia’s Interior Minister deemed the “English pigs” who had urinated on a war monument in Riga a “dirty, hoggish people.” Tells about a group of young Britons on a package tour in Poreč, Croatia.

Lauren Collins, Letter From Poreč, “The British Invasion,” The New Yorker, April 16, 2012, p. 88

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