Unasked for gifts, while travelling. Have you received them?

Yes..saxophones are .. near on impossible to travel with. Merry Jo I actually have once had to drag both my alto and my vintage tenor AND my dive gear across Australia on my way to PNG - never again!. I mentioned to a friend I was having a night stop over in Sydney before heading to Cairns to get to PNG and a friend who was doing a bit of recording asked if I would mind spending an hour in the studio with them in exchange for a bed for the night. After managing to get everything on the plane (and getting slugged mega dollars excess baggage) I then had to find someone I had never met before who was picking me up from airport..a lot of txt msgs where are you? what do you look like? can you see the Avis sign?..no..ok then walk out the front and play something loudly so I can find you....you have no idea how much of a dick I felt playing Baker Street - although the person picking me up did find me but not before i made $7.60 because people thought i was busking LOL!.

By littlewing

One time, when me and my ex bought some food at a supermarket while travelling, and were making sandwichs with it at a train station in Europe, somebody dropped the equivalent of 10 Euros(I think, it was Deutsch Marks at the time) in one of our shoes that had been kicked off and was lying beside us. My ex ran after him with the money, to say we werent begging and didnt really need it, because we have saved some money for our travels. The guy kept walking faster and faster, as my ex tried to catch up with him, and then started to run and managed to hide someplace. My ex thought he must have thought we were chasing after him to ask for more money. Whatever he thought, he did not want to take the relationship with us any further than dropping the money in our shoes. and that was for sure. so we treated ourselves to some icecream for desert with the money, after our train station picnic. We were not quite rich enough at 20 years old, to consider giving the money to a real beggar, instead of spending it on a luxury for ourselves.

Mel
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While we were travelling with the kids we were constantly being given food and toys. A lot of it was completely inappropriate for their ages according to western standards but we accepted it anyway and gave it a try to test it before giving it to the boys to try. Nothing raises a smile faster on a local than seeing my boys faces light up when they're given sweets. The only thing we didn't give them when offered were large boiled sweets, chewing gum and a can of red bull (a lady in Vietnam actually gave my 18 month a can of Red Bull??? Needless to say he didn't get any of that!)

The other memorable items include:

2 whole smoked dried fish on a train in China... they did try it but spat it straight back out again, actually it wasn't that bad, but it's definitely not something they'd eat at home.

Our hotel in Saigon where we stayed a week gave Nate a ton of toys when it was his birthday and some for Gabe too... They had three boys and they were so envious when they saw ours go to bed at 7pm, while theirs stayed up gone midnight. In the morning I was so envious though when at 10am their boys were still in bed when we'd already been up 4 hours!!!!!

In KL a lady strolled past and smiled at Nate, he smiled back, so she stopped and whipped out a massive chocolate bar (like 500g massive) and gave it to him. She started walking off, then noticed Gabe asleep in his pushchair, reached into her bag and whipped out another massive bar and wedged it into his chair next to him. We were a little sick that night! 😊

I hardly lost any weight on our last trip..... 😞 Reply to this