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Hello hello hello. Only two more days now until I catch the plane back to Sydney :( Before I come back, I have received a number of requests for more fun facts, so I thought I'd put up a few of my favourite fun facts from the rest of the trip. See you all soon! Photos will go up on facebook over the next few weeks, as I have not found this blog's photo albums very satisfactory...
Fun Facts from random places (sorry if I repeat any from previous blogs):
1. In Barcelona it is completely legal to walk around in public naked so long as you are wearing shoes.
2. In Edinburgh in the middle ages people were only allowed to empty their chamber pots out the window twice a day: at 10am and 10pm. However, 10pm was also the time that the pubs closed, so if you stayed drinking til closing time you were likely to get s***-faced! This is the origin of that very lovely phrase ;)
3. In Bavaria (now south Germany) every town has a maypole. If you manage to steal the maypole (and they are several storeys high) from another town, that town has to throw you a party. A few years ago the Munich airport maypole was stolen. Worried about security, the airport called the police to report the stolen maypole and were met with raucous laughter from the police. Turned out it was the police who stole it!
4. For 800 years the city of Hamburg did not pay tax based on a 'special document' from Rome which turned out they had totally made up.
5. In Italy they have a brand of potato chips called Teenagers. My favourite inocuous phrases about potato chips made awesome when the chips are Teenagers are: 'I had forgotten that there were Teenagers in my bag', 'Teenagers are so crunchy' and 'Two Teenagers for the price of one'.
6. In the north of England there is a small village called Dent where you can buy Dent Beer!
7. Australians make the largest percentage of foreign visitors to Oktoberfest (giant beer festival in Munich) every year. During Oktoberfest every year, so many Australian passports are lost that the Aus embassy in Berlin has to come down to Munich and set up a temporary office to provide hung over Aussies with emergency documentation.
8. Two major European wars in history were started when angry protestant Czechs came and threw their Catholic overlords out of a window.
9. There was a Czech king who used to go hunting by shooting deer out of his bedroom window and having them brought up to his room.
10. In Amsterdam, whilst marijuana and prostitution are legal, it is a serious offence to urinate in public. The Amsterdamers hate people peeing on their old buildings so much that on many buildings pee guards are installed that are designed to deflect pee back onto the pants of the person peeing. When these were first installed many were also electrified.
11. When Louis Bonaparte was made King of the Dutch he wanted to impress his new subjects by making a speech in Dutch. He tried to say, 'I am your King', but ended up saying 'I am your rabbit'. The words for kind and rabbit are very similar in Dutch.
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