MORNING STORIES TRANSCRIPT How to Rate a Travel Disaster: Vacationer Robin Levendov relives her encounter with the alien in the bathroom. Also, Mark Grashow stops by to rate Robin's story on his patented Vacation Disaster Story Scale Hi everybody! It's Tony Kahn, the producer and director of Morning Stories from WGBH in Boston. Well, it's summer and already if you listen carefully, the air is full of travel stories and anecdotes that people tell of vacations gone horribly awry. Sooner or later, of course, all of our trips end up as, you know, one or two or three anecdotes, so obviously the more horrendous the details, the better the chance that those stories will be remembered and retold! Still, how do you evaluate a really good disaster travel story? Well, today's Morning Story is going be an attempt to answer that question, scientifically. First we're going to listen to a travel story that I recorded a while ago by the beach in Cape Cod. It's told by a friend of mine named Robin, about an incident that had just happened to her and her husband Rich, in a hotel room in London. Then, we're gonna turn to my good friend and world traveler, Mark Grashow, who's going to evaluate Robin's story with a system that you're never going to forget. So first, let's listen to our test story, Robin and Rich at the Hotel Savoy. [Sounds of ocean waves and sea gulls] Robin: One night, at about 4:30 in the morning, I stumbled out of bed, found my way around the corner to the bathroom. And I saw a man, standing over my bathroom sink. So, I ran back to bed. I hid under the sheets and covered myself completely with the sheets. Rich -- his first reaction was, "What did you do to yourself, now?" [laughs] He just had this vision that I had knocked over some glass and stepped in it. I said, "There's a man in our bathroom!" And he starts asking me questions and interviewing me and saying, you know, "Was he tall or short, was he young or old?" So I said, "Will you just call security, already?" So he picked up his sandal, [laughs] this little flimsy rubber sandal, and he, like, crept around the corner, to the bathroom, kind of sidled up to the wall, with his back against the wall, and took his arm and he flung that door open! And there's the intruder, sitting on the john, with his skivvies down by his ankles and holding a hanger, in his hand. So Rich, you know, started screaming at him, "What the hell do ya think you're doin' in here? This is OUR hotel room, OUR hotel room!" The man lifts his chin up a little and squints his eyes and goes, "I'm from another time zone." And he turned around and with hanger raised, he stumbles out of our bathroom, in his underwear and his t-shirt and that was the last we saw of him. [laughs] About ten, fifteen minutes later, Rich proceeds to tell security the entire story, with all the details. Meanwhile, HE'S the person standing there in HIS underwear, saying there was intruder,
from another planet. [laughs] An hour later, we got a call from the front desk. I think they didn't think our story was impressive enough to warrant a manager. "Yes, they found the man." And it turned out that he was an American guest that was sleepwalking in the hotel and they sent us up a basket of fruit. And that's when I told them a banana, just wouldn't do it for me. I needed something more substantial. Ten days after we'd gotten home, there was a letter saying next time we visited the Savoy, they'd upgrade us to a suite. [laughs] Oh, God, they still hadn't fixed the door. [laughs] Here we are, in the studio, with Mark Grashow, world expert in disasters that happen while you're traveling. So, Mark, based on your experience, how would you rate this mishap? I think the event is amusing, funny, not -- somewhere around, maybe, a hundred points. Out of how many? The maximum is, is five hundred. Five hundred points!?! Yes. You have actually figured out a numeric, equivalent for the disasters that happen to the people on the road Yes, yes! This system dates all the way back to 1974. My wife and I had been on the road, for about a year. We found ourselves in a hotel in Jug Jakarta, Java We were sitting around a table with about ten other travelers, some of them traveling east, some of them traveling west, talking about where we had stayed, and where we were going and sharing lots of information, when in walked a couple that we had all met earlier in the day, that had decided to climb a volcano. Mm, hmm. And they set out. They got really near the top, when suddenly there was a torrential downpour. Totally drenched, and the white powdery ash turned to this thick ooze.
Oh! And the two of them slid off the trail, down the slope, hundreds of feet... [Laughing] Hundreds of feet?...until they actually managed to stand up. Oh, my God. Lost their pack, lost their shoes, lost their passport. Their clothes filled up with mud. Well, the group of us at this hotel decided that in the great scheme of things, this event was spectacular and had to be worth five hundred points. Five hundred points. This is the gold standard. This was the -- and as soon as we did this, we realized that ALL disasters, now, could be rated. So if you, for example, went to a monkey temple... A monkey temple? Okay....and decided to try and feed the monkeys... Yes....and instead of taking the peanut, the monkey runs up your body, jumps on top of your head, grabs your hair, holds on tight, until you buy the monkey another bag of peanuts, which he takes and then runs off, that we give you... What? Let me guess. Four hundred and twelve. No! No, no, no, no. Eighty-five points.
Eighty-five?!? There's no real threat, no real danger. Ooohh. I see, okay. So... Even things like, for example, if you're in a strange place, and you, from the airport, you flag down a taxi, and you tell them, take you to your hotel, and the taxi drives away with everything you own, I would give this a hundred. [Laughter] Oh, a hundred!?! Well, depending on how much stuff, ya got. If you've got a lot of stuff, it's worth more. If you have a little stuff, it's, it s worth less. It's gotta be up there. Lasting effect. Lasting effect. Even the little experiences, if you go to a country, for the first time you've experienced a squat toilet... Yeah?...gotta be worth at least thirty points. If you go for -- to your hotel in a strange place, and you decide to, Let's go for a little sightseeing and shopping and you totally forget where your hotel is, and you forget the name of your hotel! [Laughing] Yes, yes! Now that's worth something! Absolutely, everything can be rated. Take too much luggage: forty points. Find a customs guy that just doesn't like your face, doesn't like your attitude and decides to take apart everything you own: forty-five points. You know.
But it's humiliating. It's humiliating, yes. But, you know, as opposed to, you know, trying to explain someone in a drugstore that you need something for diarrhea and they don't speak your language, and you have to go through all these sign languages to try and get them to understand. [Laughing heartily] I know you to be a really nice guy... Yes... and I know that you wouldn't, I mean, you're not saying that the purpose of travel is to be able to come back home barely alive. No. No. Or that the only experiences that change you for the better are scrapes with death. [Laughter] No. You never go on a trip planning for something like any of these things to happen. But if they do happen, at least ya got points. Anything out of the ordinary, anything unexpected, you get points. You deserve points, you get points. If you eat breakfast too close to the baboons, getting a room and discovering you're on the same floor as the, as the teen tour. People who suddenly discover halfway through the trip, that they actually hate their friend and they don't get along. Book a trip and two days before you're supposed to go, you find out that your travel agent has been arrested for fraud. [Both laugh heartily] How many points? That's big! That's money you lost, time lost, that's about three hundred points. And you have to you can't inflate your scores, either. You can't uh,
It's an honor system. It's an honor system. If you're flying to a country and you are expecting your best friend to meet you there, and no one shows up, you can't decide that's worth four hundred points. It's just unethical. [Laughing] This is a very subtle system, Mark. Yes, this is tough, this is tough. Because this isn't just slapstick, you're talking about. No, no. This is mental anguish. This doesn't have to be overseas, either. You can get points, you can get points right here, yeah, right at home. Last time I visited you in New York, you know, I parked on the street. You know how long it took me to find my car? [Tony and Mark both laugh] You don't go looking for these things, but at least enjoy the points and enjoy the stories, when you get home. I'm sure that people listening to this, like me, are going to have much of their traveling past flash before their eyes. What should they do about it? I'm hoping that people will email me their stories. Okay?
And they can email me at <travelinggame@hotmail.com> that s all one word, travelinggame Traveling with one L travelinggame -- How many G s? Two Gs. Two G s. <travelinggame@hotmail.com> and tell me their stories and I'd love to have them share them and I'll email you back their value. I know you're driving back to New York very soon after this... Hopefully, without any points! [laughing] [Laughing] I don't know what to wish you! [Tony Kahn & Mark Grashow laugh] Other than the fact that you should call me when you get back, because I can find out... I'll do my best. okay. Mark, thanks a lot for dropping by. Okay, and I hope everybody out there travels safe.
Thanks! And that's about all the time we have for this week's, Morning Story, but don't forget to write us, too at Morning Stories at <www.wgbh.org>, let us know how you're doin' and where you're doing it from. And wherever your travels may lead you, when you get to a fork in the road, take the one that says, "Ipswitch." It'll lead you directly to <ipswitch.com>, a leader in file transfer software, and the guys who pave the road for this podcast, every week. So, thanks for listening, and we'll see ya next week. Bye, bye. Back in the days, when I had a full beard, I'm walking down the street, and the next thing I know, I'm blind and suffocating, because there's something dark and HOT, that has totally covered my face, like something out of The Alien. [Slapping sounds] It's going back and forth, back and forth, repeatedly, in what can only be taken as a mating ritual. [Laughter] And the next thing I know, I hear a guy saying, Flaubert!" Flaubert!" Ici! I can breathe again and what I see is a little monkey! There ya go! That is jumping back to this guy. The monkey is called, Flaubert!" This guy got the monkey in Tahiti, and he just loves this monkey, partly because of all the trouble the monkey gets in! We're sitting there, talking, and I'm still, you know, I'm just checking my face, to make sure, you know... [Laughter]...I'm still a virgin. [Tony and Mark both laugh] And a woman goes by, an older woman with a cane. It's winter, so she's got a heavy coat on. The monkey rushes up to her, pulls up her coat and gets right under her dress. She did something that I will never forget. She continued to walk straight forward, she didn't look down; she refused to acknowledge that anything was going on and she kept on whapping, at the side of her dress with her cane! [More laughing] Until Flaubert!" jumped out from under, and then rushed over again. Is it a question, who gets more points, the woman, the woman or you?
[Laughing] Who gets more points!? I say for you, probably, seventy-five, you know, for her, you know, maybe sixty, depending on what that monkey did under the dress. [Laughing, hysterically] What about my face?!? She could've got a hundred. Remember, they can hold on with their feet! He had four! [laughs] Let s go, we ll give you a hundred. [laughing] We'll go up to a hundred. [screeching of a monkey in the distance] [End of recording] Transcribed by: Lynn Relyea