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Brits behave badly - especially on vacation

Drinking, public sex: Tales abound from Ibiza, Greece, Dubai
Sarah Lyall, New York Times
Published 4:00 am, Sunday, August 24, 2008
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"They scream, they sing, they fall down, they take their clothes off, they cross-dress, they vomit," Malia's mayor, Konstantinos Lagoudakis, said in an interview. "It is only the British people - not the Germans or the French."


"The government of Britain has to do something," Lagoudakis said. "These people are giving a bad name to their country."

They are also hurting themselves in the process. A recent report published by the British Foreign Office, "British Behavior Abroad," noted that in a 12-month period in 2006 and 2007, 602 Britons were hospitalized and 28 raped in Greece, and that 1,591 died in Spain and 2,032 were arrested there.

The report did not distinguish between medical cases and arrests associated with drunkenness and those that had nothing to do with it. But it did say that "many arrests are due to behavior caused by excessive drinking."

So it would seem. Reports of scandalous incidents rumble on regularly here and elsewhere, helping to cement Britain's reputation as the largest exporter of inebriated hooligans in Europe.

Earlier this summer, flying home to Manchester from the Greek island of Kos, a pair of drunken women yelling, "I need some fresh air," attacked the flight attendants with a vodka bottle and tried to wrestle the airplane's emergency door open at 30,000 feet. The plane diverted hastily to Frankfurt, and the women were arrested.


More alarmingly, a 20-year-old British tourist partied with her sister and a friend into the early hours in Malia also in July, then returned to her hotel room and - although she had denied being pregnant - gave birth. Her companions say they returned later to find the baby dead; she has been charged with infanticide.


All of which leads to a natural question: Why?

"I think that in their country, they are like prisoners and they want to feel free," said Niki Pirovolaki, who works in a bakery on Malia's main street and often encounters addled Britons heading back to their hotels - "if they can remember where they are staying," she said.

David Familton, a Briton who works in a club here, said it was a question of emotional comfort. "It's because of British culture - no one can relax, so they become inebriated to be the people they want to be," he said.

Worried about the increase in crimes and accidents afflicting drunken tourists, the British Consulate in Athens has begun several campaigns, using posters, beach balls and coasters with snappy slogans, to encourage young visitors to drink responsibly.

"When things do go wrong, they go wrong in quite a big way," said Alison Beckett, the director of consular services. "What we're trying to do here is reduce some of these avoidable accidents where they have so much to drink that they fall off balconies and are either killed or need huge operations."



"British tour operators present them with these packages that promise a wild holiday in Malia," said Brig. Fotis Georgopoulos, the police chief of Iraklion, which takes in Malia. "This predisposes them. They are automatically put into a wild and lawless mind-set that is beyond them."