Monday, November 10, 2008

Maspalomas

When you book the cheapest all-inclusive holiday ever at the very, very last minute you don't really expect luxurious accommodation, fluffy white bath towels and the best upper sets as fellow holiday-makers. And sure enough, we didn't get any of that in Gran Canaria. But we did get sun. And we did get a perfectly acceptable apartment, a nice pool, edible food, lashings of alcohol on tap and the dunes of Maspalomas. So as I lay on a sunbed reading David Foster Wallace's Consider The Lobster, thinking that many of the characters around me sounded a lot like people I had seen in Eastenders (there were even two Frank Butchers) — and feeling not a little superior (mostly because of my reading matter rather than any innate class) — I came upon this passage on vulgarity:
But of course we should keep in mind that vulgar has many dictionary definitions and that only a couple of these have to do with lewdness and bad taste [DFW is writing about the porn industry]. At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby. It is humility with a comb-over.
So , there you have it — I am proud to have been a vulgar tourist and here is my vulgar slideshow.


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

3 comments:

Rosie said...

ew it looks wonderful. sunbeds and not doing anything...and no rain.

Ms Mac said...

I'll be coming to you for advice on cheap hols in future. They'll have to be super-cheap, mind!

Lesley said...

Rosie: Holidays in the rain are so posh!

Ms Mac - I'm available for consulting any time. (Seriously, 390€ pp all inclusive is a snip isn't it?).

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