Rude

Today we went to the zoo in Basel. As I may have mentioned, Reto is quite the zoo fan, and since I have known him I think I might have visited more zoos than I did in the other 20-something years of my life. Anyway, off we went and it was really nice, apart from all the rain. We saw lions and tiger and bears (no tigers, actually, but two types of bears and a snow leopard so that's surely enough to add up to a tiger as well), we ate an excellent cherry danish thing and a second-rate piece of lemon cake, we saw heaps of animals that I didn't know the names of (going to zoos where the animal names are only up in Foreign Languages really makes me realise how atrocious my animal knowledge is. The names were also in english in this zoo, but I didn't realise for quite a while). We also saw kookaburras, kangaroos, blue tongue lizards and various Australian snakes and spiders and fish that I feel no emotional attachment to. A mysterious old man held my hand and told me all about some iguana or something in some incomprehensible language (at least that's what I assume was going on. He said something incomprehensible to me, then grabbed my hand, made a gesture that made me think he was going to bite it, and then pointed at the mystery-reptile and said something else).

All that was very charming, and then I, in a frenzy of goodwill and politeness, held the door to the monkey house open for some man with a pram. There were two sets of doors and he seemed to be struggling a bit to get through the first door while simultaneously opening the second one and preventing his child (not in the pram) from being crushed by the first. I am generally nice, and have even been known to open doors in a professional capacity from time to time, and so I stood in the rain and held the second door open for him. Actually, I had an umbrella and I wouldn't have been able to get past him to go the other way through the doors anyway, so it wasn't actually very arduous for me, but it was still a nice gesture, and not one that anyone else was making (and there were plently of other people around who could have). And did the man with the pram acknowledge me in any way at all? Did he say thankyou? Did he so much as look at me and smile? Hah. No he bloody didn't.

Later I held another door open for another pram-driver (another man) and he didn't say thanks either. Honestly, people with prams are so annoying (taking up tons of space, having noisy and annoying children, dawdling, often travelling in packs, and worse still, packs several-abreast ie. taking up the whole footpath) that in my opinion they should be pathetically grateful when other people treat them with any amount of kindness*. In general they are, too, at least in my experience of helping people lug their prams up and down stairs in train stations (usually women and usually in Australia if that means anything, which I secretly suspect it might. As in, women are more likely to be the ones to know how annoying children and prams and unhelpful strangers are, and Australians are generally nicer than Switzies), but these two men completely failed to show any appreciation. And neither of them had the excuse of being actually too harried or harrassed to notice or to have the time to acknowledge me, they just didn't. They just dawdled through the door and ignored me.

Rude.






* Please note that some of my dearest friends are people with prams, and in general I don't really mean what I say in that sentence. Although I also sort of do.