Lanzarote Relocation

We (quite deliberately – it’s therapeutic) watch some real crap TV, and we love the idiots you get on the property and holiday programmes. Last night was no exception, and we sat down to watch Holiday Hijack from Channel 4, featuring four morons from London who wouldn’t look out of place in ‘The Only Way is Essex’. Two (relatively) pretty little brunettes, a blonde bird with thighs on a giant redwood scale, and a little ginger boy who I spent the whole show trying to figure out whether he was the boyfriend of one of the pretty little things, or just gay and tagging along on a girlie holiday.

The premise of the show is you take some regular tourists, and throw them into the lifestyle of the locals. Nice idea, they end up gushing about their guilt and then return home to their pathetic existence and spend the rest of their little lives going on about how cool and self-righteous they are because of the experiences whilst never using that experience to do some good!

In short – they are promised a free luxury holiday (they claimed to never do anything less), and dropped into the family home of one of the locals. It was very clear from the start these pratts were used to nothing more than a cheap package holiday to Benidorm, Ayia Napa or some hell hole in Turkey. The give-aways being comments like “Wow, they only earn seven pounds a day I earn ten times that!” (just over 18k a year before or after tax does not pay for the several 5 star holidays a year lifestyle they claimed), and the phone call to reception asking for pink champagne, and wanting to know if the towels were Egyptian cotton. My personal favourite being that ginger boy would not drink from a well – does he not realize where the mineral water he pays a couple of quid for each day, because it’s pure, comes from?

Anyway enough of the show – if you want to know more, here’s the review from the Guardian.

This and a couple of glasses of wine got us talking about some of the questions we get asked by tourists – and how they would cope here. What would shock the football shirted tourist if thrown into the expat Lanzarote lifestyle…?

Could we expect to hear comments from Chardonnay, Chantelle, Stevo and Kevlar like;

“OMG – you don’t get ITV without a 3 metre dish!”

“What! You actually have to work!”

“Those poor expats don’t even have air-conditioning; I don’t know how they do it!”

“I can’t even get a News of the World on a Sunday!”

“Those poor bar owners are all starving because of all-inclusive hotels and have to sell beer and English breakfasts at knock down prices to scratch a living”.

“The locals don’t even speak English”

“WTF, you used to be a brain surgeon and now you clean pools for a living?”

“The only English bank here is Santander!”

“Bloody hell, your mobile phone company can actually take any money they want from your bank account even after the contract is cancelled.”

“OMFG, how do you deal with all that paperwork?”

“UHT Milk? Really?!”

So… what questions do you think that the more naive visitors to Lanzarote would ask, or sweeping statements would they make, if thrown into the lifestyle of the average expat?