I could probably write blog post after blog post about our brief excursion to Verdun, because it was sch a moving experience. Unfortunately, most of our group was affected not by the sheer horror of Verdun but by the tour guide we had. David, A brit expatriate in Luxembourg, seems like a knowledgeable and decent tour guide from the very beginning. On his first talk he was frank about what he had thus learned. He told us the truth about the EU in Strasbourg, which I appreciated because the people in Strasbourg never said anything like that. But as time went on, he began to deepen his obnoxiousness, and by the time the rest of the group, professors included, were fed up with him, I had joined the group against him. I could not tell you everything that he did to offend my fellow DGPSers and myself, but I thought a brief description as in order.
To begin, he never gave the group any overview of the two-day tour, the battlefield of Verdun, or WWI. This to me was the worst problem, because even though I know World War I very well, I wanted to know what it was we would actually be seeing in regards to the war. This did not bother me too much because the rest of the group did not seem to have a problem with his lack of explanation. However, the problem came when I would ask him a question, and he would insult my intelligence because I did phrased the question the wrong way. On one occasion, as we were touring a field with huge craters from mining trench warfare, I asked if anything else happened here besides the mining incident. He looked at me and said, "What a stupid question! Come back to me when you have knowledge." Another time, Jenny asked the guide while walking from a WWII memorial site if both WWI and WWII were fought at the site of this memorial, and he literally scoffed at me. Scoffed.
The fact of the matter is that David showed no real interest in being with the group or giving a tour. The man acted throughout the entire two days as if we, the paying consumers of his services, were a colossal nuisance to him, and he made several snide remarks about how difficult we were to put up with. While thee are many examples I can give you of this happening, I think the funniest is when he literally abandoned our group on a battlefield forest. Mind you, this comes just after he told us that there was serious live artillery in the forest and that people die each year walking on mines and collecting live ammunition. He then just left us there to find a way out on our own.
Interestingly enough, he lost what little respect he had left from the group when he fabricated several important pieces of information on the tour. He has issues with just randomly pulling numbers out of his head to assign to casualties, but he also had a problem with making up a complete lie in the face of not knowing an answer. God forbid.
And how could I forget the evening in Verdun? When we were touring the tiny city, he overheard Miles and Cameron say they wanted some good Italian food at this cute little Italian restaurant we had passed. He went on a rampage about uncultured we Americans were and that you don't come to France to eat Italian, especially at this place in Verdun because it was known for it's disgusting food and outrageous prices. To top this whole thing off, after we could not find a different restaurant to eat in, guess what the guide tried to get us to eat? At that little Italian restaurant. This was the final straw for our professors, who absolutely refused to eat at a place the guide just said was awful.
Being that he was British, he never missed an opportunity to poke fun at the French. I love a good French joke, don't get me wrong. But I think he crossed the line several times as well. He also said a few nasty things about Germans to Christine, and I thought that was unjustified as well. I didn't care when he blatantly called us uncultured and stupid Americans, but he needed to be a little less hypocritical.
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