Post
by Wrathbone » Tue Jul 02, 2019 8:39 am
Definitely not just you. I went through the phase of lots of friends getting married, hence lots of stag dos, and most of them involved some ludicrous amount of money to go abroad somewhere rife with culture that would be entirely ignored as everyone got slaughtered. I went on one stag do to Budapest because it was a close friend, and a couple of others in the UK, but otherwise I stopped caring about what people think when I say I can't (or won't) go. It's not even that I couldn't afford it - it's that I don't want to spend hundreds of pounds on shite like that.
As for birthdays, I always just go for a few drinks in town and say anyone who wants to come along is welcome. I would never in a million years expect people to spend a bunch of money for it.
EDIT - Going back to stag dos, when did it become the norm for a stag do to be a minimum of a 3-day affair in a foreign city whereby the people involved annoy the locals in a whirlwind of booze, money, xenophobia, embarrassing t-shirts, kebabs and tits? To paraphrase Rob Brydon, they used to just be a right good knees up down the pub. The stag do I went to in Budapest was relatively tame, but by the third day I was exhausted and hungover beyond the point where I could tolerate even the most minor inconvenience. I don't cope well with airports at the best of times, and getting through customs on the way home was an ordeal - the saving grace being, I suppose, that the airport staff in Budapest are used to burnt-out shells like me shambling through every day. Incidentally, we shared both the inbound and outbound flights with another stag do for a certain "Deano", who it turned out was two men short on the return, having lost one to a hospital and one to the police. I can't say I was surprised based on their unfathomable dickhead behaviour on the first flight. I also had to discuss with a friend on the plane possible explanations he could give to his girlfriend as to why he now had a coin-slot scar down the centre of his forehead (he headbutted the buttons in a lift).
Oh, also, someone in our party got separated from the group on the second night and was pepper-sprayed by a prostitute (or, as his voicemail said, "I've been peppercorned in the face!").
Fuck stag dos.