My holidays are active and I only spend little time in the hotel in order to sleep there. Thus I am only to a very limited extent interested in its inner life and the group dynamics developing on these sites.

Now I am on holidays with my youngest one (5). I chose a family hotel at the sea with swimming pool and numerous other children, so that my youngest one finds friends. The hotel has three swimming pools. One for children, one exclusively for adults and a mixed one. Around these swimming pools are many deckchairs.

We hardly have time to use one of those. We are swimming, building sand castles, go by boat, surf, go diving, i.e. simply discover the usual holiday activities. At the end of the day we ended up in the mixed swimming pool. We wanted to put our things on a deckchair but there is never an empty chair. Not a single one. Not that every deckchair is actually used. Most of the deckchairs are empty and only occupied with towels, books, newspapers, t-shirts and similar stuff.

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We started to watch this. At any time of the day, approximately 10% of the deckchairs are actually used. Only shortly before lunch time, about half of them are used. At daybreak starting from about 7am, young and old, men and women are sneaking to the deckchairs and occupy 2 to 4 of them with various items. Then they disappear again and are not to be seen for the rest of the day or at maximum for one hour. Madness!! What nonsense!! A territorial behaviour that is normally seen with animals such as dogs.

All the same to us. We spread our things on the ground and laugh about the stress the others have in the early morning when trying to snatch the much sought-after places. However yesterday we discovered an empty deckchair when we went swimming in the evening.

I put my backpack and our towels on it and started to take off my t-shirt and shorts. Suddenly a podgy man came running.

„What are you thinking?“ he was shouting at us. “That is our deckchair; I only changed the towel which was on it before”, he continued screaming.

I looked around. There was no towel on the deckchair and he had empty hands.

Whatever, I tell myself. If that was THE positive event of his day (I can already hear him telling his wife, how bravely he defended the deckchair), then he should have this event from me as a gift.

I take our things and we go to the next palm tree. Outraged he hauls the deckchair to the three other empty deckchairs and immediately puts a towel on it and lies down. When we return about 40 minutes later from the water, his wife was lying on the deckchair. The other two deckchairs were empty, as so often.

It’s incredible, how strange people behave time and again.