Watch this short story of a holiday that turned awry.
Self-study activity:
Watch the video and answer the questions below about it.
1 What did the couple's friend (of a friend), John, do the first night?
2 What activity did John insist on doing the next day?
3 What happened to him when he was a long way off the shore?
4 Why couldn't the hotel use their lifeboat?
5 How did the swimmer pull John back to the beach?
6 Who was in fact the person who saved their friend's life?
Sometimes you agree to go on holiday with people you don’t really know. And sometimes those people (1) drink too much on the first night.
My husband and I found ourselves on such a holiday in Morocco, where a friend of a friend, let’s call him John, had a place at a beach resort in Ashilla. John insisted on taking Ashilla’s night life by storm and the next day, even though he looked like he could use a nap, continued to amp up the activity level with a bout of (2) windsurfing. This is a vacation after all, why relax?
When he jumped on to the windsurf board he was immediately swept 300 metres off shore and then (3) the mast broke. My husband and I couldn’t swim out to help. He’s not a strong swimmer, neither am I. So we watched with increasing dread as John was rapidly swept further out to sea.
Crowds gathered on the beach and began to get rowdy:
If he doesn’t drown, the sharks will definitely get him.
Come here! There’s a guy drowning.
The hotel offered to call in a lifeboat from Tangiers, (4) theirs was broken. Tangiers was over an hour away.
Suddenly, Morocco’s version of Arnold Schwarzenegger parted the crowds with his rippling muscles and proclaimed: I watched a guy die here last year. I can’t let that happen again, and in he dove, swimming towards the small dot that John had become on the horizon. He seemed to swim for hours, stopping only briefly to catch his breath and began pulling John back (5) on the broken windsurfer.
As they came on to the shore the previously cut-throat crowd was cheering and crying. The lifeboat from Tangiers had just arrived, the crew basking in undeserved glory.
Turns out the Moroccan Arnold was (6) a professional bodybuilder on vacation from LA. And if he hadn’t weighed 300 pounds we would have lifted him on our shoulders and paraded him through the Medina.
