Sometimes, arriving early for your hotel check-in results in scoring a bed ahead of schedule. And sometimes it leads to an international incident. The latter is true of a bizarre incident in Stockholm involving three Chinese tourists—an older couple and their grown son, reports the Guardian. The three arrived very early, apparently the night before their scheduled check-in at a facility described variously as a hostel or a hotel. The two sides differ on exactly what happened next—the hotel says the tourists became belligerent and threatened staff, while the son says he merely wanted the hotel to allow his elderly parents to wait in the lobby—but the upshot is that police came and carried the group outside. See them lying on the sidewalk here. “This is killing, this is killing," the son yells in English. "Save me," says his mother.
The video soon took off on social media platforms in China, with many users outraged at the treatment. Others thought the family embarrassed China. Beijing's foreign ministry sided with the former camp, and a spokesman at China's embassy in Sweden said police "severely endangered the life and violated the basic human rights of the Chinese citizens.” A state newspaper, the People's Daily, has accused Sweden of being hypocritical in calling out human rights issues elsewhere, notes Reuters. So far, Swedish government officials haven't deemed the incident worthy of an investigation, with one anonymous official accusing China of exaggerating things because Sweden recently spoke out against the detention of a Swedish citizen, Gui Minhai, in China. (Another international incident took place at an Italian fountain.)
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