Screaming, falling down, cross-dressing, vomiting

Konstantinos Lagoudakis, the mayor of Malai, Crete, interviewed in today’s New York Times: “They scream, they sing, they fall down, they take their clothes off, they cross-dress, they vomit.”

He's talking about British tourists.

“It is only the British people,” he said, “not the Germans or the French.”

The Times spoke to 21-year-old man from Essex who said that the night before he had drunk had five beers, six cocktails made with Baileys, tequila, absinthe, ouzo, vodka, gin and orange juice (mmm!), five vodka-and-limes and another five beers – all of which, he said, emboldened him to pick up a woman to spend the night with.

In July, a 20-year-old British tourist partied with her sister and a friend into the early hours, then returned to her hotel room and — although she had denied being pregnant — gave birth. Her friends say they returned later to find the baby dead; she has been charged with infanticide.

Of course, the badly behaved Brits abroad aren’t been confined to Malia.

Earlier this summer, flying home to Manchester from the Greek island of Kos, a pair of drunken women yelling “I need some fresh air” attacked the flight attendants with a vodka bottle and tried to wrestle the airplane’s emergency door open at 30,000 feet. The plane diverted hastily to Frankfurt, and the women were arrested.

In Laganas, on the Greek island of Zakinthos, where a teenager from Sheffield died after a drinking binge this summer, more than a dozen British women were charged in July with prostitution after taking part in what the police called “an alfresco oral sex contest.”

In Dubai this summer, a British man and woman who met during a drinking bout were arrested and charged with having sex on a beach, after repeatedly shouting abuse at a police officer who ordered them to stop.

A recent report published by the British Foreign Office, “British Behavior Abroad,” noted that in a 12-month period in 2006 and 2007, 602 Britons were hospitalized and 28 raped in Greece, and that 1,591 died in Spain and 2,032 were arrested there.

London 2012 is gonna rock.