Our local newspaper Nacka-Värmdö-Posten for 24 July has an item by Evelina Stucki that I would be remiss to keep from you, Dear Reader (and I translate).
"Last summer, three Värmdö girls went to Brighton in Great Britain. Before leaving, they had tried to contact their host family, but the phone number they had been given did not work. When they arrived, it turned out that there were thirteen people living in the house. [...] the family was prone to fighting, and the girls allegedly did not get much to eat.The host father had changed his name to Elvis Presley and the host parents were allegedly heavily inebriated every day. The father is reported to have openly made advances on one of the girls and tried to get them drunk. 'He was unstable and they were afraid of him', says their complaint."
Wop-bop-a-loom-a-blop-bam-boom.
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Brighton has always had a slightly dodgy reputation - check out Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, a chilling portrait of the town in the late '40s after the war. Also a superb film version with Richard Attenborough as villain Pinky Brown in one of his best performances ever. Check it out.
It does have this reputation for slightly decayed Blackpool gaiety. Reminds me of a good pop record, the Delays' Faded Seaside Glamour.
Well, family placement during language study trips appears to be something of a lottery. When I went to London for such a trip, our first assigned family didn't exist, and they had to find us a new one "on the fly" while we waited. With the result that we were in total 7 Italian boys, 3 Italian girls, 4 Swedish boys and 3 Swedish girls living in the same, normal-sized house (the family appeared to live in a trailer in their garden).
Two other girls lived mostly alone in the studio apartment of a 20-something guy. Most of the others on the same trip appered to get reasonable placements, though. With actual, rather normal families.
I spent two weeks in 1988 with nice working-class people in Juan-les-Pins on the French Riviera. The family consisted of Madame, her taxidriver son, sometimes her little grandson, and an Alsatian puppy. I spent the days with a gaggle of cute Swedish girls and the evenings in the company of J.R.R. Tolkien's Silmarillion, so I didn't learn as much French as I could have.