Where is the worst place you have ever been?

DMZ, South Korea

The ICU of the hospital where I did my residency. Alone on call with 2 cardiac arrests at different sides of the hospital and several patients already on ventilators and not doing well.

In Palliative Care next to a loved one who died before my eyes.

Baltimore a few years back.. the particular area i was in was poverty stricken…and just run down.

Walking on the street in Gurgaon, India. The incredible poverty and suffering is right next to wealth so excessive it will make a compassionate person sick.

At an Alicia Keyes concert. The music was so loud it hurt my ears even when they were stuffed full of ear blocks. The music didn’t sound very good after that.

Oh. And my wife opened my phone bill and found dozens of calls that should not have been there. She made our kids sit between us and every time I looked at her, she would mouth, “Fuck you!” She is not normally a mean person, and never swears. I never felt so bad in my life.

Public high school.

Wherever I am is the worst place to be.

As a teenager, the worst place I’d been to was a funeral home in Maryland where I saw my friend lying in a casket, eyes closed, caked in the thick makeup of someone who no longer had Life to color her face. Then in my 20s I found the worst place I’d ever been to was the wake at my boyfriend’s funeral, where I averted my gaze toward his casket so as to keep in my memory the image of his face—eyes open, smiling, and with his natural coloring—and avoid the mistake I made years before. Despite my belief then that nothing could ever be worse, three years later I found I was wrong again. I know now, at least, I hope now, that the worst place I’ll ever know is the hospice in Arizona where I watched my father die over the course of ten days. I am so sorry, @Jude, to see you have been there, too.

Inside my head as a mushroom-tripping teenager. Shudder…

@jetblondie I’m so sorry for your string of losses. :(

For me, the answer is: the laundry room in the basement of my grandparent’s house. I was about four years old, and I was being sexually molested by one of my uncles. I could hear everyone else in the house, still at the dinner table on the floor above me, laughing and joking. They couldn’t hear me.

Similar to @ladymia69, I’d have to say on a really bad trip or stuck at a desk in a classroom. Same difference.

Charlestown, West Virginia. Between the cigarette smoke and the greasy food I thought I was going to die of cancer before I left the next morning.

Living in a rooming house in Winnipeg downtown for seven months. Being kept up all night long by people drinking, some dude trying to force his way in my room at night, and the guy next door hanging himself. It was right next to a 7–11 though, so that was awesome.

@Symbeline That sounds horrible! Hey where have you been? I haven’t seen you on Fluther for awhile and I was missing your answers.

I suppose a manhole I had to slide into. Couldn’t stand up straight, or turn around. Couldn’t see my feet, which were half covered in sewage. During all that, I felt something crawl over my foot. I couldn’t see what it was, so I visualized that it was a lizard, not a rat.

Not to push my religion on anyone, but I really can’t think of anyplace I’ve been where I didn’t feel the comfort of the Lord with me

I’m going to take a similar answer to those above and say [insert random name of one of dozens of] funeral homes. I will also add cemeteries to that. Ideally, I will never set foot in either one ever again.

@augustlan I am sorry for your situation! Death is an inevitable part of life (I keep telling myself), however devastating it may be. Molestation, on the other hand, is an abominable, terrible thing that I consider myself extremely lucky for never having experienced. Ugh. People are f-ing horrible. I am so embarrassed to be human sometimes.

I really hate both Tuba City, Arizona and Wheeling, West Virginia. Wheeling is filthy, brown, dirty, ugly, and only offers gambling, and Tuba City is essentially the same except not as brown and with nicer scenery. But mostly I hate Tuba City because I had a horrible experience finding a place to stay there while on a road trip and it is in the middle of bumfuck nowhere with pretty much only Indian reservations around and we were inexperienced road trippers at that point and scared so…..but I went through it again this summer, still lame.

In the house with my parents immediately after they found out the child abuse case was dismissed, and I was the one who reported them.

Conditions: A Mexican hamlet, where the shacks were made of whatever could be found. I was there with a missions group distributing food and clothes.

Personal danger: Chicago at night. On a road through the bad part of St. Louis (at night). Clinging to the side of a mountain after trying to cross a hole in the trail, with naught but a thousand feet of rocks and grass between me and a ravine.

Residence: A basement in Rolla, MO. There were four of us living down there, and at one point we all got sick and kept passing the bug to each other. It was cold and crickety, we didn’t get along with the owners of the house, and the family coffers held next to nothing after a run-in with a Ponzi scheme masquerading as a venture capitalist.

Auschwitz – Birkenau site…I have been to Madero Mexico and Honduras, both piss poor hell holes and even worse the Cabrini Green Projects in Chicago, but I will never forget the feeling of despair of Auschwitz. Really words cannot describe that feeling I felt there.

Prison. But not because I did something wrong. The Moundsville Prison in WV is now closed and they have tours. It was very horrible yet facinating. It is a very old prison and over crowded and they had 3 prisoners in each 8×5 cell. One would have to lay in the floor to sleep. Made me glad I wasn’t a criminal.

My own head. Jail, court, funerals, crack runs to the projects at 3 a.m. and psych wards. I think they don’t need any explaining why they are shitty.

Caught in a lie.

A physical place? Okay: caught between people’s armpits (I’m short!) during a mosh pit. Being in a crowd like that is fun as hell, but boy can it be disgusting.

A tiny little courthouse in the middle of one of the most backwards towns in TN. There was a pingpong table leaned up against one of the walls and the judge wore orange UT Football shorts with loafers and knee high socks. The courthouse itself, as well as the town, looks as though it has been preserved since the 1950s. It’s a weird place. I’m sure cannibals live there.

Tiajuana, Mexico. The streets are filthy, most of the people were filthy and one woman attempted to sell me her baby.

The food I was smelling cooking had a strange odor to it.

I looked around and could find a dog anywhere.

The bathrooms there are open pits, where you just hang it over and let it fly. They tried to charge me one peso for one square of toilet paper!

Glad I brought a bologna sandwich with me.

I have been only once to Tiajuana and I will never go back

Fiddle Player, are you talking about my state?

On an old crappy smelly rattle trap train from Budapest Hungary to Bucharest Romania in 2005. It was brutal. No air conditioning. Everyone seemed to be smoking. The toilets emptied directly onto the tracks. Crowded sleeping area with no place to store bags. Way over priced. Pure torture.

@john65pennington One of the worst nights I ever spent was in Tijuana during Spring Break. A group of young boys surrounded my friends and I. They were trying to sell us necklaces, then grabbed the money out of my hand and ran. I happened to be carrying everyone’s money since I was the only one with a purse for the evening, now all of our money was gone. A local guy that had been hanging out with us found a policeman and told him what happened. They gathered a few of the boys and asked us to go to the police station. Our spring break evening was spent in a Tijuana police station waiting for the young boy’s mother to show up. Apparently the boy’s mother has more say about discipline than the police? wtf?

We waited for 3 hours until we gave up, ate some nasty vendor food (thanks to our local flirt), then drove back to the border to sleep in our car before the drive back to San Luis Obispo. :/

I’ve been to worse places in my life, but Tijuana ranks in the top 3.

Disneyland.

I really hate going to the mall. Especially when the music’s loud and it’s winter and it’s too hot to leave your coat on but it’s bulky to carry.

Denmark, Copenhagen to be precise. I mean i’m sure it’s a delightful city steeped in history, but to a 12yr old lad…..speaking from past experience here….. it can be a deadly dull location.

Israel is far and away the most unpleasant country I’ve ever had the misfortune to set foot in. A sizeable minority of the people I met were obnoxious bigots, hell bent on lecturing me about the evils of the Jews or Palestinians. At least both sets of bigots were united on telling me how bad I should feel regarding British rule during the mandate. A plague on both their houses…

Immingham a bleak seaport on the River Humber in Lincolnshire England. A cold, flat, featureless landscape with one grotty pub.

Anyplace where you see that the love in your S/O’s eyes has faded.

What Austinlad said; plus, I was in a car with my father one time, and I was convinced that he was driving my sister and me to a remote location to abandon or kill us. Completely unfounded, but the fear was something I’ll never forget. As far as visual abyss, the desolation of West Texas during a spring sandstorm (cue the rolling tumbleweeds) is about as dreary as it gets.

@meiosis really, you make it sound like you experienced a mosquito problem, how inconvenient for you. Never mind, your curse has come true, there is a plague on the Palestinian houses, it’s called the Israelis.

@john65pennington, it’s my state too. The town I’m referring to is in East TN, and you live in West TN, so I wouldn’t feel too bad if I were you.

Most recently, it was to the airport where I had to say goodbye to the man I love because life made it too difficult for us to be together. Actually, no, it was the driving away from there that was the worst place I had to go…

@mammal It’s not the Israelis who have made it their business to make unprovoked attacks on the citizenry. Both sides have their claims to the land, and the Israelis (despite having the older claim) are at least civilized.

@harple {{{hugs}}}

School!!!

Tuba City? I play the tuba, perhaps I ought to visit there.Surely it can’t be worse than Immingham can it?

@basstrom188 save yourself the trip, and don’t :) no tubas in this tuba city!