“Not a single other person had complained about us so I refute the idea that it was their smell....”
Wanna bet? I’ve told people their body odor was so bad they needed to clean up. You have to use tact, but when a person walks into a skating rink where you are, and the WHOLE PLACE is immediately filled with their body odor it is time to say “Enough”.
I bet they were Africans. One time I was on a train traveling through Spain and suddenly everybody came rushing out of the car in front of me, waving their hands in front of their faces.
Because of where the train stopped on the platform, I decided to walk through that car. It was nearly empty...except for one young African woman, sitting there wearing traditional dress and probably just off the boat. She smelled so bad it made your eyes water.
Someone later told me that Africans put some kind of fermented animal grease on their hair to make it shiny and also to make it possible to braid it into the shapes they like, and this is what smelled so bad.
It's a horrible smell, but I felt bad for the poor girl, because she had no idea, she probably thought she smelled just fine (and she looked quite clean and well dressed in an ethnic way), and she probably also thought that she was being harrassed because she was African. But that wasn't it at all: she just simply reeked.