If you're an American junior or senior in high school, there's a good chance that at some point over the next few months, you'll be going on tours of colleges and universities. Almost all schools offer such an experience: the schools want you to attend their institution, and the tours are a good way for the schools to sell themselves to prospective students. As a result, almost all of these college tours are free. Sure, you have to pay to get there and you may need to book a hotel for the night, but it's not like the university is going to charge you for the tour itself. In fact, most colleges let just about anyone walk around their campuses for free.

But if you want to tour Chiang Mai University, you may have to hand over a couple of bucks.

If you're Chinese, that is. Maybe.

Chiang Mai University is located in Chiang Mai, the largest city in northern Thailand. It's not all that close to Mainland China -- to get from China to Thailand, you have to cut through Burma or Laos (or, more likely, fly) -- but starting in December 2012, Chiang Mai became a very familiar city to many Chinese. The reason? A movie, titled "Lost in Thailand." The film, was "by any measure a ridiculous movie," according to Time Magazine. Per Time, the movie was "lowbrow" with low-budget action scenes and a "plot [that] feels like a rehash of The Hangover Part II and Planes, Trains and Automobiles" -- which was the magazine's way of saying "not all that great." It has a 67% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (albeit on only six English-speaking reviews) and a 49% audience score, with a similarly-low 2.9 stars on Letterboxd. It's a Chinese-language slapstick comedy that didn't resonate with audiences outside of China. But in China itself, Lost in Thailand was a blockbuster. A month after its release, it had earned the equivalent of around $200 billion, and was the highest-grossing Chinese-language movie in China's history at the time. 

And many of the scenes were shot in Chiang Mai. Within a year after the film's release, Chiang Mai started to become a popular tourist destination for Chinese travelers. According to a study (pdf here) that explored the impact of the film on tourism in Thailand, in 2012, there were "2.8 million tourists from mainland China" to Thailand. The year after the movie came out? "The number of Chinese mainland tourists exceeded 4.7 million—an increase by 68.7%." And, according to the paper's authors, most of that gain can be attributed to the film. Fans of the movie wanted to see themselves in the same place as their now-favorite film.

And for Chiang Mai University, that became a problem. The movie doesn't take place at the school, at least not in its classrooms or the like, but many of the scenes use locations on campus as a backdrop. And for many tourists, that was enough to make the school a destination on their itineraries. Thai publication Samui Times reported on some of the tourists' more unusual activities:

The behavior includes sneaking into classrooms to take photos of teachers and students, causing car accidents, leaving a mess in the canteen, and pitching a tent near the lake and writing “we are here” in paint on the ground.

The most bizarre behavior, however, is the practice of costume play where the tourists buy or rent school uniforms and pose for photos, a practice which is widely encouraged on Chinese travel websites, according to reports. Many of these visitors also sneak into classrooms in school uniforms and attend lessons