Friday open thread: awkward trips

[dolorosa_12]

This week's open thread takes a prompt suggested by author_by_night a few posts back, when I was asking people to suggest topics.

It is: talk about an awkward trip.



In order to answer this, I need to give two pieces of context first.

Number one: for some reason, when I was an undergraduate student in Sydney, there was something about me that made large numbers of of men (who were strangers to me) ask me out in contexts in which I'd given no indication that this was something I was open to, and in which asking out a stranger was kind of weird.

Number two: I have never learnt how to drive, and this meant when I lived in Australia and wanted to go somewhere beyond the cities in which I lived, I had to either rely on friends or family to drive me around, or catch a long-haul coach. (It's possible to fly between Australian cities and to some regional centres, but if your destination has no airport, that's not an option; interstate rail infrastructure in Australia was at the time — and presumably still is — fairly underdeveloped.) I spent a lot of time on the coach between Canberra and Sydney (a 3.5-hour trip), and did several trips on the coach between Sydney to the NSW south coast (a 5+-hour journey, if I remember correctly), when my Canberran school friends and I booked holiday houses for a week or so over the summer.

You may possibly begin to see where this is going.

I was always a solo traveller on those coach trips, and as they were almost all fully booked, this invariably meant sitting next to a total stranger for several hours. On at least three occasions, the person in the seat next to me was a (different) young guy of roughly my age, who fell to talking to me, and then asked me out at some point during the bus ride.

Two of the times this happened, the men in question at least had the self-preservation instincts to ask this at the end of the trip, so when I declined, we just got off the bus and went our separate ways. But on one trip, as the bus wound its incremental way from Central Station in Sydney to Batemans Bay, stopping in every town in between, the guy sitting next to me asked me out after we'd only been speaking for twenty minutes or so — we hadn't even left Sydney. So then, I said I wasn't interested, and the two of us had to sit in excruciatingly awkward silence for the next five hours. By the time I got out at Batemans Bay, I practically sprinted into the car of my waiting friends, who had come to pick me up at the bus's last stop and drive me to the holiday house in Broulee! To this day, I cannot fathom what the guy was thinking — presumably he wasn't thinking at all, or he just had such supreme self confidence that he couldn't imagine that I would possibly refuse him.

I've never been able to read or look at a device in cars or buses (trains are fine), and in any case there were no smartphones in those days, and I was not a music-and-headphones kind of person — so I always used to just sit in those coaches and stare out the window or sleep, or talk to the person next to me if they struck up a conversation. I guess I should have behaved in a more offputting way that discouraged conversation — but I was very guileless in those days.


What about you?

Comments

[trepkos]

Once, in Thailand (Phuket), I had gone to a party at the beach hut owned by a friend of mine, a local gay guy who called himself "Mac". At some point, Mac had left to open his bar; he said he'd send a tuk-tuk later to pick me up. I spent the evening talking to, and subsequently arguing with, a Swedish (I think) guy, about vegetarianism, and it got quite heated, with discussions about whether we would eat people or not, etc. And as the night wore on, it turned out that no tuk-tuk was coming for me. One of Mac's other friends called him at the bar, and he said there were no tuk-tuks. The route home was along about 3 miles of up-and-down laterite "road", with no lighting. My only choices were to stay at the hut overnight (which I couldn't do because I'd left my SO at the hotel, and he would be worried sick if I didn't return) - to WALK on my own, in the pitch black, back to Patong, or to get a lift back on the back of the bike belonging to the Swedish bloke with whom I had been arguing for the past hour or more. So I got on the back of a bike - having never ridden before, either on my own or as a passenger - and spent a terrifying 5 or 10 minutes, going up and down and side to side on the back of a bike on a pitch dark road, with someone who hated me, and no crash helmet. I think I have honestly not been so terrified in my whole life. I did have the presence of mind to say "Thank you" when I got off, and immediately went to Mac's and had a stiff drink!

I actually have another really awkward trip to blame on Mac. He invited us to go out on his friend's boat, to go snorkelling, so we went along. We had to wait ages for the boat because something was wrong. Then when we reached ... somewhere in the sea ... it turned out to be a FISHING trip. It was really distressing sitting on a boat - with little shelter from the sun - while all around us, people pulled beautiful fishes out of the water and killed them. There was little or nothing for us to eat; they were going to eat fish. I don't think Mac actually had any concept of why we were vegetarians, beyond "Aaahh ... Greenpeace!" It turned out that they'd been intending to stay out all night, on some island, I think, but we insisted they take as back. Which was awkward.

Having said that, I am still very fond of Mac, though I haven't seen him for many years. I even found out his real name after the first 10 years of knowing him! When we first arrived in Phuket - after a horrible week in Koh Samui - he offered us cocktails, and got us to help him dye some sugar green to put around the rims of the glasses, and I was immediately in love! His bar, which was then a Hard Rock cafe, was like a slice of home, or possibly London,. They played all the cool stuff - Rammstein, Led Zeppelin, The Cult, Jethro Tull ...

[dolorosa_12]

Oh wow, both those trips sound massively awkward — it's the being trapped with no options (on a boat, in a remote area at night with only a motorbike owned by an antagonist for transport), in a wildly uncomfortable environment that really make both situations sound truly awful.

Mac sounds like an interesting person, though.

[trepkos]

He's complicated!



Mac (left), me, then his partner, Dec.

[tellshannon815]

Towards the end of my A levels, my sixth form friends started planning a week in one friend's family's caravan in Wales as a celebration that July. Simple, right?

Not so much. Around the beginning of May, the couple who had been the main organisers of the trip split up. The girlfriend had been cheating on the boyfriend with another guy in the group, and the boyfriend had found out by accident (he'd overheard another friend talking about it having not realised he was behind him). After a lot of back and forth, everyone involved still ended up going on the trip. The atmosphere was awkward.

[author_by_night]

Argh. :/

[dolorosa_12]

Oh no! I feel stressed out just reading this!

[author_by_night]

FWIW, by the sounds of that guy, I think he would've asked you out no matter what. But yeah, awkward!

I can think of a few examples, honestly. One that came to mind just now was when in high school, I went to a school event with a friend and her parents, who had been chaperones. They stayed at a hotel and we stayed with her sister, whose university happened to be near the town we were in. I was really excited because I was expecting a girl's night, except her sister ended up having friends over and kind of shoving my friend and I to the side. Not in a mean way, she was nice about it, but it still happened.

When we went to bed, my friend started jerking wildly in her sleep and I had to drag her sister from her friends because I thought my friend was having a seizure. She was fine, that was just how she slept.

In fairness, IIRC it was their last weekend of the semester, so I'm sure she wanted to see her friends one last time before the summer.Also, there were potentially conversations I can see her not wanting her sister around for. (Either crazy college stories, or could've just been very personal stuff.) I'm also certain now, with the benefit of hindsight, that us staying over there was a request from her parents. In other words, I think it was more of a babysitting gig to her, despite us being teenagers.

Still, it was a little awkward and disappointing.

[dolorosa_12]

FWIW, by the sounds of that guy, I think he would've asked you out no matter what.

I think you're right, and at the time it was excruciating. But as soon as I left the bus, it just became another funny anecdote about all the weird contexts in which random strange men asked me out.

That trip with your friend and her family just sounds like a mess of mismatched expectations — and very awkward to have experienced.

[author_by_night]

I do have more awkward stories, but some are a little convoluted and took way too long to explain. This was far from the most awkward, just the shortest. :)

[peaked]

I guess I should have behaved in a more offputting way that discouraged conversation — but I was very guileless in those days.

I personally don't believe you should look back on this and ask yourself what you should've done differently because I feel like this is feeding into the belief that you had put a signal out that said, "Hey, ask me out!" when all you were doing was behaving as per usual and being friendly. So, please don't look back on this and ask this question! I think you behaved well, and it's up to that guy to learn to read a room. I hope he has learned that!

I honestly block out awkward/uncomfortable scenarios, so let's pretend I gave the most impressive awkward trip response here.

[dolorosa_12]

I agree with you, though I should also say that there was nothing wrong with asking out a person on a bus (or in the queue at the print shop at Sydney Uni, or on the person's first day on the job — which happened to me twice, with two different colleagues in two different hospitality workplaces — etc, etc), and none of the men in question behaved poorly when I rejected them, nor made me feel uncomfortable or unsafe. It was just a little bit odd, because none of these occasions took place in contexts where I feel it would be more normal to ask out a total stranger (in a bar, nightclub, and so on). The coach trip to Batemans Bay that I described was excruciatingly awkward, but not scary in any way.

I don't know if things have improved in this regard — I've been in a relationship with the same person for nearly 15 years, so it's been that long since I had to navigate those early stages of getting together with someone — but certainly when I was a teenager and undergrad, I feel like a lot of guys deliberately misread social cues and interpreted friendliness as romantic interest.

I honestly block out awkward/uncomfortable scenarios, so let's pretend I gave the most impressive awkward trip response here.

[falena]

Really awkward. But at least it made for an amusing anecdote?

I don't have anything to share because of my truly horrid memory. I'm sure I must have had some sort of awkward travel-related experience but I can't think of anything. I hate my memory.

[dolorosa_12]

Oh, it absolutely did, and as soon as I left that bus, I could see the humour in the situation.