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dolorosa_12) wrote2025-01-24 05:17 pm
dolorosa_12) wrote2025-01-24 05:17 pm
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Friday open thread: awkward trips
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?
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?
no subject
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 ...
no subject
Mac sounds like an interesting person, though.
no subject
Mac (left), me, then his partner, Dec.