Travel Tales Tuesday: Being a gullible foreigner
One of the things I love about travelling is that you meet so many new people and try new things. Something about new people and experiences that especially interests me is finding out the ways your culture is the same and yet different from others, and how you personally can be the same and yet different when you go new places. This is one of the reasons I love going on prepackaged tour holidays. You meet a bunch of strangers from all over the place and you all get to know each other but nobody has any expectations about you or the kind of person you are, so you can do things that you'd never do at home without anybody raising an eyebrow. You can reinvent yourself if you want to, and it's so refreshing.
Before I get on with this story, you need to know a little about me and about my home country. Generally speaking, I cannot act. I have no poker face. The vast majority of the time, you just have to look at me and you'll know what I'm thinking from my expression.
Australians have a sense of humour that isn't always shared or understood by others. This includes (but is not limited to) very black humour, the deadpan delivery of dry and ironic observations, a love of tall tales, a lot of self-deprecation, and a tendency to tease anybody who takes themselves at all seriously.
Something that pretty much everybody already knows about Australia is that we have a lot of poisonous, vicious and otherwise dangerous wildlife. Everything from insects to kangaroos to wombats to crocodiles is probably capable of killing you, in the right circumstances. And we're kind of weirdly proud of that.
This will perhaps go some way towards explaining why one of my favourite memories of the people I met on a tour through Germany in 2010 is the time that I told the whole group everything I know about Drop Bears. As you can see from that article, and others like it, we here in Australia take our Drop Bears quite seriously.
It was perhaps the second or third night of our tour, and everybody was still getting to know one another. Aside from Mark and me, there was one other Aussie couple on the trip. The rest were all from either the US or South Africa. Dinner on this particular evening was in a restaurant where, alongside traditional German fare, the waiter also brought out his best "traditional" practical jokes. These were all very well executed and reasonably amusing, but very cliche- things like pretending to squeeze a sauce bottle too hard, but it turns out the "sauce" is just coloured string, and so on. At one point there was a (deliberately) poorly lip-synched "performance" of a traditional German song, complete with fake accordion playing. It sounds kinda cringeworthy, and that's because it kinda was, but it was also delivered with such enthusiasm and good humour that it was really pretty fun. It's also the only picture I have from that night:
As the evening went by, our conversation turned to the one thing everybody had in common: travel. We all offered our favourite things to do in our own countries, and things to avoid, and so on. An older American lady mentioned that she'd love to see rural Australia and explore the bush. I agreed that it was lovely and worth seeing- as long as one took precautions against the drop bears. I winked.
"Drop bears?" She enquired. I looked around the table. Everybody except for the Aussies (all carefully concealing grins) seemed curious, and nobody else was in on the joke.
Perfect.
As befits such a serious subject matter, I began with a scientific and completely straight-faced description of the shaggy rust coloured carnivorous koalas with their deadly sharp fangs and claws, and their preferred methods of hunting. I maintained my completely solemn tone while sharing some devastating statistics on drop bear attacks, and followed it up with my equal concern that due to deforestation and introduced species and the delicate balance of Australia's ecosystem being damaged, the drop bears are endangered and must be protected, and that spotting one in the wild is very rare but also very exciting as long as one takes proper steps to prevent them from dropping on your head and ripping your face off.
"It sounds awful. What can you do?" asked a middle aged South African.
"Yeah, how do you stop a bear from dropping out of trees?"
They were so earnest. I can still see their faces, the awe and confusion and genuine fascination with Australia's cutest deadly creatures. I could feel the corners of my mouth beginning to twitch, but I managed to tell them that it wasn't so bad if you smelled like an Australian, and the right way to get that scent was to eat a lot of Vegemite. That Vegemite was, in fact, invented for just this purpose, and that all Aussies eat it as a matter of health and safety. Foreigners who don't like the taste can just dab a bit behind the ears and it usually has the same effect, but it can take a while to wash out of hair. And of course...
Here I began to really struggle to keep the giggles in.
"And of course..." I choked out again, "there's the fashion of wearing sharp hair accessories- knives and forks are in right now. You can..." here I giggled out loud "You can use them like chopsticks... if you... have long... hair...!"
And then I completely cracked up. I could not stop laughing. The worst part was when I opened my eyes after wiping away the tears, they were all still looking at me in utter confusion, and it set me off again.
One of the South Africans cottoned on first.
"Ah, she's fooling us!" he groaned.
I could only nod and grin, winded from laughing. The South Africans all chuckled and groaned. Some of the older Americans needed it explained twice more. In the end they all understood that what you really need to be wary of when on holiday in Australia is the locals who will encourage you to do some very silly things if you give them half a chance.
At that point the waiter came out with the coffee, and proceeded to fumble a full cup of boiling coffee right into my lap. The whole table gasped, myself included- though the cup had been empty, and it was another of his jokes.
I guess it's true that what goes around comes around!
Before I get on with this story, you need to know a little about me and about my home country. Generally speaking, I cannot act. I have no poker face. The vast majority of the time, you just have to look at me and you'll know what I'm thinking from my expression.
Australians have a sense of humour that isn't always shared or understood by others. This includes (but is not limited to) very black humour, the deadpan delivery of dry and ironic observations, a love of tall tales, a lot of self-deprecation, and a tendency to tease anybody who takes themselves at all seriously.
Something that pretty much everybody already knows about Australia is that we have a lot of poisonous, vicious and otherwise dangerous wildlife. Everything from insects to kangaroos to wombats to crocodiles is probably capable of killing you, in the right circumstances. And we're kind of weirdly proud of that.
This will perhaps go some way towards explaining why one of my favourite memories of the people I met on a tour through Germany in 2010 is the time that I told the whole group everything I know about Drop Bears. As you can see from that article, and others like it, we here in Australia take our Drop Bears quite seriously.
It was perhaps the second or third night of our tour, and everybody was still getting to know one another. Aside from Mark and me, there was one other Aussie couple on the trip. The rest were all from either the US or South Africa. Dinner on this particular evening was in a restaurant where, alongside traditional German fare, the waiter also brought out his best "traditional" practical jokes. These were all very well executed and reasonably amusing, but very cliche- things like pretending to squeeze a sauce bottle too hard, but it turns out the "sauce" is just coloured string, and so on. At one point there was a (deliberately) poorly lip-synched "performance" of a traditional German song, complete with fake accordion playing. It sounds kinda cringeworthy, and that's because it kinda was, but it was also delivered with such enthusiasm and good humour that it was really pretty fun. It's also the only picture I have from that night:
As the evening went by, our conversation turned to the one thing everybody had in common: travel. We all offered our favourite things to do in our own countries, and things to avoid, and so on. An older American lady mentioned that she'd love to see rural Australia and explore the bush. I agreed that it was lovely and worth seeing- as long as one took precautions against the drop bears. I winked.
"Drop bears?" She enquired. I looked around the table. Everybody except for the Aussies (all carefully concealing grins) seemed curious, and nobody else was in on the joke.
Perfect.
As befits such a serious subject matter, I began with a scientific and completely straight-faced description of the shaggy rust coloured carnivorous koalas with their deadly sharp fangs and claws, and their preferred methods of hunting. I maintained my completely solemn tone while sharing some devastating statistics on drop bear attacks, and followed it up with my equal concern that due to deforestation and introduced species and the delicate balance of Australia's ecosystem being damaged, the drop bears are endangered and must be protected, and that spotting one in the wild is very rare but also very exciting as long as one takes proper steps to prevent them from dropping on your head and ripping your face off.
"It sounds awful. What can you do?" asked a middle aged South African.
"Yeah, how do you stop a bear from dropping out of trees?"
They were so earnest. I can still see their faces, the awe and confusion and genuine fascination with Australia's cutest deadly creatures. I could feel the corners of my mouth beginning to twitch, but I managed to tell them that it wasn't so bad if you smelled like an Australian, and the right way to get that scent was to eat a lot of Vegemite. That Vegemite was, in fact, invented for just this purpose, and that all Aussies eat it as a matter of health and safety. Foreigners who don't like the taste can just dab a bit behind the ears and it usually has the same effect, but it can take a while to wash out of hair. And of course...
Here I began to really struggle to keep the giggles in.
"And of course..." I choked out again, "there's the fashion of wearing sharp hair accessories- knives and forks are in right now. You can..." here I giggled out loud "You can use them like chopsticks... if you... have long... hair...!"
And then I completely cracked up. I could not stop laughing. The worst part was when I opened my eyes after wiping away the tears, they were all still looking at me in utter confusion, and it set me off again.
One of the South Africans cottoned on first.
"Ah, she's fooling us!" he groaned.
I could only nod and grin, winded from laughing. The South Africans all chuckled and groaned. Some of the older Americans needed it explained twice more. In the end they all understood that what you really need to be wary of when on holiday in Australia is the locals who will encourage you to do some very silly things if you give them half a chance.
At that point the waiter came out with the coffee, and proceeded to fumble a full cup of boiling coffee right into my lap. The whole table gasped, myself included- though the cup had been empty, and it was another of his jokes.
I guess it's true that what goes around comes around!