In orientation, they told us that it’s polite to sit in the front seat, not the back seat, of cabs. So the first night my friends and I were going to grab a cab, I smoothly opened the front passenger door—and there was the cabbie, giving me a very confused look. I forgot about the fact that in Australia, the drivers sit on the other side of the car.

I was a student teacher at an all-boys Anglican school. As a student teacher, I was brought along on all the grades’ “camps”—weekend-long class trips to the country. At the kindergarten camp, one of the student teachers told me that she’d been waiting and waiting for the last of her students to finish in the shower. “What’s taking you so long?” she called into the bathroom. “I’m washing my foreskin!” he shouted back. “Take your time,” she said.

I lived in a dorm full of American college students on the Boston University study-abroad program, and my roommate was in a very strange three-way relationship with two other women in the program. Apparently I once walked in on the three of them when they were about to all take their clothes off and go at it. I didn’t notice anything, and had to be told later. I once shared a bed with the three of them, but we kept our clothes on and just spooned.

My roommate enthralled me with tales of his frisky ex-girlfriend back home, who would awkwardly fart during sex, and who liked to hold his penis while he peed.

We all took an anthropology class on Australian culture taught by a tall, handsome blond man who could not have been more stereotypically Australian if he’d been Paul Hogan himself. At the end of the semester, he bought me a beer and I thanked him with a hug, which he was visibly uncomfortable about.

My friend back home was (and is) a huge fan of Men at Work, and when the band’s frontman Colin Hay played in Sydney, I walked across  downtown with several folded-up sheets of paper and a Sharpie in my pocket. When I got to the club, they wouldn’t let me in because I was wearing shorts. I walked back to the dorm, changed into pants, and grabbed a glass of water that I accidentally dropped on the kitchen floor, shattering it. I left a note on the glass saying I’d clean it up later because I couldn’t miss Colin Hay. I walked back to the club just as Colin Hay was finishing his set, and afterwards the staff let me back into his dressing room to get an autograph. He wrote, “To Dave from Colin Hay, Sydney, Australia.”

I attended several operas at the Sydney Opera House; there were student rush tickets for only about $20. There were often private corporate receptions during the intermissions, and I learned that no one would ask questions if you just walked on in and grab a glass of sparkling wine. By the third act, I’d be flying higher than the Dutchman.

I visited Tasmania with three friends; we rented a car and drove all over the island’s winding roads, which were beautiful but nausea-inducing, especially if, like me, you chose to lunch on a liter of sarsaparilla and a bag of mini candy bars. I remember saying, “Trina, please don’t take this the wrong way, but can I put my head in your lap?”

One of the women on the program had a boyfriend back home, and the relationship was stressing her out because she was having a hard time being open with him about the fact that his huge penis was hurting her vagina. While we were in Australia, he was mailing her dickpics in, as it were, hard copy.

Another woman who had a boyfriend back home was the one I had the biggest crush on. We’d never hooked up and she’d never given me any indication that she would consider leaving her boyfriend for me, but nonetheless I planned a grand overture for our final night in Australia. For weeks, I worked on composing a letter that ended up being about 15 pages long. It listed all the fun things we’d done together, and all the things about her that I thought were most wonderful. It climaxed with a two-page description of a magnificent sunset I’d seen while on camp with one of the school classes, finally saying that I’d only wished she’d been there to see it with me. Once I was finished editing the letter on the computer, I printed it out and copied it in my own handwriting. On our last night together in Australia, I sat and read the entire letter to her, dropping the pages on the floor as I finished them. The last words of the letter were, “I love you.” I dropped the last page and looked at her. She said, “Wow, Jay, you should be a travel writer.” I cried.

– Jay Gabler

Photo by Bdearth (Creative Commons)