Mr. Shirley Goes All Over The Place, by Paul Shirley

The following is the story of my recent three-week trip to China and Australia. The tales from the first twelve days of my journey were originally presented as Parts I and II, but I have a hunch that very few people saw those Parts as I was posting from shaky Internet connections in Shanghai and Sydney. If you are one of the few who has read about my first days abroad, click here to skip to Day 13. (Or, if you’ve read the first part and would like to skip to what you haven’t seen before (Day 6 and beyond), click here.)

Otherwise, enjoy the read. (And the surfing video.)

Day 1 – Chicago, Illinois, USA – O’Hare Airport, 5:30 p.m.

I’m one flight into a nine-flight itinerary that, over the next twenty-five days, will shepherd me to Shanghai, then Melbourne, then Sydney. As I sit at a high table a few paces from Barbara’s Bookstore At O’Hare, my thoughts are less on my upcoming adventure and more on my balls.

When it comes to flying, you would think that the chief concern of a man seventy-one inches tall would be legroom. You would be right, sort of. The part you would miss would be the why. Most people think that my main complaint about airplane seats is the uncomfortable proximity of the back of the seat in front of me. This closeness, which never fails to make me think of coffins and Medieval torture devices, is a problem, in large part because of my tendency toward claustrophobia, which I will revisit at some point in the trip, I’m sure. But the hidden danger of seats designed by ergonomical engineering dropouts is their height.

As I write this, I’m sitting at one of those tall, one-way-facing tables that airport cafes install in an effort (I think) to keep people moving. My legs don’t reach the floor. My jeans feel slightly bound up around the waist and crotch, but I sense no pain in my testicles. Contrast this with the seat on the American Airlines DC-something I deboarded twenty minutes ago. Its seats were fifteen inches off the ground and canted forward like a ski lift designed by a former thrill-ride architect. As a consequence of their dwarfism, I spent the one-hour flight alternating between hunched and splayed, shifting my weight every three minutes thanks to a nagging pain in the vicinity of my genitals. I don’t know why this setup, which features my body making contact with the seat in only one place on my body – I believe it’s called my ischium – makes my testicles hurt, but I suspect that it has something to do with weight dispersal, my back, and the principles of physics.

I don’t expect seats on airplanes to be like seats in airports. I don’t even expect them to change. What I do expect is that, after tomorrow’s fifteen-hour flight to Shanghai, I will be one step closer to sterility.

Sterility is a small price to pay for this trip, which came together rather suddenly and which, if I die sometime in the next year, will certainly be labeled as the trip of a lifetime. As I write this, I’m waiting for my girlfriend, Mandy, to arrive from New York. After six days together in Shanghai, we will separate; she will leave for two weeks in India. I will go on to Australia. We will meet up in Shanghai and fly home. Between now and then, I will visit two countries to which I’ve never been and will go to the Southern Hemisphere for the first time, which seems important to me, somehow.

I am, as a sixth-grader from Orange County might write, pretty stoked. Don’t let my complaints about airplane seats fool you.

I hope to write every night of my trip. These writings will probably be haphazard; I won’t address everything that happens to me in China and Australia and parts in between, and I will likely spend more time than is necessary on minutiae (see above) but I hope to paint a loose picture of the trip I have.

And with that, away we (I) go…

Day 2 – Shanghai, China – Citadines Jinquao Aparthotel, 9:20 p.m.

My fears of overheated testes and errant sperm were unfounded. Even though our flight was oversold and, therefore, “very full” as the stewardess put it, an angel at the United desk found for me an exit row seat, thus precluding my planned in-flight breakdown if and when I was relegated to the middle of a row of five. I shared my twosome not with Mandy but with Darryl Trooper (or maybe Tripper, except that that sounds too much like Three’s Company), who travels to Shanghai six times a year to check up on the makers of those “chairs in a bag you probably know,” who ply their wares in Shanghai.

After the fifteen-hour flight, Mandy and I stepped into an efficiency nerd’s wet dream. Immigration took four minutes. Directions to the MagLev train were clear and abundant. As advertised, said MagLev reached 420 km/hr, at which point I had to disappoint Mandy by explaining that she hadn’t caused the tent in my pants. From the MagLev’s last (and only) stop, the subway was well-marked. Even our hotel was easy to find.

Modern and well-run, all.

I don’t know what I thought Shanghai would be like. Maybe all glitz. Maybe all Chinese junks in scummy rivers. Maybe all that old guy who owns the shop where the father buys the Mogwais in Gremlins, even though that guy, I’m pretty sure, was Japanese.  What Shanghai is like, that is The Truth – at least, as much of The Truth as I can divine in five hours – sits somewhere in the middle of my preconceived notions. Shanghai looks, as Mandy so correctly put it, like something out of Blade Runner: all neon and skyscrapers and animated Nike ads. But Shanghai also looks like what I imagine old China to look like.

Shanghai has a third as many people as New York City. We are staying, as mentioned in the header of this section, at a hotel near People’s Square, which sits near Shanghai’s city center. Nonetheless, when we left the hotel in search of bottled water and a snack, we were able to wander into a semi-squalid residential area only one block from the hotel. It was like starting in midtown Manhattan and finishing in Queens, except if Midtown and Queens were one hundred paces apart.

Maybe it’s The Economist in my ear, or maybe it’s those months I spent in Russia, but I am suspicious that there is something strange about Shanghai. The streets (that we’ve seen) aren’t even as dirty as the streets of Athens. The people are friendlier than even in Spain. But unless it’s all my Westerner’s imagination, the faces of the old men on their rickety bicycles tell a story that is in conflict with the 30-story Marriott that is going up across the street.

Day 3 – Shanghai, China – Citadines Jinquao Aparthotel, 2:00 a.m.

We emailed a friend of a friend of Mandy’s, and arranged to meet her at Glamour Bar, where this friend of a friend sometimes works, and where, tonight, the kickoff to the 9^th Annual Shanghai Literary Festival would be. This friend of the friend, whose name is Annabella, arrived twenty minutes after we did, which, coincidentally, I’m sure, is when the night got going.

After two hours at the Glamour, which included a talk with an older French lady and her Slovenian assistant about the possibilities of my working with their company, we – where “we” includes Annabella the half-Portuguese girl, our Shanghai-ian friend Jimmy (“our” used loosely, of course), Milan, a half-Chinese, half-New Guinean who was raised in Amsterdam, and two Spanish dudes with questionable facial hair – left for a restaurant called New Barbarians. Or maybe Southern Barbarians. At any rate, Barbarians was in the name. We ate the best Chinese food I’ve ever had; it included potato pancakes that we topped with fried goat cheese, tomatoes, and mint salad. (Note to self: learn how to make mint salad. Your colon will thank you.)

We were joined at the Barbarian joint by at least one German (maybe two) and a Greek, making our party the United Nations of fun-lovers.

I quickly bonded with the Greek because Greeks love to argue and, three hours later, when I was desperate for cash because I didn’t want the night to end, he accompanied me down from Lune’s third story location to the street below where, after two hundred meters of walking, we found a Chinese bank. He told me that his wife had come to China with him, but that she was only willing to stay in China without him.

Back at Lune, we danced, and I marveled at the multicultural crew I had picked up, at their enthusiasm, at the price for a pint of Tiger.

Day 4 – Shanghai, China – The Grand Mercure Hotel, 9:30 p.m.

There might be mold in the air, or it might be dirt. We moved today, from the Citadines Aparthotels to the aforementioned Grand Mercure. (Credit to Mandy for the push; I was content with the Citadines.) For $75 a night (thanks Hotels.com!) we’ve ensconced ourselves in a near-five star hotel that can only be described as Lost In Translation-esque, minus that sweet pool and, sadly, Scarlett Johansson. In other words, it’s really, really nice. Except for the pervading smell of…something dirty, or maybe moldy.

Last night, our friend Jimmy told us that the Chinese are freer than we understand. He told us stories of people smoking pot in front of the police. I see what he means. Shanghai, at least, is a festive place. In People’s Park, there are bumper cars. Tonight, we had hot chocolate from Coco. We spent an hour inside a toy store. We watched a Chinese opera that was nothing if not whimsical.

Yet, that strange smell remains.

It’s possible that I’m searching too hard for a metaphor, and it’s possible that my conceptions of China are influencing my opinions. There’s all sorts of shininess here – TVs on the side of buildings and enough neon to light the route to the moon.

But still, the police presence is jarring. The old men gathering trash are weathered and beaten. Inside a grocery store tonight, I watched a supervisor browbeat a dozen security guards. The people here are free and exuberant and happy. Yet, today, on our walk through People’s Park, we came upon a marriage market. Old men and women had set out signs describing their children. There were dates of birth, heights, weights, and among the most proud (or desperate?), pictures. We’d been told about the market by Annabella; she said that the old men and women still made arrangements to marry off their grown children. Most of the birth dates were 77, 78, 82 – the far end of marriable age, I suppose.

Their children are free, but not really.

Everywhere we look, it is the same. People waffle between two expressions: toothy smiles and I-Wish-You’d-Die-White-Devil. When we talk to them – in furious hand expressions, mostly – they are polite but rarely what anyone would call helpful.

Maybe this experiment, of discipline and slow growth, will work. But I don’t know how. China seems – and again, I should probably write “Shanghai seems” – like a bulging disc. Too much pressure, and shit starts to moosh out the sides.

Then again, that could be the mold talking.

Day 5 – Shanghai, China – The Grand Mercure Hotel, 10:36 p.m.

The word for the day is “drear” which, when defined, would be the gray that, as far as I know, can only be found on a rainy day in Shanghai.

Mandy and I tried ever so hard to make a day of it. We got onto the metro (and what a fine metro it is) and rode to the Jade Buddha Temple, which was dull and uninspiring, especially in the drizzle. Then it was on to the French Concession, a part of Shanghai that was once dominated by, well, the French. There, we walked around in the gray mush, thinking that perhaps we could find a place to get a cheap massage. As the raindrops got closer together, both in time and in space, we gave up and stormed the gates of Oscar’s Pub, where we drank Scotch and listened to expats talk about life in Shanghai.

We recharged at the Grand Mercure before venturing back into the Seattle for the best Shanghainese in Shanghai (according to my Frommer’s Guide) at Crystal Jade. The food – pork buns, steamed dumplings, roast duck, and a scallion pancake that neared perfection – was fine enough, but the cab ride home was even better; we were as sleepy as two humans have ever been, and the cushioned softness of the Mercure’s king-sized bed beckoned. We blame the weather and the jet lag for our weariness; it turns out that it does take some time to get used to being halfway around the world.

With two days left, we have learned about Shanghai what I’ve learned about every city in the world: leave the attractions to the old ladies with fanny packs. I will remember more vividly the walk from the metro station to the Jade Temple – we saw a woman doing tai chi in the trees, next to a hen on a leash – than I will the Jade Temple. Seeing a city is seeing its people, eating its food and drinking its drink. That means the grocery store over the museum, the bar over the picturesque garden, the sidewalk over the sights.

Day 6 – The Grand Mercure Hotel, Shanghai, China, 10:17 p.m.

We have a confession to make. Well, really it is I who has the confession, because it is I who is doing the writing. But Mandy (my girlfriend) was complicit in our crime.

Tonight, we ate supper at KFC.

It had been a long culinary day. It started with a fruitless search for breakfast that ended when we gave up on breakfast and ate pork dumplings at Power Dumplings. That’s not to say that pork dumplings couldn’t be breakfast because, when you think about it, they are a tad breakfasty, what with their pork-ness and their pastry-like outer shell, it’s just that they’re a little odd, as breakfast goes.

The day’s gastrointestinal adventure continued in Suzhou, a city of some X,000,000 people, where X has not been determined because there is no wireless Internet in the Grand Mercure (one of it’s few misattributes). After taking in the Master Of The Nets Garden – a lovely little spot that looked kind of like you might think it should – we set off for midtown Suzhou and a search for the Frommers-recommended Song He Lou restaurant. The Lou, as I would have affectionately called it, had I thought of that at the time, was closed, and we were hungry, so we accepted the invitation of the first joint with lights on inside, which happened to be the Me She Yan Gua Gon*.

*This is not even close to the actual name of the restaurant.

Our lunch was hot. Chilis and cayennes hot. And there was a lot of it. Some of it was good, some of it wasn’t, but we left full and with fire in our bellies.

This, of course, points to one of the disadvantages of foreign countries. Namely, that one is often at the mercy of whomever is waiting tables, because one often cannot make heads nor taluses of a menu written in a foreign language. Which problem can be solved by piecing together words and phrases over the course of a few days in a particular country, but which problem is made more difficult when every letter looks like a frat boy’s tattoo.

And this – this is representative of my feelings on this, our last full night in Shanghai. I’ve loved being in Shanghai; it’s been an adventure worth, well, writing about. But it – like most adventures – has been tiring. There’s a reason that Mandy and I couldn’t wait to get back to the big, soft bed in the Grand Mercure.

Day 7 – The Good East Hotel, somewhere outside Guangzhou, China, 12:44 a.m.

It was a comedy of errors from the start. Okay, not errors so much as tiny, miniature panics.

Mandy and I got to the airport with time to spare. My flight – to Guangzhou (the flight to Sydney is tomorrow morning) – would leave first. Hers – to Delhi – would leave two hours after. I asked my desk agent about an exit row seat, grinning sheepishly in the way that usually has some effect on airline workers.

Unfazed, she said, “You have aisle. Best I can do.” My eyes pleaded, but it was no use. While Mandy went to the Air India desk, I doubled back; I wanted to ask someone to add the flight to my Frequent Flier miles because China Southern is a SkyTeam partner. And I’ve always wanted to be the sort of person who actually remembers to build up some frequent flier miles.

The fellow I found, who was sympathetic enough, told me to call when I got home. But I knew I’d never do that, so after dropping Mandy at International Departures and kissing her goodbye, I made for my gate, hoping I could kill two superfluous birds with one ill-aimed stone – I’d find a sympathetic agent who could secure an exit row seat, thus preventing an in-flight, claustrophobia-induced panic attack, and who could help me add this trip to my SkyTeam miles program, thus allowing me to act like an adult.

Then I remembered that I hadn’t eaten. Then I remembered that I didn’t have any Yuan left.

The clock was ticking. I had an hour. I hustled the length of Shanghai Pudong, putting my claustrophobia/discomfort first. The gate agent was no help: “Sorry, you can try talking to the captain.”

Like I’m going to approach the captain with my petty request for more leg room.

Then it hit me:

Oh fuck, I don’t even know my Frequent Flier number. There was an internet kiosk back there, wasn’t there?

I turned and sped-walked to the bank of computers.

Shit, they’re full. No matter, I’ll come back, after I’ve gotten some food, which will happen after I’ve gotten some money.

There must be an ATM around here somewhere.

There wasn’t. I hiked all the way back to the entrance to my terminal, where I spied a currency exchange desk. “ATM?” I wondered, in the direction of the lonely twentysomething who’d adopted “Jane” as her name. She shook her head and I ponied up the dough. 50 Yuan ($8) commission on $40. Sage move, Shirley.

Next, food.

I picked out a bag of Chinese beef jerky and two bottles of water and scrambled for the counter.

Of course, there’s a credit card scanner – the first I’ve seen in two days – making the currency exchange rape I just endured completely pointless.

Outside the food shop, I tore open the bag of jerky.

Is this made out of opossum?

I stuffed the bag into my bag and saddled up at the computer.

Success! My number, and with minutes to spare; they’re calling my flight now.

I scurried toward my gate and, when I noticed an errant worker from another flight, I asked her to help me. I presented my number and, to her credit, she called in three coworkers to help translate. But again, alas.

My seat, on China Southern Flight 376472, was one behind the exit row. I spent the flight trying to breathe easy to keep the aforementioned claustrophobia at bay.

Aside here: I don’t know if my claustrophobia is born of my six-foot-nine-edness, or if I’d fear tight spaces either which way. But let me tell you, it’s a motherfucker. And I know, I know, it doesn’t make sense if you’re not claustrophobic. And it’s true that my claustrophobia isn’t so intense that I can’t function. (Unless it’s that one time, back in middle school, when I freaked the fuck out when they put us in a basement hallway with no windows for a tornado drill.) But it’s not exactly pleasant; there aren’t many things that make me nervous in this world, but having a seat jammed into my knees is one of them. (AND NOT BECAUSE OF MY KNEES, WE’VE BEEN OVER THIS!) If you need evidence, take a whiff of the shirt I just took off. It smells like I took the bar exam today.

But I survived.

Off the jetway, and into a…What’s this? This isn’t the homey airport terminal I’d envisioned for an intrepid evening spent with fellow travelers as we await our morning flights. This is cold tile floor and steel struts.

I walked and walked. And finally I asked someone. “Can I transfer to the international side now?”

A pointer finger. “You go there.”

A man. No, a boy. Then a girl. She’s going to Sydney too. China Southern is going to put us in a hotel for the night.

And pay for it? I want to ask.

Don’t worry, she says, they will take care of everything.

I consider declining. Either way, I’ll have to be up in a few hours. And I had designs on writing something brilliant tonight, and being first in line, so as to make goddamn sure I don’t spend nine hours to Sydney ready to peel off my skin. And plus there was the romanticism of it all – world traveler, nighttime airport, stories.

But if they’re going to pay for it, fuck it.

A van. We get out. Switch to a bus. There’s the Good East hotel.

“We keep boarding pass.”

What?

It’ll be fine, my new friend says.

“If you no pay more, it two beds and you and other person,” she says.

I can see my furrowed brow on her face.

100 Yuan, she says.

Fuck.

And here I am. It’s awful in here – there’s standing water in the bathroom. My bed is no softer than the tile floor at the airport. And I’ll probably have nightmares about tray tables and my heart racing and goddamn 41D.

Day 8 – The Original Backpacker’s Hostel, King’s Cross, Sydney, Australia, 1 a.m.

I like this scene.

My day started as planned; I was up at 4:30 and in the lobby of the Good East Hotel by 4:50. When I asked, “Can I get a taxi?” the tired Chinese girl behind the front desk looked up with lidded eyes and said, “Yes.” She meant the shuttle that would leave in a few minutes but whatever. I got my exit row seat and the flight to Sydney was like a dream. A very long, and very mediocre dream, but a dream nonetheless.

I arrived in Sydney more than somewhat shell-shocked; the ten-hour flight and a three-hour time change had me knackered, as I believe the Aussies might say. (Flights are always longer in real life than they are on paper. When the Shanghai to Sydney flight came up on Orbitz, ten hours seemed like nothing. It’s significantly greater than nothing.)

After being subjected to my first-ever customs shakedown – and you’re getting this from a man who’s been through his share of immigration checkpoints – I made for the train station and after a few false starts on a metro system that is much less user-friendly than Shanghai’s, rode to King’s Cross.

I’m new to the hostel scene. I write the previous sheepishly; it seems that someone like me would be experienced with such things. But no, the closest I’ve come is a very shitty hotel in Paris that, I believe, was technically a pension. With this inexperience at the forefront of my brain, I was anxious – afraid I would muck up the proceedings somehow. But my concern was misplaced. I was greeted warmly by a German working the front desk at the Original Backpacker’s and shown to my room, which was occupied by a brother-sister duo from Austria. Christine looked like a riot grrl version of Zooey Deschanel; he, like Buster from Arrested Development. They explained that they were only two days into a month long trip across Australia and New Zealand and, a few minutes later, Christine was asking if she could come find food with me. I said yes, cursing slightly my begirlfriendedness as her very Austrian  breasts (that is, bigger than they should have been) peeked over her black tank top.

We failed on anything approaching a dinner, settling on a street corner kabob. After I explained that I had a girlfriend, she walked to an Internet café. I wandered the streets and now it’s 1 in the morning and I’m sitting outside my room, typing a summary of the day.

And as I said, I like this scene. I’ve examined the backpacker culture before; tonight has only confirmed my suspicions. Backpackers are like a loophole in society. They’re nice, they’re smart, they’re well-traveled. Most of them aren’t even hippies. These are my kind of human.

Day 9 – Wombarra, Australia, 1:05 a.m.

It’s possible that I romanticized the hostel scene a touch. I slept very little last night thanks to a hot room and a tiny bed. And three roommates is about two roommates too many.

But that experiment is over, so let’s not dwell on it. Especially because it’s late and I’ve had about five good hours of sleep in the last 72.

Today, I took bad pictures of the Sydney opera house, I walked through beautiful parks, and then I met up with my host for the next several days, someone who will be familiar to (some) readers of this website: Tara Goedjen.

Tara and I ate Greek food and then listened to novelist Annie Proux (The Shipping News, Brokeback Mountain) talk about her latest book, a foray into nonfiction about her house in Wyoming. Her talk was like most author presentations I’ve seen – it was geared toward old women with cats. But no matter (or “no worries,” as Australians say approximately 62 times each day), Ms. Proux’s speech had only been a way for Tara and I to hook up so that she could escort me to the home she’s house-sitting in Wombarra.

And what a home it is. I haven’t seen much yet – it is quite dark at 1:05 a.m – but I could hear the ocean from the deck when Tara gave me my tour.

Wombarra is about an hour’s train ride south of Sydney. I suppose it is possible that I’ll get back into Sydney, but it isn’t likely. I think I’ll be content on the beach.

Day 11 – Wombarra, Australia, 3:42 p.m.

If you’re paying attention, and I hope you are, I missed a day. All this travel finally caught up to me; my body gave out like an ’89 Explorer at the end of a cross-country road trip. I was sneezy and sleepy and generally out of sorts when I woke up on Day 10. (At this point, my reference to day number isn’t even me being deliberately opaque; I can’t imagine what day it is, what with the traveling and the back-calculating to figure out what time it is at home in case I have a bitchin’ tweet to send.)

Waking up sick in Australia as an adult was a lot like waking up sick on Disneyland morning as a child, which happened to me when I was eleven. But, like when I was eleven and rode Big Thunder Mountain even though I was nauseous, I rallied as best I could; I went to the grocery store with Oliver, the guy Tara had gotten to dog-sit while she taught yoga; I rode the train to Kiama to meet Tara and the guy she’s dating, who is predictably great; I went with Tara to a two-hour meditation featuring an American Indian named Medicine Crow and some very specious spirituality; back at the house, I hung out with Tara’s friend Hank, a Dave Mustaine look-alike who’d just gotten off a ten-hour train ride – he’s going to hang out and surf this weekend.

Then I collapsed into my bed and slept well for the first time in several days.

I woke up today to French toast with Tara and Hank. When we finished the dishes, we went to the beach to body surf. Later, we made lunch together. Tonight, we’re going to take in an Australian professional basketball game between the Wollongong Hawks and the Adelaide 36ers.

But enough about the day-to-day. Let’s talk Australia.

I usually don’t believe it when people say that they’ve fallen in love with a place (city, state, country) because usually when people say such a thing, they’re trying to justify a decision in their minds. The same is true for jobs and, often, mates (lovers, not Australian friends); if someone admits to you that he doesn’t actually like his job as an assistant accountant for GloboTech, he also has to admit it to himself. And no one likes to admit when he’s made a poor decision. Just look at all the mismatched couples you know.

All that as preface to this: I think I’m falling in love with Australia. Or, more accurately, with Australians. The place ain’t bad – the house I’m in is nestled between a 500-foot hill (or escarpment, as Hank called it) and the beach – but the people really make it go.

Australians are my kind of folk. As I wrote to my brother Matt, they’re smart but sensitive, strong but gentle, caring but not naïve. They’re athletic and hard-playing and hard-drinking, but they also listen when you talk.

And I haven’t even gotten into the girls. My god, the girls.

[Shakes head to clear image.]

(By the way, does it count as cheating if my girlfriend is 5,000 miles away on an Indian ashram on top of a mountain and I’m not sure she’s alive because I haven’t heard from her in 3 days? Just kidding, girlfriend of mine.)

I don’t want to go too far because I’m sure Australians have their problems, but thus far it seems like Australians are what humankind can be. I find this both inspiring and depressing. Inspiring because I now know it exists; depressing because I can’t help but think of my home country.

At this point in history, we Americans are like a mediocre basketball team trying to protect a late-game lead. Instead of playing to win, we’re playing not to lose. We bicker about politics and moan about how things are getting worse, but no one actually wants to do anything about it.

I wasn’t around in 1776, or 1876, or even in 1976, but my sense is that, in those days, Americans had the attitude that Australians have now. That attitude being one of openness to new ideas and then, a willingness to implement them.

Being in Australia isn’t so unlike being in the U.S. Sure, there are more trains and fewer garbage disposals, but the day-to-day existence is similar. I can’t point to a slew of rules or laws or lack of both that make Australia far different from the United States. What I can point to is something much more intangible. Hopefulness, optimism, a sense that things can get better, as opposed to a sense that things are only going to get worse.

I don’t know what has made Australia (or Australians) this way. It might have something to do with the culling process that is natural to the place; in the same way that the brave set out for the West in America in the 19^th and 20^th century, the brave set out for Australia now. There are those whose families have been here for generations. But they aren’t many. Most people in Australia are new. It has become the melting pot that America once was.

That melting pot breeds an excitement about life that broils happily under the surface here. Contrast that with America. As a friend of mine (an American) when we emailed about why Australia might be such a great place, wrote:

“I’m not sure if it is everyone having healthcare, general cultural pleasantness, being an island nation, or some other intangible factor. People say Midwesterners are nice. When I return to my [Midwestern] hometown, I see a lot of small-minded, hateful, racist, overly religious, intolerant people who are generally confused as to how their life has gone the direction it is. They look for targets to blame, not realizing a lot of it was well beyond their power and is not because of Mexicans, gays, or blacks. Now a lot of it is their fault, and this is probably even more enraging.”

His words helped clarify something I’d been trying to fit into a tweet all week. Midwesterners make New Yorkers look like assholes, but Australians make Midwesterners look like Ivan The Terrible.

But that’s enough about that. Hank and Adrian and Tara just got home from the beach and we’re going to go do something fun now.

Day 12 – Wombarra, Australia, 11:09 p.m.

Yesterday, Tara asked me if I “love the beach.” I said that I really like it, which, I think, disappointed her. I wanted to explain by saying that I think people overuse the term “love”: I love those shoes! I love the Silversun Pickups! I love my boyfriend! Which means that when I say I really like something, I probably love it, according to the parlance of our times.

Still, I’m not going to cop to loving the beach just yet.

Today reminded me of my reallylike of the beach. Tara, Hank and I were oceanside by 11 a.m. Hank carried Adrian’s (Adrian = Tara’s love interest) surfboard, I lugged enough sunscreen for an albino rhino, and Tara worried about the dogs.

Soon after my arrival in Wombarra, Tara proposed that she and I take a surfing lesson. We’ve scheduled one for tomorrow. But I thought I’d get a head start.

Once we’d found a place to drop our towels, Hank took me to the water and patiently explained the ins and outs of paddling around on the board and then watched as I used a man-sized surfboard for some child-sized boogie-boarding.

Satisfied with my surfing warm-up, I retired to the beach. Later, while Tara took the dogs back to the house and Hank did some real surfing, I sat with my arms crossed over my legs and my eyes pointed into the Pacific. I had nothing to do – no book, no music, no conversation – but I was happy.

And this is why I reallylike the beach. At the beach, there is always something to do, even if there is nothing to do. At the beach, it is difficult to remember to worry. At the beach, everything is okay.

Day 13 – Wombarra, Australia, 10:46 p.m.

On a gray, late-summer morning, we left the house in Wombarra at 8:45. I was putting on a wetsuit in North Wollongong at 9:35. I was moderately fascinated by the wetsuit; I’d always seen people in them, but I’d never been on the inside. My fascination increased when we hit the water. I’m no fan of cold water – cold showers, cold pools, cold oceans – and was pleasantly surprised when I learned just how much a wetsuit warms a human body.

Our instructor, whose name was either Bayer or Byer, wasn’t much of an instructor. I don’t write that because I was a complete failure at surfing and wish to place blame on our diminutive teacher. I write it in spite of that fact. It wouldn’t have mattered if Kelly Slater had been teaching me how to ride a surfboard.

That said, I did “get up” once. Kind of. Maybe. Depends on your definition of “get up.”

Byer’s instruction consisted of showing us how to spring up on dry land and then holding onto our boards through bad waves in shallow water until a good wave came, at which point he would push us forward. After that, it was up to us. (Us being Tara and I. Incidentally, Tara got up eight or ten times, which wasn’t emasculating at all.)

The problem, as I saw it, was the springing up. When I pushed against the board on dry land, I was able to use the force to spring into a sweet judo stance. But when I pushed against the board in the water, the force only pushed the board into the water, causing two things to happen simultaneously: 1. The board’s nose dove toward the sand below. And 2. My body got wobblier than a septuagenarian on a unicycle. I would contend that my core strength is pretty high, but it was no match for the imbalance-fest that was my time on the surfboard.

None of that really mattered; I was never close to “surfing.” The important thing was that I tried. The even more important thing was that, about half an hour in, as my mood darkened thanks to the frustration that comes along with being an ex-professional athlete and not being able to do something physical, I was able to change course from the dark, downward spiral and laugh at myself.

So even if I didn’t make surfing progress, I made life progress.

After Byer’s time was up, he told Tara and I that we could keep the boards for another 30 minutes. He advised that we stay in the super-shallow water and work on trying to stand up in the very small waves there.  So that’s what we did.

And this is the video of it. Enjoy.

(And no, none of these count as “getting up.”)

Day 14 – Wombarra, Australia, 11:17 p.m.

Just like that, it’s time to move on. It’s my last night in Wombarra. Like delinquent high schoolers, Tara and I celebrated by raiding her hosts’ liquor cabinet for a nightcap of three fingers of gin. We don’t think they’ll notice, what with the cobwebs that were on the bottle.

Hank left this morning; he took a job as a civil engineer in Coff’s Harbour, where he lives, and starts in two days. I had something of a man-crush on Hank. He’s everything I’m not: he doesn’t worry, he stays in the moment, he has hair like Dave Mustaine. Hank talks about spear fishing and sleeping in the bush and “maybe seeing what that’s like.” Hank is cool.

I’ve realized recently that I’m not cool, that I never will be cool, and that I never was cool. For awhile I thought there was a chance. Sometime in my late twenties, things were clicking and I was a pretty happening dude. I was well-read, I listened to good music, I seemed to be able to talk to girls. But I’ve noticed that something is missing. I still listen to good music, I still read good books, I can still make a girl laugh. But I’m not aloof enough. I don’t inspire people to want to be like me. My presence doesn’t light up the room. My potential for cool has stayed potential.

I find this disheartening. For what does anyone want, other than to be cool? Especially those of us who weren’t cool in high school. Or middle school. Or college. Now, like the stock market undergoing a correction, I’m returning to those days. I’m not Hank, and I never will be.

I spent my last, Hank-less day wandering around the University of Wollongong, if for no other reason than that I wanted to stick it to my brother, who is the owner of a U of W sweatshirt without ever having been to the place. Later, I wrote a little. Then, Tara came home and we walked to the Wombarra beach, which I’d been led to believe was unspectacular but which was the opposite. Tara and I took copious pictures of each other. I’m sure they’re all over Facebook now.

It was a calm end to a calm stay on the Gold Coast (South Coast? Best Coast? Where the hell am I?). I’m glad I settled into life here; now I know about Coledale Beach, and what the best bar in Thirroul is (Beaches), and how much it costs to get to the North Wollongong station and back ($8.00, which is a schload). Again, my travel advice remains the same: pick an intimate look at a smaller place over a cursory glance at a big place.

Day 15 – Melbourne, Australia, 12:21 a.m.

And now, for my final act…Melbourne.

I left Wombarra on the train after a sad goodbye with Tara. I connected through Wolli Creek, where I learned that the two-stop ride to the airport would cost me 15 AUD. I thought about skipping payment, but I had a feeling they’d catch me. (They would have; there are bays for the tickets at the exit.)

I was early for my flight – three hours, almost – so I bought a chicken sandwich from a restaurant called Pie Face. Once again, it was expensive. Maybe, if we have time, we’ll talk about how expensive everything in Australia is. No one checked my ID at the airport, which I thought was strange, even for a country as laid-back as Australia. It seems that, by checking in online a day early and printing my boarding pass from the University of Wollongong, I exposed a hole in the not-so-vaunted Australian security.

My host in Melbourne, Chris Anstey, was waiting for me at the exit from the Tiger Airways terminal. I found it endearing that he was out of the car, standing near the door. Chris and I played in Russia together – as I wrote in my book, he kept me sane when I thought sanity was no longer an option.

Chris drove me to his house, where we woke up his policewoman girlfriend, Ilsa, who will have the night shift for most of my time in Melbourne. I was happy to be in their company again; both of them came to Kansas City last summer and I enjoyed thoroughly our time together. We had dinner at a place near the sea (ocean) and then Chris and I walked to several bars near his house.

Now we’re ready for bed.

The stage is set.

Day 16 – Melbourne, Australia, 11:56 p.m.

I’ll be honest – and this won’t make my father happy – I drank beers for eleven hours today. That it is only 11:56 p.m. – and not four in the morning – should help tell the story: today was St. Patrick’s Day.

Drinking in Australia is an expensive pursuit; I think the cheapest pint of beer I bought today was $8.50. (Those are Australian $s, not American $s.) I’m not sure how anyone gets drunk in this country. You certainly can’t do it by drinking before you go to the bar. I’ve seen cases – or “slabs” – for $40. And those are the cheap ones.

We didn’t move far today. Chris and I started at an Irish bar. We were soon joined by Chris’s friend Jon and his friend Greg. We went to lunch. We went back to the Irish bar. They started talking to two ugly girls. The day progressed. Greg and Chris left. (Chris had to coach basketball; Greg had to go home to his fiancé.) Jon and I ditched the ugly girls and went to the Melbourne casino, which was surprisingly nice and where I lost $160 on a viciously bad poker beat.

And really, that was all. It was a good day, though, because I recalled something I learn over and over – the friends of my friends turn out to be the best friends I have. It turns out that, much of the time, our friends have great taste in people. (Obviously.) They tend to hang out with folks like us, and those folks like us are remarkably…like us. Unless they’re not like us, and fuck those people anyway.

Oddly enough, I’m probably more like Jon than I am like Chris. I don’t write that to be mean to Chris – he’d say the same thing. In the end, it’s part of the beauty of travel. I meet so many people on the road and many of them turn out to be great humans being. If nothing else, travel reminds me to have faith in mankind.

And that’s a rare thing for me to say, so travel must be good for me.

Day 18 – Melbourne, Australia, 7:16 p.m.

This may come as a surprise: Australians have accents.

I’m no stranger to speech that is “augmented” by idiosyncrasies and slang; I’ve been around people from other countries. But this is my first time immersed in a country where the people speak my language, but do so differently than I do. I’m shocked by how little I understand.

This issue hits particularly close to home because I hate to be difficult. When I don’t understand what someone has said the first time he says it, a panic floods my brain. Like the child of a recent divorce, I blame myself, assuming that I’m the problem in the auditory flubbing that just happened. This panic only serves to put further pressure on the repeated sentence or phrase because I certainly don’t want to ask a third time.

Here in Australia, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to practice calming myself for the repeated rendition because I’ve understood much less of what people are saying than I expected. This, it would seem, is hardly worth discussing. Australians have accents, duh. And they’re a little hard to understand, double-duh.

But let me be the first to tell you – in case you’ve never been to where I am – these people are hard to understand.

It’s not so bad when it’s just me and an Aussie. That one-on-one encounter is easy enough. The problem is when it’s a group of slightly-more-athletic, Anglo-ish humans flooding the airwaves with “How ya goin’, mate?” Then, I feel like an eighty-five year old woman trying to decipher what a bunch of seventh-graders are saying.

I got a full dose of the language last night, when I went out with Chris and two of his brothers. We spent the evening baby-sitting a girl named Jess who’d come to the bar with two workmates, only to be abandoned ten minutes into her stay and passed off into our care. There were plenty of remarks to be made, but I couldn’t understand half of them, especially when we got to a night club called Cookie, where the music was loud and the patronage was drunk – never a good combination for comprehension.

The language barrier was less a problem today at the Melbourne Zoo, where I saw my first platypus (the Australians were not nearly as impressed as I) and watched the most active set of Capuchin monkeys since a certain Basement Jaxx video. A trip to a zoo in a foreign country sounds – I will admit – shockingly lame, but it was a fine way to further understand Australia. Because what better place than a zoo to observe a cross-section of humanity? Rich, poor, fat, skinny, smart, dumb – they all want to watch orangutans look bored.

The zoo served another purpose: it reminded me that Australia isn’t perfect. As we stared at a set of ring-tailed lemurs, a woman said, in all seriousness, to her daughter, “Are those pandas?”

That, I understood perfectly. Stupid is easily translatable.

Day 19 – Melbourne, Australia, 2:03 a.m.

I take back anything I ever said about Melbourne girls not being up to snuff.

I should back up. After a Friday night out with Chris and his brother Kevin “The Vulture” Anstey, I wrote a tweet that said something to the effect that Melbourne girls didn’t have anything on Kansas City girls. That was incorrect.

After a day spent watching entirely too much basketball (I watched Chris coach The Vulture in an Australian second division game, then Chris put us in a lavish corporate box to watch his old team, the Melbourne Tigers) Chris, Ilsa, Kevin and I went to dinner at a restaurant owned by one of Chris’s player’s parents. After rushing home with Color Me Badd blaring from the window of Chris’s Australian-made car, we talked Ilsa into taking us to a nightclub where the Tigers’ opponents, the Gold Coast Blaze, and most of the Tigers were going. (Incidentally, Ilsa was headed into work for the night. She’s not Chris’s chauffeur.)

There, I caught up with Ira Clark, who was my and Chris’s teammate in Russia, and met several Australian players, at least one of whom had read my book, and at least two of whom let me buy them beers. In between talking to basketball players, I stared at pretty girls and thought about moral dilemmas.

I’m thankful that none of the 6-foot blonds who were stalking the dance floor were enraptured by my gray eyes; I’m not sure how long my shields would have held.

The best part of the night – besides ogling Australian models – was meeting some of the Australian basketball players Chris calls friends. I always thought that my basketball career should end in Australia; now I see that I was right. I might have found what I was always looking for: a group of hard-working, intelligent people who wanted to win but who wanted to have fun doing it.

On second thought, maybe meeting those fellows was the worst part of my night. Even more than the pretty girls, they showed me what I missed.

Day 20 – Melbourne, Australia, 12:00 a.m.

Australia has many positive attributes. Reasonable pricing is not one of them.

A few nights ago, I went to a dinner in honor of Chris’s mother and her recent birthday. We ate at a Mexican restaurant. It was not a fancy place; it looked a lot like the restaurants on Southwest Boulevard in Kansas City. The food was typically Mexican – beans, meat, cheese, tortilla. In the US, each entrée would have cost, at most, $15, and more likely $10-$13. In Australia: $30.

The careful reader will note that the dollar sign before that 30 should have been an Australian one. (If there were such a thing. Come up with your own mark, you uncreative bastards.) Thanks to an exchange rate, that reader might say, my quotations of prices are misleading. The careful reader would have been correct, five years ago. Now, though, the Australian dollar and the American dollar are, for all intents and purposes, the same.

Chris tells me that some years ago (ours wasn’t a discussion fraught with exactness) the Australian dollar was worth about 60 cents. This helped explain why people in Australia get paid so much; as I may or may not have written, one of Tara’s friends told me that teachers often get upward of $55,000 a year.

A more favorable exchange rate (for Australians) has not caused Australian businessmen to lower their prices; such a move would be folly – from an Australian perspective, things are the same. Leaving out inflation, if someone made $55,000 five years ago, and meals cost $30 five years ago, and that ratio hasn’t changed, buying power is the same. The pain is only felt by people coming into the country. Me, for example.

The result: I have spent a lot, lot, lot of money in Australia. (You’re welcome, Australia.) By the time I get home, my wallet will be, as my father would say, smokin’.

Day 21 – Melbourne, Australia, 10:54 a.m.

Yesterday, I walked down the beach of Port Melbourne to a tram that would take me into downtown Melbourne. I got off at a random stop and began wandering through the streets with no real purpose, other than to get a feel for the city through which most of my passage had been as the passenger in a car. I was alone, which was a change – most of my time in Australia has been accompanied, first by Tara, now by Chris and/or his girlfriend.

Two-thirds of the way through a walk that would finish at Carlton Gardens, one of Melbourne’s many parks, I poked my head into a second-hand bookstore. There, on a whim, I bought Ross Terrill’s The Australians for one Australian dollar.

As I sat on the steps of the Melbourne museum waiting for Chris to come get me, I read the first few chapters. I learned about the macro history: it was not originally known that the land the Dutch settled in Western Australia and the land claimed by Captain Cook in Eastern Australia were, in fact, the same land. And I learned about the micro: the reason so many Melbourne streets and parks are called Batman is not because of a recent love for black-clad superheros; a man named John Batman “bought” from the Aborigines 600,000 acres in and around the future Melbourne for 200 pounds’ worth of knives, mirrors, beads, tomahawks, scissors, and blankets.

But what struck me most was a quote early in the book. Terrill writes, “Australia is not driven to its future, as a poor country is, by the non-negotiable need to put a loaf on the table, or as the former Communist countries of East Europe are, by the impulse to redeem a lost past. Nor does Australia find its future laid down by a great event in the past; we are not like the USA, which follows the star of a constitution written after a glorious war of independence. Australia, more like Scandinavia, can take thought and build without pressure a society it chooses.”

As my time in Australia draws, sadly, to a close, I want to summarize some of my views on this place, a place that is at once foreign and familiar. Terrill’s words have been helpful, because I’ve been thinking a lot about the similarities between this place and my home.

I am not bullish about America’s future prospects. Our country seems at once too divided – in rifts between liberals and conservatives that appear to be widening weekly – and too united – in stubborn isolationism made all the worse by little desire, on the part of many, to read about or experience the larger world. Americans watch too much television, eat too much terrible food, and most of all, talk too little amongst themselves about the real problems facing their country.

Some of these problems, I think, arise from exactly the role of which Terrill writes: We feel, in America, that stubbornness is a good thing. (And of this, I am among the most guilty.) We think that, because the Founding Fathers wrote it, it must be good, whether that means guns, God, or manifest destiny.

Australians, it seems to me, are less bound by stubbornness. There is an anti-authority, streak, to be sure; the place was founded by wardens and their criminal wards, after all. But the people aren’t beholden to this attitude. The people here are willing to listen, they’re more open to outsiders, they’re just plain old nicer.

This niceness, comparative or no, might be attributed to Australia’s current richness – it’s easy to be magnanimous when you have enough coal to power several countries. But I would say that there is something else at work.

I’ve thought, often, while here in Australia, that this place is like a European country where everyone speaks English. I think mine is an apt comparison. The people here genuinely enjoy interaction and any sort of argument is usually made less because the two people want to prove the other wrong and more because people like the exchange of ideas.

The depressing thing for me, an American, is that I am not sure we (America) are going to find our way out anytime soon. Short of taking every American on a field trip to Australia (or to Sweden or to Spain or to Switzerland), there isn’t much momentum to, in effect, get better. (Witness those who will read this and say, “If you don’t like it, get out!”) And this, perhaps, is key. We Americans aren’t good at taking criticism. No adult is, really.

But because Australia is younger, its people are slightly more apt to do just that – to listen instead of talk, to admit when they are wrong, if need be. To be more childlike – something all of us should aspire to be.

Day 22 – Sydney International Airport, 10:55 a.m.

My flight to Shanghai leaves in one hour. I can’t believe I’m leaving Australia.

I’d like to be dramatic and say that I feel a little like I should run out of this terminal, grab a taxi to downtown Sydney, get a job tending bar at some joint in King’s Cross, and figure out a new life in Australia. That’s not really true, perhaps because I’m just not romantic enough to actually imagine such a sequence events, but I am feeling wistful and conflicted. Australia has been kind to me. It shouldn’t be forgotten that I had nearly the perfect trip. Stars and supermoons aligned perfectly: in Wombarra, there was Tara and Hank and a wonderful shower; in Melbourne, Chris and Ilsa and Jon and Kevin and all the access that comes with knowing one of the most-known professional basketball players in a country’s history.

A stay in Australia would be hampered further by the expense. And it is FAR to Australia. And I am looking forward to driving my car and being in my house. (Mandy and I will be in Shanghai for only one day before the flight home.)

But there’s something about Australia. I haven’t left yet, but already I want to come back.

Last day – an airplane on the tarmac in Chicago, Illinois, 8:40 p.m.

Melbourne to Sydney, where I had a three-hour layover. Then direct to Shanghai, where Mandy and I met, as planned, under the giant L in Terminal 1, which was clearing out as the airport began a drowsy march toward nighttime. On the way to the Grand Mercure, Mandy told me about her two-week stay in India. A summary: it was dirty and hot and there was a spider the size of her hand in her room one night, but she was glad she had gone.

We collapsed into a soft bed at the Mercure. I was up at 7:45 in order to meet with a Slovenian girl who works for a French company about doing some editing for their Chinese children’s books. When I was finished, I handed my taxi driver the card for the Grand Mercure and watched the blocks go by during one last drive through the crowded streets of Shanghai.

Thanks to the MagLev, we were at the airport forty minutes after we left the Grand Mercure. My cousin Stephen, who orchestrated the companion passes that got us to and from Shanghai, had emailed to tell me that the flight was, again, a full one, and that we should get to the airport with plenty of time to spare. We were in front of a United Airlines agent three hours before our flight. He explained that not only were there no business class seats left (the ol’ buddy pass puts one in line for business), but that the exit rows were all taken. The only seats remaining were middle ones. Did we still want to go today?

I looked at Mandy. Our tired eyes agreed. We had to kill this gate agent.

Or rather, we said yes, we would do our best to survive.

And survive we did. I staved off two or three claustrophic panic attacks in 23E – one never wants to be in E on an airplane – thanks to Mandy’s Klonopin and the in-flight magazine crossword puzzle. Other activities were limited; our flight ran out of wine for the passengers and, apparently, juice for the movies. We went twelve hours with only sporadic shots of The King’s Speech and Due Date. (From what I saw, it wasn’t as bad as people said.)

We arrived in Chicago at the same time we had left Shanghai, a trick that still makes me believe in time travel, and settled in to wait for our respective flights home: mine four hours later, Mandy’s, five.

As we snaked our way through the line to customs, I caught the eye of someone who looked familiar. Then I hazarded a try at his name.

“Darryl?”

He looked up. It was him – the same Darryl Trooper or Tripper who’d been on our flight to Shanghai some 24 days earlier. He smiled and asked if we’d been in China this entire time. I said we hadn’t, and asked him the same thing.

“Hell no!” he said. “I’ve been home and back and home again in the time you’ve been gone.”

“Were they good trips?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

We shuffled forward, leaving Darryl behind. Then, as such queues are wont to do, the line brought us back to Darryl.

“What about you?” he asked. “Good trip?”

I looked at Mandy. Then I looked back at him and smiled.

“Great trip.”

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