I slammed the door, then flew straight to the laundry basket. Sure enough, all the undies were on top. I counted four of mine and five of Bonnie’s. A few lacy bras nestled underneath, as if searching for cover from those beige-clad skebes (dirty old farts). I tried to remember which panties I’d worn the past week, since I’d done the laundry last, and did some simple arithmetic in my head…
The conclusion was easy: in one week, I go through seven pairs of drawers, yet only four of mine could be found in the basket. That means, three pairs were missing…not including Bonnie’s (who might be missing two, but I couldn’t be 100 percent sure, for even though we were very close friends, I hadn’t memorized her daily underwear habits).
In shock, I sat at the kitchen table and stared at my notes. After about an hour of struggling, I finally gave up on my dissertation. Thoughts of my dirty undies in someone else’s pockets and printed on Fuji film overwhelmed me. I grabbed my backpack and left to go buy a few groceries. On my way down the stairs, I ran into two beige-uniformed men climbing up, with the same logo on their shirts as all the others.
The taller of the two stopped me, then had the nerve to ask me: “Sumimasen. Are you busy? Could we just see your bathroom, it won’t take a minute.”
I blew a fuse. “lie” (“No.” One never says “no” in Japan, it’s not polite, but at that point, I could’ve ripped that man’s neck off, which wouldn’t have been very polite either. I chose the former solution.)
I certainly didn’t have time to show two more workers my dirty drawers, and I knew they didn’t need any more pictures of my tub. Plus, I was on my way out.
After my curt refusal, the man insisted, with: “What time are you returning? We can wait.”As if all they had to do was sniff gaijin underwear all day long! No wonder they were incapable of repairing my o-furo. I told him off, as best I could, without worrying about the consequences. Bonnie and I could take showers for the next year—I couldn’t care less at that point.
Amazingly enough, despite my foreign rudeness, the next day, two new men came to repair our tub. Just in case, I’d gotten up early to do all our laundry that morning and it was safely hanging outside to dry. I was sure I could read disappointment on their faces when they saw the empty laundry basket in our bathroom. So with no frilly, exotic, olfactory distractions, they kept their cameras at bay and swiftly repaired our o-furo.
Once the last pair of worker’s shoes had left my genkan, I closed my front door, locked it, then sauntered straight to the bathroom. I gaily pushed the o-furo button and watched streams of boiling water rush into the tub. It was time to release some deep-seated physical and mental tensions caused by my painful twenty-four-hour cultural underwear crisis. I ripped my clothes off, tossed them into the laundry basket, scrubbed my body raw once again, then lowered a toe into the scalding water.
Laura Kline is a Belgian-American creative writer and translator living happily in Brussels with her partner and her fuzzy Calico cat. She came back from Japan in 2003 after obtaining her Master’s and Ph.D. degrees, and spends her free time jotting down anecdotes from her crazy traveling experiences in Japan, Europe, and Mexico. She’s currently working on learning her seventh language, and her dream is to write books and make films (comedies). She hopes that by sharing her odd, yet true international experiences, the world will become a playground for peace and love, instead of war.
BARBARA ROBERTSON
Getting Grandma
It’s important to know when to raise a stink.
THE NICELY DRESSED YOUNG MAN WHO HAD SHARED our compartment since Düsseldorf said goodbye in Munich, pressed a brown nugget the size of a hazelnut into the palm of my hand, and quickly got off the train.
“I think that guy just gave me a chunk of hash,” I said to Yvette.
“You’re kidding,” she answered, looking at my hand. “No, you’re not. That’s amazing.”
“What do you think I should do? Should I keep it?”
“Sure, why not? Just hide it somewhere. No one’s gonna suspect us.”
I don’t know if it was some puritan ethic that stopped me from tossing a gift away, Yvette’s confidence, or my evil twin named “curiosity,” but I quickly stashed the little lump in my suitcase. And then forgot about it until the incident on the train in Yugoslavia when I learned what can happen when you never throw anything away.
It was Yugoslavia then, a communist country, not Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. We were slicing through it on our way to Athens after enduring a cold late-October day in Salzburg. Snug in our sleeping car, Yvette on one bench, me on the other, we stretched our legs out, drank a morning cup of coffee, and lazily watched the foreign film unspooling outside the window. We were naïve Eurail travelers; it was our first trip to Europe. We didn’t know we’d be sharing the compartment until the door opened at our last stop in Austria, and “Grandma” struggled in.
She wore a heavy dark blue sweater over a brown cotton dress spattered with small beige flowers. Her gray hair was pulled loosely into a bun. A jumble of bags hung from one arm; in the other, she held a baby.
Yvette quickly scooted to my side of the compartment. Grandma humphed down next to the window on the bench across from us. She snugged the baby into blankets and pillows on the seat beside her and smoothed her dress over her thick legs.
We smiled at her and said, “Hello.” She answered with something we didn’t understand. We pointed to the baby and smiled again.The baby made faces. Grandma gibbered more words we didn’t understand and grinned. She was missing a front tooth.
Yvette decided that Grandma had been visiting her children in Austria and was now schlepping the grandchild to her village in Greece to give the parents a break. While Yvette was spinning her tale, Grandma began unwrapping bread, cheese, fruit, and jars filled with baby food. We were hungry and glad someone had brought food, especially home-made food. We nodded appreciatively, said, “Oh, that’s nice, thank you,” and offered her a soda. She took the soda and smiled her toothless grin. Then she fed the baby, ate her lunch, drank our soda, and tossed everything they didn’t eat out the window.
In the field outside the train window, a woman in a long skirt and head scarf cutting hay with a scythe put down the curved blade and looked up from her work. A horse tethered to a wagon nearby swished its tail.
“That was really horrible,” I said in a sweet voice to Grandma, knowing she didn’t understand a word.
Yvette joined in, smiling at Grandma, “I hope you get a stomach ache and your other tooth falls out.”
Grandma smiled back and began changing the baby’s diaper. When she finished, she put the used diaper in a bag, and stuffed the bag under the bench.
“Did you see that?”Yvette hissed behind a hand held in front of her mouth, as if Grandma could understand. “She threw our lunch out the window and saved a disposable diaper.”
“She must be going to toss it out later.”
“No,” said Yvette. “I saw another one inside. I don’t think she knows they’re disposable.”
We shared a candy bar and read our books. When the baby started crying, we decided to look for a dining car. On the way, we had to elbow through a company of soldiers. Yvette used the “F” word to tell them to back the “F” off, and marched on, head high, her wild, curly black hair bouncing with every stomp. They may not have understood English, but they understood Yvette. I slipstreamed behind her.
The dining car was an oasis. Slightly shabby, but with a pedigree—the Orient Express’s poor cousin. On the walls, small bouquets carved with inlaid wood brightened the dingy mahogany panels. The lamps were antique, the table settings plain. It was the last car on the train; I could see farmland out the back window.
We didn’t have Yugoslav money. We didn’t have much money of any kind. There were no menus. A waiter came and tried to discourage us from ordering, or so it seemed. He didn’t speak English. Because the train had stopped, Yvette decided he was telling us
to wait until we started rolling again. Or maybe, she surmised, it was too late for lunch and the kitchen was closed until dinner. But, we were too hungry to wait.
We gathered all the coins we’d collected across Europe, put a pile of shillings, guilders, pfennigs, and marks on the table, and pled with the waiter by making sad faces and rubbing our bellies. He shrugged, took the coins and left. We waited, watching a group of men in blue work clothes near the train depot warm their hands over a fire in a metal garbage can.The buildings behind them were gray, concrete, faceless. A train whistle cried for attention.
Our waiter returned with steaming bowls of goulash, some crusty bread and two glasses of wine. We beamed at him. We would have eaten mush. As hungry as we were, though, we ate slowly, laughing, sharing stories, soup spoons clinking in the bowls. We had the cozy dining car to ourselves. No soldiers, no baby, no Grandma.
“This reminds me of something,”Yvette said, pointing to a lamp. “Oh, I know. Our funky hotel in Amsterdam. What I remember most, though, was the look on your face when they said our room was on the fifth floor. I didn’t think you’d ever be able to drag your suitcase up the stairs.”
“Do you remember when we got lost that night walking back to the hotel?” I countered. “You tried to convince me the men staring at us in the cars driving by were commuters who had worked late. And then you looked up and saw the ladies in red corsets in the windows.”
I swiped the last of the peppery goulash out of the bowl with a piece of bread, sipped my wine, leaned back and sighed.The train ride wouldn’t be a disaster after all.
We decided to go back to our compartment, get our books, and spend all our time in the dining car. I slid open the door and stopped dead. Our dining car had been unhooked from the train and the train had moved a half a block farther down the tracks.
“Omigod Yvette, the train’s going to leave without us. We have to go. Now!”
We leapt from the door of the dining car, ran alongside the tracks past a clump of passengers who had gotten off the train, and jumped on just as the whistle blew.
Shaken, pumped with adrenalin, we walked as quickly as we could through the jostling cars, eager to reach our snug compartment, Grandma or not. As we passed the first sleeping cars, we began to notice people moving suitcases around and repacking. Yvette said they were preparing for bed.
We learned the real reason when we squeezed past a man we thought was a ticket-taker to get to our compartment: He was searching the luggage. And that’s when I remembered my little hazelnut.
“Omigod Yvette,” I whispered in her ear. “The hash.”
Hands trembling, I opened our door and we collapsed onto the bench. Grandma was just finishing another diaper change. It looked like the baby had eaten too much fruit.
“What are you going to do?”Yvette asked me.
“I don’t know,” I whispered as the customs officer put one highly polished shoe inside the door. The brass buttons on his pristine uniform gleamed. He glowered.
“Passports,” he said sternly. He slowly examined them, checking our ashen faces against those of the happy young women in the pictures. Then, he pulled Yvette’s suitcase from under the bench and opened it. Yvette and I sat stiffly, side by side, hands clasped in our laps, afraid to even blink. He shoved Yvette’s suitcase aside with a grunt and opened the bag next to it.
It was Grandma’s bag of dirty disposable diapers.
He couldn’t get it closed. The smell ricocheted off the walls. It swam into our nostrils and crawled down our throats. The customs officer gagged. He gave us a sympathetic look. We smiled back sweetly. He stamped our passports as fast as he could, and left.
Yvette slammed open the window, stuck her head outside and gasped.
Grandma smiled and closed the bag.
I croaked from behind my hand, “Would you like another soda?”
Grandma got off the train at the first stop in Greece. We traveled on—to Athens and then to the islands. One day, on a beach in Mykonos, I gave my little hazelnut to a guy from Australia we had met a few hours earlier. He was leaving for Munich. We didn’t have a pipe, anyway.
Barbara Robertson started traveling in the back seat of her father’s Chevy and has been on the road as much as possible since. In addition to traveling for fun, her work as a journalist covering visual effects and animation has provided the ticket for journeys to many countries. When she’s not packing or unpacking, she hangs out with her husband and three dogs in Mill Valley, California. She’s won national and international awards for her articles, and writes regularly for The Hollywood Reporter, The Bark, Animation Magazine, Film & Video, Computer Graphics World, and other publications.
Index of Contributors
Asdorian, Elizabeth 146-152
Ashman, Anastasia M. 114-117
Balfour, Amy C. 153-159
Brady, Susan 178
Briefs-Elgin, Gina 28-32
Brown, Jennifer 144-145
Browne, Jill Conner 90-96
Caudron, Shari 83-89
Claymen, Lisa 19
Colvin, Jennifer 179-185
Cox, Jennifer 40-43
Crawford, Kate 133-134
Dreon, Nicole 33-38
Edward, Olivia 79-81
Eisenberg, Julie 54-62
Ellen, Elizabeth 43
Erler, Jessica 119
Everman, Cookie 14-15
Fonseca, Elizabeth 126-128
Fontaine, Michele 24
Frankel, Laurie 118-125
Friesen, Colleen 129-133
Gordon, Marcy 63-71
Halliday, Ayun 72-78
Hepburn, Katharine 115
Kably, Lubna 196-204
King, Laure McAndish 135-140
Kline, Laura 205-211
Landis, Konnie 52-53
Lombardi, Ann 192-195
Lott, Michelle M. 174-178
Lyles, Megan 44-52
Mack, Bonnie 57, 122
McLane, Katie 97-102
Michaud-Martinez, Christine 170-173
Misuraca, Melinda 160-169
Notaro, Laurie 5-14
Orlean, Susan 103-113
Pehl, Mary Jo 62
Penn-Romine, Carol 107
Popper, Joanna 38-39
Radner, Gilda 172
Robertson, Barbara 212-217
Rudner, Rita 92
Schutte, Louise 102
Sheward, Tamara 16-27
Stigger, Carol 148
Sukkar, Deanna 141-144
Sussman, Ellen 1-4
Taketa, Mari 81-82
Tully, Catherine 47
Weiler, Julia 186-191
Zeno, Phyllis W. 16
Acknowledgments
My biggest thanks goes to Susan Brady, Larry Habegger, James O’Reilly, and Sean O’Reilly who bust their butts to make sure these women’s travel humor books go out in top form. I love them like family, and their friendship is more important to me than any amount of book sales. Thanks also to our production assistant, Christy Harrington, and our interns, Emily Dunn and Lydia Harari, who generously gave their time and effort to this book. And the book would not get its good looks without the creative brainstorming from Peter Ginelli, the participation of Jaime McFadden, and the devoted hard work of Stefan Gutermuth.
We owe all belly laughs about the title to Jeremy Balka. Jer, I thoroughly appreciate you working out the statistical probabilities of what words would generate the most amount of guffaws…we love it, no matter what the conservatives say!
Continued thanks to Sean Keener, Chris Heidrich, and the BootsnAll staff who keep my websites running and my online following growing by leaps and bounds. It’s deeply meaningful to have you believing in me and helping to make my dreams come true.
Heartfelt appreciation to my writing sisters Lauren Cuthbert, Lynn Ferrin, Danielle Machotka, Linda Watanabe McFerrin, Christi Phillips, and Alison Wright. Thank you so much for guiding me and remaining my biggest fans.
And as always, I couldn’t go anywhere or do
anything crazy without the love, strength, and friendship of my family and second families. They give me their guestrooms, do my work for me, act as airport shuttle drivers and storage units, send happy pictures of their kids, donate emergency funds, inspire me to achieve more—and always give me unconditional invitations to come home despite large holes in my communication efforts. I love you all right back and I went alphabetical with this because you’re all A-List in my book:
Kelly Amabile, Jessica Balesteri and Scott Hennis, Jim Benning, the Bradys, Dan Buczaczer and Jennifer Porcinito, Mike and Pat Buczaczer, John Caldwell, Sally Caton, Jennifer Colvin and Bob Read, Nathaniel Eaton, Merle Hammond and Max Abbott, the Heidrichs, Scott Gimple, Jacob Glezer and Judy Persky and family, Phil Gordon, Heather and Mark Grennan and family, the Lyons family, Rolf Potts, Leigh and Seth Presant and family, Lisa and Mike Ramsey, Bridget Burke Ravissa and family, Viv and Josh Spoerri and family, Oscar Villalon and Mary Ladd, the Walshs, Tara Weaver, and Dana and Brian Welsh and my sweet god daughters Berklee and Reilly.
And last but not least, my family. All the Leos, both West Coast and East Coast. Marylin Livingston and all the Livingstons (plus those who’ve changed their names). Extra special hugs to my dad, Garry L. Leo, who lets me call him at any hour of the night. Thank you so much for believing in me…(and not reading my risqué stories!)
“Naked Nightmare” by Ellen Sussman published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2005 by Ellen Sussman.
“An American (Drug-Smuggling) Girl” by Laurie Notaro excerpted from I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies) by Laurie Notaro. Copyright © 2004 by Laurie Notaro. Reprinted by permission of Villard, a division of Random House, Inc.
“Pills, Thrills, and Green Around the Gills” by Tamara Sheward excerpted from Bad Karma: Confessions of a Reckless Traveller in South-East Asia by Tamara Sheward. Copyright © 2005 by Tamara Sheward. Reprinted by permission of Summersdale Press.
“Cherub” by Gina Briefs-Elgin published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2005 by Gina Briefs-Elgin.
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