Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls - By David Sedaris Page 0,25

find a couple having sex. This wasn’t on pay-per-view but just regular Sunday night TV. And I mean these two were really going at it. If I’d had the Lonely Planet guide to German, I might have recognized “Please don’t stop!” “That was amazing/weird.” With Herr Thomas, I could understand “I just gave it to you” and, with Pimsleur, “I would like to come now.”

I watched this couple for a minute or two, and then I advanced to the next channel, which was snowed out unless you paid for it. What could they possibly be doing here that they weren’t doing for free on the other station? I asked myself. Turning each other inside out?

And isn’t that the joy of foreign travel—there’s always something to scratch your head over. You don’t have to be fluent in order to wonder. Rather, you can sit there with your mouth open, not exactly dumb, just speechless.

Laugh, Kookaburra

I’ve been to Australia twice so far, but according to my father, I’ve never actually seen it. He made this observation at the home of my cousin Joan, whom he and I visited just before Christmas one year, and it came on the heels of an equally aggressive comment. “Well,” he said, “David’s a better reader than he is a writer.” This from someone who hasn’t opened a book since Dave Stockton’s Putt to Win, in 1996. He’s never been to Australia either. Never even come close.

“No matter,” he told me. “In order to see the country, you have to see the countryside, and you’ve only been to Sydney.”

“And Melbourne. And Brisbane,” I said. “And I have too gone into the country.”

“Like hell you have.”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s get Hugh on the phone. He’ll tell you. He’ll even send you pictures.”

Joan and her family live in Binghamton, New York. They don’t see my father and me that often, so it was pretty lousy to sit at their table, he and I bickering like an old married couple. Ashamed by the bad impression we were making, I dropped the countryside business, and as my dad moved on to other people’s shortcomings, I thought back to the previous summer and my daylong flight from London to Sydney. I was in Australia on business, and because someone else was paying for the ticket and it would be possible to stop in Japan on the way home, Hugh joined me. This is not to put Australia down, but we’d already gone once before. Then too, spend that much time on a plane, and you’re entitled to a whole new world when you step off at the other end—the planet Mercury, say, or at the very least Mexico City. For an American, though, Australia seems pretty familiar: same wide streets, same office towers. It’s Canada in a thong, or that’s the initial impression.

I hate to admit it, but my dad was right about the countryside. Hugh and I didn’t see much of it, but we wouldn’t have seen anything were it not for a woman named Pat, who was born in Melbourne and has lived there for most of her life. We’d met her a few years earlier, in Paris, where she’d come to spend a mid-July vacation. Over drinks in our living room, her face dewed with sweat, she taught us the term “shout,” as in, “I’m shouting lunch.” This means that you’re treating and that you don’t want any lip about it. “You can also say, ‘It’s my shout,’ or, ‘I’ll shout the next round,’” she told us.

We kept in touch after her visit, and when my work was done and I was given a day and a half to spend as I liked, Pat offered herself as a guide. On that first afternoon, she showed us around Melbourne and shouted coffee. The following morning she picked us up at our hotel and drove us into what she called “the bush.” I expected a wasteland of dust and human bones, but in fact it was nothing like that. When Australians say “the bush,” they mean the woods. The forest.

First, though, we had to get out of Melbourne and drive beyond the seemingly endless suburbs. It was August, the dead of winter, and so we had the windows rolled up. The homes we passed were made of wood, many with high fences around the backyards. They didn’t look exactly like American houses, but I couldn’t quite identify the difference. Is it the roofs? I wondered. The siding? Pat was driving,