When traveling, some folks despair, wondering how to “break the ice” with strangers: One tourist said he just couldn’t engage with locals, “not even in bars and cafes.” A couple, planning to travel to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary, feared they wouldn’t speak with a single soul. To that couple I offered specific advice, but you may prefer broad concepts.
Consider the humble hound walking by. Don’t you just know, somehow, whether he wants to interact with you or not? By whether he’s lost in himself, or instead hopefully scanning around like, “Dog meets world”?
So start with what you can most easily control: Your eyes, face and a smile. If you look like a frozen face on Mount Rushmore, I may nervously avoid you, but I feel safer if your crows feet are even the least bit mobile… and I will be the moth to your flame if you are shining with the light of gratitude: A poster beside the Vancouver Art Gallery coat check shows a woman in a grey-walled balcony, looking at blank grey buildings by a bland tree trunk without bark. “I can’t believe I’m in Paris!”
Art may help: some folks wear a conversation piece, such as a broach, from the gallery gift shop, while a music lover told me he wears his heavy metal T-shirt to be inviting to fellow fans. In Sex and the Single Girl, (1962) Helen Gurley Brown tells of wearing a button that read, “Fight that willpower!” Anyone ostensibly “wanting to know” what that nonsensical slogan meant would happily ask her.
Ms Brown, in her book for singles, advises that people go to parties in an interested, meet-people mood. If they attend parties, then they like travellers. I can signal my willingness to meet… by dressing as “a tacky tourist”! I’ve been approached in London for having a child’s compass around my neck. (For exiting tube stations) As Grandma said, “Just be yourself” and people may find you interesting.
At a London tavern, I gratefully enjoyed an ethnic lunch of “English Sunday beef.” Even though I’m a bookworm, I eschewed reading any magazine, newspaper or digital device. Before I dug in, I carefully snapped on an easy-wash Scottish tartan bib. That, I judged correctly, was tacky enough. Right after I had my last bite a schoolteacher from Wales, sipping beer, opened the conversation by saying, “That meal makes me famished!” Of course we didn’t say a word about beef, but we got to talking about sports and Shakespeare. I took my beer to his table to free up space in the quaint little pub…
So much for appearance. Meanwhile, just as it’s hard to remember jokes, (but not “pickup lines”) so too it would be hard, I think, to remember any “lines” for meeting the locals: I would blank out. Better to manifest my inner attitude: “A Boy Scout does someone a good turn every day.”
“Good” can mean helping a pretty girl feel less lonely, or an elderly man browsing a bookstall to feel more connected. For the latter, “I love that writer, especially her one about being on the Orient Express.” Of course we smiled!
For the former, she was one seat over for a matinee of the rap musical Hamilton, wearing a big white puffy nylon jacket, a jacket I just knew would embarrass her by rustling loudly if she tried to take it off during the show. I gently pointed out that others seated ahead of us were taking off their jackets already. But she knew the room temperature well: This was her seventh time! I ended up showing her on my tourist map the tube station by a theatre bookstore with grand souvenir coffee table books about Hamilton: including the script, so she could sing along at home. I became twice as gentle—not twice as hearty!—as I noticed she had the shy-scared talk of the young. So I didn’t involve her in my talking to the couple behind us.
For them I had broken the ice after being supportive of their squee-e-e-zing past us only to end up seated right behind me. Were they embarrassed? Not after I gaily said, “We meet again!” Another good deed for the day.
People are more alike than different.
As for that couple planning their wedding anniversary tour, fearing a cold, uncrossable gap between them and everyone else they would meet on their trip, I advised: big matching white convention name stickers. “Still married after 50 years.” Or draw a smiley face… Who could resist?
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Sean Crawford
On highway 97 to to fruit tree country,
July
2025
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