Bathing with Foreigners

In my previous blog, Piss on the Wall, Question Mark, i discussed how many American males view the public urination experience. It all boils down to one basic rule: no talking while my wang is out. As previously discussed, i've recently learned that this rule is attributed more to males who live in a more urban setting, as more rural folk are more comfortable talking while their wangs are out. Let me speak here about a more grievous breach of protocol, again on the New Zealand trip we took two years ago. The following events take place on Thursday, March 13th, the eleventh day of the trip and a full week of poor restroom facilities after the last bathroom story.

After checking out from the campground in Kaikoura, our plan for the day was to go on some sort of a dolphin swimming encounter. Kaikoura has a couple of small businesses which do this sort of thing; the idea is that they take you a few kilometers out into the see, slit your throats and dump your body.

I mean, they drop you in and you get to get all up close and personal with dolphins. This sounded pretty cool to our badass tourist selves. Unfortunately, reservations were required and they were all booked out for weeks. So we went with Plan B, which was more what i had wanted to do anyway: a seal swimming encounter. Seals!

...

Seals!!

So, we made our reservations for the seal encounter, a mere couple hours into the future, and did some hardcore American-style shopping downtown Kaikoura. A waterproof camera was our most important purchase at the time.

The encounter began when we slipped into wetsuits (Wetsuits!! How cool!) and boarded a bus, which drove us across town to the docks. The boat took us out to an island-like rock formation which was maybe a hundred or so meters across. It was the seals' natural habitat, their home. There were a great many of them sunning themselves on the rocks. This is what seals do: they sun themselves and sleep. This was not the first time that we'd seen seals in New Zealand. However it was the closest we'd been in their proximity, even closer than the injured one we'd seen on that rocky beach a few days prior, before it got mean and started to look at us in a threatening manner and we ran away.

We were advised not to get too close to the seals or to their colony, and physically touching them was expressly forbidden. At first this seemed, to me, like it was defeating our purpose for being there; i had thought that we'd be getting to actually swim with them. I wanted to pet a seal. So although this dream was not fulfilled, i still feel that this excursion was worth it.

The water was frigid, and getting in was a shock to the system for sure, but after hyperventilating for a few minutes and remembering how to breathe through a snorkel (which i hadn't done in years), it got a bit more comfortable. I started to, probably largely due to the cold water, feel the pressure in my bladder mounting. It would continue to mount, subsiding occasionally, and at those moments i thought i had pissed myself. Judging by the geyser i unleashed when we returned to base, i'd say i probably remained fully continent during the excursion, though i'm pretty sure that the warm spots i swam through were other peoples' pee. Lovely.

After we'd been floating out there for a while, the seals started to come up to us and lazily lope around in the water. I laid face down, staring at the beautiful underwater vegetation, and one coasted by directly below me, staring me in the eye. It was so close i probably could have reached out and touched it, but it may have viewed that as a challenge. Don't mess with seals when they're in the water, they will destroy you.

Sea water is awful. Alyssa had accidentally ingested a lot of it, so she returned to the boat, feeling sick, well before the rest of us. One of the other women on the trip had a similar experience, and so the two of them struck up a conversation on the boat. It turns out that she and her husband, probably in their sixties, were from Maryland, and they and their daughter were visiting their other daughter, who was living there on a six month visa. Aside from the three of us and that family, there were two other people on the tour: a couple from Shanghai.

After two hours, we made our return. And that's when things got awkward.

I entered the men's shower room. I'll paint you a picture of it: straight ahead from the door is a common area with benches on three walls, probably a dressing room. As you enter the door, immediately on your left there is a bathroom stall. Further left, there is a long partition identical to the walls of a bathroom stall. It housed four showerheads, spaced about three feet apart. I, being the first member of the party into the room, peeled off the wetsuit and dropped it on the floor at the rightmost shower. This was where the entry to the partition was. I then walked all the way to the leftmost shower, which is the most enclosed of the lot, and began to rinse myself off, with my swimming suit still on.

The man from Shanghai did as i did, but selecting the second shower from the right, effectively putting a one-shower buffer between us. He, too, began to rinse off with his swimming suit still on. This is the correct course of action. See, dude from China knows what's going on.

I was pretty well done, i was just about to step out, which would have meant walking across the other man, since there was only the one exit, all the way on the right. This wouldn't have been a big deal, even though there is only about three to four feet from wall to wall. I could probably have passed by him with a comfortable six inches between our still-suited asses.

Then, suddenly, the man from Maryland had to go and ruin everything. He suddenly saunters into the shower, butt ass naked, with his shriveled old man balls flapping in the breeze, and gets into the shower between us. Although i must admit that this was the only remaining shower, as the rightmost shower was occupied by all of our wetsuits, this was not an ideal situation for me. Now, suddenly, i need to cross a naked man in close proximity to exit the shower. This would have been bad enough in itself.

Remember the general convention: a man should never, NEVER speak to another man while urinating. Never. Don't do it. It throws everything off. So, how does this apply to showering?

Never speak to another man while showering. I suppose i should make an amendment to the rule of thumb we discussed: NO TALKING while YOUR wang is out, EITHER.

In fact, talking while your wang is out is worse than talking while my wang is out.

"Oh, check out these shower apparatuses! These are so nifty, why don't we have showers like this back in the States? Don't you think these are cool?" I'm paraphrasing here, but this is the general gist of the conversation he attempted to start with me.

I wanted to scream, "SHUT UP! Don't you know you're throwing your wang in the face of ten million years of human evolution?! This is not done! How is that acceptable?!" but it only came out as, "Uh...yeah."

I turned to face the corner of the wall and rinsed my hair again. I rinsed my hair for longer than could possibly be considered natural, unless you were a hippie on your annual wash. Then i shampooed again, which took abnormally long. Then i rinsed for longer. Basically, i went at it with my hair until the old man left the shower, and then waited another couple minutes to be sure that he'd have his clothes back on when i came out.

As it happened, when i exited the shower, he was still standing in the middle of the common area with his aging scrotum hanging loose, making idle conversation with the other guy, who obviously had fewer qualms about making nude conversation with strange men. Fortunately for me, right at that moment Amanda shouted into the men's locker room for the soap and shampoo, which i had, in my mortification, forgotten that we needed to share. After i brought it out to them, i locked myself in the toilet stall and pissed until i heard the old man's voice taper off out the door.