Meet and Greet

Tonight was the first official night of the tour and we were being treated to a meet and greet buffet style dinner.  We would officially meet Brent, our tour guide and we'd get to sit with 6 other tour mates and make small talk with them.  We asked and answered the standard questions -

1. Where are you from?
2. When did you arrive?
3. What do you do?

When we walked into the dining room, we quickly scanned the room to see firstly if there were any seats left and secondly if those seats were next to any cool looking people.  A lady, whose name we later learned was Lorraine was waving madly at us, signaling us to join their table, so with nowhere else to go, we walked over and smiled broadly, introducing ourselves.  Lorraine was traveling with a man called Ian.  We're still not quite sure if they were married or in fact, just related. Lorraine seemed to have a cousin in every town that was mentioned in Australia, so it's possible that if Ian wasn't related to her, we were!  Ian had a very pronounced lisp and as hard as he tried he just couldn't get "Shelley" out.  I answered to all his attempts though.  He tried.

Next to them was Barbara and Rob.  The only pair of pants in that relationship were owned and worn by Barbara.  If we get stuck on this trip and aren't quite sure what to do or where to go, we'll just ask Barb, she knows everything!

The complete the trifecta were Pat and Shirley, travelling companions.  Both deaf, making conversation hard, but they seemed lovely.  Especially Shirley.  She told us a story of when she once wanted to change her name and when we asked her "to what?" she said "oh, something like Cheryl or Shelley, I like Shelley".  To which I replied in jest, "Call yourself Shelley, then you're bound to get called Cheryl!"  Shirley looked at me and said "pardon?"  I'm not sure if she didn't hear me or she was confused about what I'd said, so I just smiled and nodded at her and went back to eating my dinner.

I love the meet and greet.

I don't like to judge a book by its cover, but looking around the room, I have a feeling we might have had the same conversation no matter what table we chose.