I'll concede you have a point there Tonypepperoni but I think you're still being rather harsh on Aussie guys' travel habits.
The amount of under-30 Australians on working holidays and gap years is overwhelming proportionate to our Anglosphere counterparts. Have you noticed how prevalent the accent is behind the bar at pubs in Edinburgh or London? Bad examples I know but they're to be found all over Europe and South America. Then you have the exchange students and young professionals.
My point is that even if we stick to other travellers/fellow Aussies, proportionately, there will be, statistically speaking, those that try to immerse themselves among the locals, whether via Couchsurfing or friends of theirs.
Quote: (08-21-2014 07:32 AM)tonipepperoni Wrote:
St Petersburg and Stockholm are unusual locations for an Australian.
One of the Americans I got friendly with in Buenos Aires commented that "you can hardly find a hostel in the world that doesn't have an Aussie in it at any one time." Even somewhere like Budapest is mainstream these days, I agree with what Deluge said about our travel one-upmanship tendencies.
You don't need to go on about the "tribal bogan Aussie backpacker" trope. I think a lot of us can relate too well to the feeling of bumping into our own after settling into our Berlin hostel and to hearing them raving about tearing up Kreuzberg tonight, and oh we're off to Prague to get shitfaced at Charles Bath, hey were you at Pamplona next week? Blah blah blah.
But then again, from my Paris perspective, there
were a few of us who broke away, did our own thing and attempted to appreciate the city, approach chicks at Le Marais and Montmatre, not just do the pub crawl rounds with the Erasmus kids. And I lived there for a couple of months btw, not 4 piddly fuzzy days as part of a Contiki.
Sure, for the most part, I also stuck within the traveller bubble the rest of Europe, but I know better now. I missed out on a chance to live in Berlin in 2010 but that's a plan B for after graduation so I'm keen to find out what you're on about.
Quote: (08-21-2014 07:32 AM)tonipepperoni Wrote:
Do you know what kind of cum-downs an Australian male will experience if he actually met a beautiful girl in stureplan and went home with her and had a flight scheduled to go back to Melbourne the next day? I have. It was depressing.
That sort of 'redpill' experience or anguish will not be experienced by your typical Australian male because A) They do not know how to get on the guestlist in stureplan B) They wont go out to stureplan, most likely follow hostel mates to some shitty bar in gamla or the hipster isle. C) And suppose they did, they will probably be terrified by the raw talent and male to female ratio that he will be too spoiled for choice and completely freeze in the moment or become so 'high' in the euphoria of validation that he will never succomb to actual sex. D) Stockholm is an unusual choice for Strayan's.
At most the typical aussie male will go to sweden and think 'Nice blonde birds, people seem a bit uptight, cold, same prices as 'straya, nice landscape' and then be done with it. The experience never ever results in a heightened sense of awareness or dissonance towards Australia.
Your Sweden hypothesis really flips the script on Aussie guys. I've heard a number of blokes rave about "fit Scandi and Slavic" birds and how's they're going to do Russia and get laid, I wonder what it's actually like for them on the ground.
I feel I can draw a causal link between that "sheltered traveller bubble" and the whole 'false-optimism' idea. We
know that there's real quality in the big wide world. We
know East Asian and Scandinavian chicks completely destroy our own. Working at a hostel back home over summer is enough to give a taster of that. So why would we, irrespective of the ridiculous travel opportunities at our disposal, regardless of our increased value overseas, be content with our lot, or with fellow Anglo chicks in the Greek Islands? There must be some idea to it, that of the lucky country and the bronzed bloke and chick.