The Backpacker Questionnaire

I’ve mentioned, a couple times by now I think, one of the weirder aspects of the backpacker lifestyle: the questionnaire you go through every time you land at a new hostel. Having lugged your pack up to your room and recollected with a sigh that your other pair of dirty jeans are all the way at the bottom, you have to unzip every zipper and crackle every single plastic bag you have with you and purse your lips and squint until you find what you want. After you’ve made your lonely way to the nearest Pak-N-Save or Malaysian noodle house and are huddled over your dinner in the common kitchen, someone will invariably get into it with you, about where in America you’re from, oh yeah my cousin went there once, where you’re heading, have you been to Queenstown yet, I hear it’s awesome, what kind of work are you looking for because you know there’s fruit-picking work on the west coast, did you hear there’s a two-dollar special on Tui at the local pub?

I didn’t mind those conversations, really, it’s just that they’re pretty predictable and you have to have them pretty much every day, every time you get on a bus or go to a cultural experience or whatever. When I settled in at the Maple Lodge some of us started talking about better questions than where-are-you-from-where-are-you-going to ask, stuff that would let you have more interesting conversations with total strangers on a nightly basis. The first good one I heard were “What’s your favorite racquet based sport?” Then I came up with “What’s the heaviest thing you’ve ever lifted?” and for some reason I’ve been thinking about all this ever since. Even if I don’t have much call for this sort of thing now (most of the questions in my life lately lately are along the lines of “Are you coming to the Southern Cross after work tonight?” and “Can you pick up some trim milk at the dairy because we are totally out.”) I figure it never hurts to be prepared.

So, what is your favorite racquet-based sport? I usually cheat and say ping-pong on this one. Or air hockey. It seems sort of weird to say “What’s your favorite puck-or-paddle based sport,” though.

And do tell, what is the heaviest thing you’ve ever lifted? I’ve been at a loss for this one but I just remembered the first time I went to Burning Man, way back in 2000 before I had internet archives. The people I was with decided that as part of our No Spectating, we’d build a gigantic teepee sort of structure that was made entirely of lead, I think, and use that as our tent-type thing at our camp. This thing came apart into about eight different (very heavy) pieces and had to be put back together and winched around and dropped on the floor multiple times and then strapped to the top of the car and when we finally did get to Burning Man, that first time, six years ago? The first thing I did when we got to the playa was walk around the back of the station wagon and smack my head into this…very heavy hing…and collapse to the dusty alkali ground in a semi-conscious heap.

What’s the best looking invertebrate you’ve ever seen? Duh, the octopus at the Octopus Resort, silly. And there was this one time, at a house about four houses ago, where there were these two giganto slugs totally getting it on hemphroditically on the front porch, hanging head-down by a long rope of blue slime. It’s all fine to have a spinal column and everything—I mean, some of my best friends are chordates– but shave me bald and call me drafty, do I love the invertebrates.

Describe your perfect nap. Okay. This is serious. Let’s think about this. I think a nap in a hammock is pretty great, as is a nap curled up on the carpet with a stack of books, a couch cushion, and a snoring cat. However, the perfect nap has to be in the middle of the afternoon on a Saturday you’re spending at home doing the kind of organizational work that ends up being strangely satisfying, like getting all your filing into one file cabinet, or making all your pots fit perfectly into their cupboards. Preferably you should be all spooned up, for this nap, with someone you really like looking at naked who is whispering in your ear and petting your hair, in the middle of a huge gorgeous bed with very crisp cool white sheets and a nice light blankey on top. There should be an open window, a slight breeze, and enough sun to make the sheets almost too bright to look at. When you wake up it should be time to watch a movie (if by “watch a movie” we mean “get it on hardcore, hermaphroditically or otherwise”) and then eat some Haagen-Dasz strawberry ice cream. And then maybe watch a movie for real and go to bed early.

What foods-on-a-stick have you eaten? I just thought about this question because I keep hearing about the hotdish-on-a-stick you can get at the Minnesota State Fair, not because I have much experience with this particular category of comestible. I’ve had corn dogs and cotton candy, and that’s about it. Pretty boring.

What is your favorite type of body of water? Ocean, alpine lake, babbling woodland stream, what? I’d say ocean, hands down. You have your currents and your tides and your kelp forests and your baleen whales subsisting solely on krill and your vent communities and your intertidal zones. Yup. Ocean. That one’s easy.

Which of your internal organs would you want to look at and why? I’d sort of like to look at my brain, I guess, and maybe my lungs. I’d like to see what a lifetime of attempted avoidance of second-hand smoke has got me. Hmm. Maybe this isn’t such a good question after all. I mean, who’s going to be all “GALL BLADDER GALL BLADDER I’VE ALWAYS WANTED TO SEE MY GALL BLADDER,” right? No one, that’s who. Okay. I’m taking this one off the list. Pretend like it’s not even here.

What are your favorite things to eat at 7-11? (Kiwis, you may substitute StarMart). In a blatant bid for the favor of the Key Girl contingent, I’m going to say Slim Jim and a Slurpee. I also used to like to get Hubba Bubba and Nerds and then squish them up together in a sort of unholy alliance of sugar and Red Dye #7, but I haven’t done that for like eighteen years so I don’t know if it counts.

What flavor of pie could you do without? (Americans: when I say pie I mean pie. Kiwis, when I say pie I mean tart but your answer may allude to either pies or tarts. Everyone else: pie, tart, pasty, whatever. Knock yourselves out). Pecan or cherry, probably. Apple is okay, I guess. And I’m not actually a huge fan of even, like, chocolate pie either, now that I think about it. Wow, can it be that I truly only like Key Lime pie? Weird. Also, clearly I am a little hungry as I write this, because all I can think of are questions having to do with food.

What is your least favorite way to eat potatoes? Okay, I just put in “least favorite” instead of “most favorite” just for a little something different, but now when I actually think about the question for real I’m beginning to freak out. This could have the potential to engender some rather tense conversations, so be careful where you deploy this one. Because at first you’re all, oh, okay, yeah, fine, baked, baked isn’t that good. But then you think, no, wait man, what about the yummy crispy skin? And the fact that you can put cheese on top? And then you think, well, okay, mashed, but that’s just dumb because no one in the world doesn’t love mashed potatoes so that doesn’t even count. Someone tells you that mashed is his least favorite way to eat potatoes? You must immediately drive a stake through his heart because clearly this person cannot be allowed to roam the earth any longer. And then you start getting desperate, thinking, okay, fine, au gratin? Potatoes au gratin? But NO! Because au gratin potatoes involve not only potatoes but also butter and cream so that’s right out. Um, uh…think, dammit, THINK! Roasted baby red? But they are so delicious with rosemary! How about on a pizza because surely that is too crazy to be taken seriously? WRONG! I had that once at Sullivan Street Bakery and it was so good it made me lay down on the floor and take deep yoga breaths to keep from weeping openly. This may be an unanswerable question. There is no un-good way to eat potatoes. The question doesn’t even make sense. This question sucks.

What is the world’s best “school supply,” like protractor or Trapper Keeper or those markers that smelled like fruit? I have a deep love for clicky pencils (the ones by Bic) that abides to this very day, so I’ll say that. I like tabbed folders, too, in different colors. Oooh, and my labelmaker! Totally my labelmaker.

What shoe currently in your shoe collection would you wear for the rest of your life if unlikely circumstances required it and if those same unlikely circumstances also indicated that the shoe wouldn’t, like, wear out or anything. Hmm. For comfort’s sake alone I’d have to say ye olde Reef flip-flops, the Christmas gift that has kept on giving. I am not so into shoes, although occasionally I sigh over some very cute contrast-stitched wedge Mary Janes that are currently stuck in a plastic box at my cousin’s house in Seattle. Another not-so-good question.

What’s the best thing about your library? The best thing about the Wellington Central Library, where I still go for books even though the Newtown one is closer, is that a) it has free books in it, precluding the dropping of thirty dollars NZ every time I want to look at marks typed on paper, and b) it’s open until 8:00. Also I enjoy that it has a café, which I think more libraries ought to have, and a really great magazine selection. I sort of like my book-getting strategy I have devised there as well, which is not so much a strategy as a wandering-around-the-fiction-section-dipping-in-and-out-of-what-looks-kind-of-good kind of a deal. I was much more focused and hold-list-oriented at the good old Ballard Branch. Here you have to pay to put a book on hold (seriously, dude, clutch the pearls, because I couldn’t even believe that was real when I first heard it) so I guess the fact that you get to do that for free in Ballard is a plus, not to mention you can return a book to any branch for free too. And I like the grass growing on the roof in Ballard as well. I haven’t been to the big downtown library in Miami for years but I do remember going there for a third grade research project and going through the catalogs and being amazed that there were so many books in the world, about so many different things. Until then I’d only read my Chronicles of Narnia and Little Women and so on and so forth and hadn’t been aware that there was so much more reading to do.

What’s your position on spiders, pro or con? Please give specific references. Pro! Huge fan of spiders! The mandibles! The spinnerets! The big awesome eyes! Past spider loves include the panoply of banana spiders that used to hang near the front door of the (old) house, into which I was wont to throw leaves and bits of paper and Doritos purely to see the spider run down the orb to check out and then huffily eject the offending detritus, as well as the…commerce… involved in the world’s most exhilarating work-study job. And one time at my old job in Seattle I was eating lunch with all my co-workers and there was this tiny pretty delicate little pale-green spider on some girl’s shoulder and she, like, lost her mind when she saw it, and she was freaking out and everyone else was freaking out and it was rapelling off her elbow or something and I just grabbed it by the silk and put it over on the floor and everyone looked at me with amazement, as if I had personally wrestled a marauding warthog, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t puff up with the pride of a big game hunter at the time.

Wow, I need some inspiration, clearly, because these really were all about either food or invertebrates. Y’all either answer some of these in the comments or make up your own for me to steal, all right? So I can be the most popular scummy backpacker ever.