Strangers on Tour

by Shirley Wang

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Just before I moved away from Melbourne, Australia, at the end of last year, I took a “foodie tour of Melbourne” on a Saturday afternoon. This walking tour had been a gift from my sweet brother, ages ago. I’d scheduled it many times and always canceled, unwilling to allocate a whole afternoon to what I assumed would be a very in-the-box tourist experience. Instead, during my three years living in Australia, I had sought out experiences that would lead to finding lifelong friends—successfully, I think. But now that I was moving back to my hometown in Iowa for a while, I thought this tour would be a good way to say goodbye to the city. 

I thought this backstory might make me the most novel or most interesting in the whole group, most of whom had likely come as tourists. I was excited to hang around with people who were maybe imagining what it was like to live here. They might like to hear my review.