I'm Free Too

I paced back and forth along the pavement outside Sydney Town Hall. The rush of morning commuters had peaked about and hour before and the remaining workers, running late to the office, were hurriedly navigating the heavy construction work along George Street. It was early December in 2018. I was waiting to lead my first free tour. I had arrived an hour before I needed to, just in case there were any delays on the fifteen minute train ride that brought me to Town Hall station. I had paced around the police station and the pedestrian bridge linking the city to Darling Harbour for a while, as I had done before the interview for the job and before the two practice tours I had given in recent weeks.

But that day in mid-December was different. Against the buzzing sound of drills laying down light rail tracks, I was to guide a tour for the first time in front of real people. I wasn’t going in unprepared or alone, thankfully. My new boss was going to be doing the tour with me. He’d do the first half, I’d do the second. We’d then swap halves on my next tour after which I’d be able to guide the whole tour by myself. I had delivered the whole tour to the boss a week earlier, but since then had focused on the second half as the real-life tour approached.

When the boss arrived he could see that I was nervous. He provided some comments to reassure me and put me at ease. He also went through some housekeeping so the tour would run smoothly. “I’ll start it and introduce you and then we’ll do a stop each but there is a point where I have to do two in a row so I can also do the last stop.” I nodded along as the words crystallised in my head. “Wait, what?” I realised. I had thought we were dividing the tour into the first and second halves, not constantly flipping between guides. I wasn’t prepared for half of the stops I was about to deliver to thirty strangers on a three hour tour. I gulped down my ever-growing anxiety. A later reading of the email my boss had sent to me in the weeks prior said very explicitly that the half-half tour involved guides alternating stops. I chose to ignore this in the dozen or so times I had read the email.

Almost five years later, I was experiencing the same anxiety, only this time vicariously. In Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s second largest city, I was on a free tour of the temples surrounding the large lotus pond in the city’s north. The grand structures had an elegant mix of Taoism, Confucianism and Taoism cultures, often in the same building. With the last of the typhoon rain passing only hours prior, there were only four people on the tour. But there were two guides. One, an older man, was an experienced guide and the other, a younger woman named Rachel, was new to the company. As the tour began I worried for Rachel. Was she expecting to do a half-half tour or alternating stops? Had she too misread the ‘Welcome’ email?

The guides ended up splitting the tour, with the older man taking the first half and Rachel taking the second. Five years after my mixup, my concern for Rachel quickly turned into envy. I wish I could’ve done the second half like she did.

The first guide had clearly be doing the tour for a while. He delivered the tour quietly and unenthusiastically and, despite there being three others on the tour, performed almost entirely to Maureen. Maureen was an American English teacher who was as old as her name made her sound. She had been living in desolate, regional Uzbekistan for the past few months but had just moved to Kaohsiung to teach English to Taiwanese students. The tour guide maintained direct eye contact with Maureen for almost the entire first half of the tour, forcing her to nod along and act as if he and her were just having a casual conversation. The rest of us were innocent spectators to their unidirectional confabulation.

The first half of the tour started with the guide taking us to a stand to get ‘free fruit’ as a temple offering. Without explanation as to how this worked, the guide walked up to a fruit stand and each of us was handed a large, light green pomelo and half the segments of a peeled pomelo. He talked for a while and then we walked to the temple. After entering we placed the pomelos at the front of the temple. Noticeably there was no other fruit there. After listening to the guide talk at Maureen for a while he told us (Maureen) to pick up the fruit. You didn’t leave the fruit at the temple, it was just an offering. He didn’t explain the significance of why we had brought the fruit in the first place but was clear that we would not be leaving it at the temple altar. Unbeknownst to us, we were keeping the fruit. And so the tour continued with an American, a German and two Australians walking along the edge of the lotus pond, each with one-and-a-half pomelos in hand.

By the time Rachel came around to deliver the second half of the tour she was a lot more convivial. She even gave the tour to people other than Maureen. Against the tired delivery of the old guide, she appeared a lot more upbeat.

The theme of the free tour pushing free stuff continued. The first guide had given us some small, silver thimble-type thing, kind of like a Monopoly token, earlier on in the tour. He didn’t explain very well what that was for. So it stayed in my bag with my pomelos. When we got to a large temple, Rachel was pushing that we could get free tea inside. She also pushed the bead bracelets they made at the temple, the pens at the deity for education, and other chachkas on the Taoist smorgasbord, all of which were available via donation to the temple.

By the time we got to our final stop and I got my fortune from a vending machine I had amassed a large haul of paraphernalia which was successfully used to guilt me into giving a larger tip.