Elbahrain.net Mike Grossman was adamant he wasn’t going to fall for anyone in Australia.
After all, he’d only be in Melbourne for a couple of months before returning to his life in the US — and Mike “wasn’t a fling type of person.”
But after packing up his life in Boston and beginning the long trek to Melbourne, Mike stopped off at his parents’ house in California, where his mother pulled him aside.
“What will you do if you meet somebody in Australia?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.
“There’s literally no way that’s going to happen,” replied Mike, firmly.
He emphasized that he was going to Australia for work, not to find love.
“I emphatically told my mother that it wasn’t possible,” Mike tells CNN Travel today. “And then off I went.”
Mike arrived in Melbourne, Australia on a June morning in 1988 — bleary-eyed from the travel, but looking forward to the weeks stretching before him, which seemed ripe with possibility.
“I was excited,” recalls Mike. “I had no specific plan other than just I thought it would be an interesting experience to be in a different country. That was it.”
‘A cinematic moment’
In 1988, Mike was 23 and studying at Harvard Law School. Through the college grapevine, he’d heard about an opportunity for US students to spend a couple of months as an associate at an Australian law firm. Mike applied on the off chance they’d take him on.
“I ended up getting it,” says Mike. “It happened just by accident. I’d never been anywhere remotely close to Australia before.”
While Mike thought the likelihood of finding love in Australia was next to none, he did want to push himself out of his comfort zone during his stint in Melbourne.
“I’m naturally quite introverted,” explains Mike.
Prior to starting law school, he’d lived in San Francisco for a year and “ended up feeling that I had allowed my introversion to get the better of me. I stayed by myself a lot. I wasn’t very social.”
Mike was determined not to repeat his mistakes and to make the most of his time in Melbourne, “to meet a lot of people, to push myself to be much more extroverted than I would naturally be.”
So when, at the end of his first week in the job, Mike heard the company was holding Friday drinks in the boardroom, he pushed aside his tiredness and made sure he was there.
“I even got there early,” Mike recalls.
He remembers thinking: “This is the sort of event I would never normally go to, but I’m going to it because I’m going to meet people.”
At first, the empty room didn’t bode well.
“But gradually the boardroom started filling up,” recalls Mike.
He glanced around, noticing some familiar faces from his first week at work. There were smiles and handshakes and small talk and beer bottles clinking as his colleagues toasted the beginning of the weekend.
Suddenly, Mike found himself standing next to an unfamiliar face. A woman, who looked up at him, smiled and introduced herself as Wati.
It felt, for a minute, like everything else melted away. Like they were the only two people in the room. “A cinematic moment,” as Mike puts it today.
“We shook hands in the middle of the boardroom and looked at each other. It really was a lightning bolt,” he says. “And that’s where it all started.”
Wati’s perspective
Wati Abdurrachman was a recent graduate of Melbourne’s Monash University’s law school who, in June 1988, had just started working as a trainee lawyer.
Wati, then 24, was “ready to buckle down and spend the year working hard,” as she tells CNN Travel today.
That mindset didn’t leave much time for a social life outside of work — and Wati says the “camaraderie amongst all the article clerks was pretty much the extent of my socializing.”
It helped that Wati’s twin sister, Yanti, was also a newly qualified lawyer, and working in the same building. The two sisters were close, sharing an apartment in downtown Melbourne and grateful to have each other to unload about work stress.
One evening in the first week of June, Yanti mentioned, in passing, that a young American guy had temporarily joined her department. Yanti worked in mergers and acquisitions, while Wati was in banking and finance.
“But my sister didn’t mention Michael in any detail, only that he existed,” says Wati.
When the two sisters found themselves at Friday drinks, scanning the room, Yanti pointed Mike out.
“That’s the American,” she said, nudging her sister.
Mike was vaguely aware of this exchange, out of the corner of his eye. And then suddenly Mike and Wati were standing side by side, and then shaking hands.
For Wati, meeting Mike’s eye for the first time was also “like something out of a movie.”
She still remembers what he was wearing: “a yellow tie and a pinstripe suit.” She remembers being struck by his height — there was a good several inches between them.
Most of all, Wati remembers feeling, like Mike, as though they were the only two people in the room.
Yanti picked up on the connection right away, and stepped aside to let the two of them connect.
“Then, later on, when we left, she was like, ‘Oh, so you like him,’” recalls Wati.
