Little Things
For the most part, living in Australia is very culturally comfortable for an American. I'm not sure how to explain the sort of general unease I felt living for a year in France, where every outing for a long time felt like a challenge. Will I know the words for all the ingredients on the restaurant's menu? Will a stranger ask me for something I won't understand? Will I end up on the wrong bus? Am I going to hit my head on the chandelier in my landlady's house again? What is the difference between these three unfamiliar dairy products?
Almost none of that is a problem for us here because we speak English and likely because Australia and the USA share descent from a recent common ancestor. Australia is also a young country spun off from Britain and built and bolstered by immigrants.
But there are some things. The other day I said "chalk talk", referring to an academic exercise in which someone gives a lecture without prepared slides, and people heard "choc talk" and legitimately thought I was talking about chocolate, which created confusion. Tons of words are abbreviated here, like "chocolate", and the words "choc" and "chalk" have pretty different vowel sounds in Australian English but not in mine.
Some words have meanings that just sidestep what I expect. A burger is any hot sandwich served on a round bun. A fried chicken sandwich, a pulled pork sandwich, a black bean patty, a falafel sandwich, or a true beef burger are all just called "burgers" here. A "sandwich" on the other hand can only be a sandwich served cold on square-cut bread, my friends told me. If it's toasted, you have to call it a toastie.
There are some obvious visual cues. A big one is that they drive on the left-hand side of the road here. But also, most of the cars -- a disproportionate number -- are painted white. I'm not really sure what causes this minor cultural difference. White cars fare better than other colors in the hot Australian sun? White cars are more often imported by rental companies, which flood the market with used ones? It truly does not matter, but I wonder about it.
Lots of the little cultural things that feel weird to me about Australia are about food availability. I think in general the available produce at our grocery store has less variety than I experienced at an American grocery store (though there is camel milk for sale in the dairy aisle, which we will try when we convince ourselves that $20 per liter is an acceptable price for a new dairy experience), and that kind of bums me out -- there is only one kind of large tomato and one kind of small tomato. There are only three kinds of apples. There are only two colors of onions. There is only one kind of chili pepper.
But all the cuts of meat are also called different things, and the butchering seems to be done differently. We experienced major disappointment when we bought pork ribs a few times and discovered they had almost no meat on them. I couldn't figure out what the deal was -- were they butchering really skinny pigs? It turns out they just remove most of the muscle and sell it in other ways, leaving ribs that are basically fit only for soup bones.
We finally figured this out and after some research on the internet, discovered a lot of foreigners had experienced the same problem. The words we would use to describe ribs appropriately cut (like "baby back ribs") aren't widely used here. We read a recommendation for a Viet Namese style butcher near a restaurant we like, and decided to go on a quest for real ribs. There they were, right in the case next to the skinny, Aussie style ribs. They were labeled "meaty" ribs, appropriately enough.
We baked them in the oven with some imported American barbecue sauce -- Sweet Baby Ray's. It's the little things that make me feel at home.
Almost none of that is a problem for us here because we speak English and likely because Australia and the USA share descent from a recent common ancestor. Australia is also a young country spun off from Britain and built and bolstered by immigrants.
But there are some things. The other day I said "chalk talk", referring to an academic exercise in which someone gives a lecture without prepared slides, and people heard "choc talk" and legitimately thought I was talking about chocolate, which created confusion. Tons of words are abbreviated here, like "chocolate", and the words "choc" and "chalk" have pretty different vowel sounds in Australian English but not in mine.
Some words have meanings that just sidestep what I expect. A burger is any hot sandwich served on a round bun. A fried chicken sandwich, a pulled pork sandwich, a black bean patty, a falafel sandwich, or a true beef burger are all just called "burgers" here. A "sandwich" on the other hand can only be a sandwich served cold on square-cut bread, my friends told me. If it's toasted, you have to call it a toastie.
There are some obvious visual cues. A big one is that they drive on the left-hand side of the road here. But also, most of the cars -- a disproportionate number -- are painted white. I'm not really sure what causes this minor cultural difference. White cars fare better than other colors in the hot Australian sun? White cars are more often imported by rental companies, which flood the market with used ones? It truly does not matter, but I wonder about it.
Lots of the little cultural things that feel weird to me about Australia are about food availability. I think in general the available produce at our grocery store has less variety than I experienced at an American grocery store (though there is camel milk for sale in the dairy aisle, which we will try when we convince ourselves that $20 per liter is an acceptable price for a new dairy experience), and that kind of bums me out -- there is only one kind of large tomato and one kind of small tomato. There are only three kinds of apples. There are only two colors of onions. There is only one kind of chili pepper.
But all the cuts of meat are also called different things, and the butchering seems to be done differently. We experienced major disappointment when we bought pork ribs a few times and discovered they had almost no meat on them. I couldn't figure out what the deal was -- were they butchering really skinny pigs? It turns out they just remove most of the muscle and sell it in other ways, leaving ribs that are basically fit only for soup bones.
We finally figured this out and after some research on the internet, discovered a lot of foreigners had experienced the same problem. The words we would use to describe ribs appropriately cut (like "baby back ribs") aren't widely used here. We read a recommendation for a Viet Namese style butcher near a restaurant we like, and decided to go on a quest for real ribs. There they were, right in the case next to the skinny, Aussie style ribs. They were labeled "meaty" ribs, appropriately enough.
We baked them in the oven with some imported American barbecue sauce -- Sweet Baby Ray's. It's the little things that make me feel at home.
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