Virtually Home

The day before yesterday, I was stuck in traffic next to a limousine following a hearse, presumably on their way to a funeral. When I pulled up next to the hearse, I looked at the coffin in the back. It was draped with a West Coast Eagles* flag! As a Sooner fan who grew up hearing the words to our fight song ("...I'm Sooner born and Sooner bred, and when I die I'll be Sooner dead!"), I thought this was both hilarious and relatable. RIP anonymous West Coast fan. A football note for foreign readers: The West Coast Eagles are our local, professional Australian Football League (AFL) team, and they're the team I've chosen to follow. Australian rules football, much more commonly called "footy*", is a full contact sport with 18 players on each team. The game is played on an oval-shaped field (like cricket! Which you probably also did not know), and looks kinda almost like rugby if you squint. The ball is mainly advanced by drop-kicking, and the field is gin...

Mask rules have come back to Perth and apparently the Delta variant of the covid-19 virus has appeared. We've entered a 3-day semi-lockdown, where masks are required indoors and some kinds of businesses are closed. People are hoping restrictions will lift after that, but I think we've been extremely lucky to contain all of our mini-outbreaks. Western Australians are feeling pretty smug about it. But I've seen a lot of maskholes around and I don't think the "success" has been due to complete compliance. It's just a matter of time until covid is loose in Western Australia. Yesterday, the mask restrictions went into place at noon. We had already bought tickets to see The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It at 2:40 in the Palace Raine Square Cinema downtown. The theatre required masks and already had social distancing built into their seating assignments, so we opted to go. I saw several people in the bus and downtown not wearing a mask. It's plausible they...

I quite enjoy noting little linguistic differences among English dialects, and being in Australia has provided me with a lot of opportunities.  Australians use a different preposition with "different" than we do: things are "different to" other things, rather than "different from" other things. It's, well, different.

 We've been in Australia 2.5 years now, and to my surprise, it feels as much like home as Minnesota ever did. I never expected to get used to cockatoos sweeping overhead -- last week, I almost collided headfirst with an endangered Carnaby's cockatoo that I startled while biking to work -- or the pink-and-gray galahs that graze in the grass like weird little cows, or driving on the left side of the road, or pints of beer that cost $14. Things have just slowly become normal.  Every once in a while, though, a thing happens and suddenly everything is weird again. The rainy season has begun. Recently, I was walking through a car park (see? just look at my vocabulary changing) and it began to rain. You know that feeling, when it begins to rain, and there is a particular smell that happens, as fungi wake up and various plants become more pungent? Well, everything began to smell aggressively of eucalyptus. My whole frame of reference shifted. I suddenly was acutely aware of how very, ...

As of Sunday night, we're on full covid-19 lockdown again for the first time since March. Today is the second full day. No one is supposed to go out except for essential groceries. People are allowed to go to work only if they can't do their jobs from home. Restaurants and cafés are allowed to operate only in a takeout capacity. For the first time in Perth, mask-wearing is mandated anytime you leave the house. This is all in addition to the closed borders and contact tracing whenever we go anywhere, both of which have been in place for months.  We first heard about the lockdown on Sunday at our local grocery store -- that's where I took the video above. We'd had a relaxing morning at the beach and went to our neighborhood grocery for our weekly shop. And it was a madhouse . There were so many people there you could barely move. The shelves were growing bare before our eyes. The lines to check out snaked all around the store and through the aisles, such that when we fina...

Australians are fond of dunking on Americans for not using the metric system, but the conversion to metric happened in 1970 and obviously hasn't been complete. Speech here is filled with Imperial units -- inches, gallons, miles -- even among younger people who were born after the adoption of the metric system. People routinely give their heights in feet and inches and the weights of their new infants in pounds and ounces. Temperature is the only thing I would say is truly always measured in the metric system. I'm gaining an intuitive grasp of the temperature in Celsius degrees, and getting better at expressing speeds and distances using kilometers. But I miss having a unit to describe a length of about a foot. It seems like a good length to have shorthand for. My biggest problem with metric, though, is that its biggest claim to usefulness is the easy conversion among units. It turns out this is not all that easy for people practicing it. Publications are riddled with conversio...

I feel comfortable saying Australia is obsessed with America. Our news is all over their tv stations, our television shows are streaming in their living rooms, and iconography about America is everywhere. Every trip to the beach turns up a swimsuit or towel bedecked with the American flag. Maybe one of the most conspicuous things is that about one in three people seem to own a Los Angeles Dodgers hat, and maybe one in five seem to own a New York Yankees hat. I am increasingly sure those two teams are almost entirely funded by sales of their merch in Australia.  This is particularly mysterious because baseball is (emphatically) not a thing  in Australia. Cricket is the thing played in back yards, at parks, and on beaches. It's the thing people listen to on the radio and watch on tv in the bars. The baseball caps are popular because the interlocking LA is taken to just mean, well, Los Angeles, California -- and the interlocking NY on the Yankees hat has come to symbolize New Yor...