I am the only Australian American I know. I've lived here in the States, in an iconic blue collar neighbourhood in the Pacific North West, for over a year and a half now and I've only heard one other Australian accent, other than that of my two grown sons who have passed through on their way to and from. They tell me that my neighbourhood used to be a small country town, a separate identity all it's own. Nowadays, it's considered a suburb of the City that sits about a half hour drive away, the last outpost of a now seamless amalgam of urban sprawl. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with urban sprawl, I guess, people have to live somewhere and there's more and more of 'em as time goes by. You've probably noticed.
Some countries are completely different than you're used to from the word go...the food's different, the climate, the language, the physical appearance of the people, the fact that you get 500 of their currency to 1 of yours...you expect that when you go there, these are often precisely the reasons why you do go there. Besides being cheap. Moving from Australia to America, however, is like stepping through a portal into a parallel Universe. The big stuff is obvious. There are more pines and firs here and less eucalypts. The weather's the opposite way round. When it's night time here, it's summer there. You get the picture. These are the big things you know and expect before you get here, especially if you are among the select few of the world's population who watch American television. People drive on the other side of the road although, interestingly, that's the easy part - it's remembering which side of the car to walk to with the keys in your hand, that takes a while. The little things.
There is also much that is similar. Thanks to the wonder of cross-cultural exchange, the food is often identical. A Big Mac is the same in San Francisco as it is in Sydney, or Newcastle Upon Tyne for that matter. There is now at least one American googling Newcastle Upon Tyne to see if it's in Australia. Everyone can mimic an American accent, we've all grown up hearing them in songs, on TV and in the movies.
The area where I live now reminds me a lot of Wollongong (which is in Australia...), where I spent much of my adolescence. Stunning natural scenery, lots of trees and water, and a big factory right in the middle of it. The folks here are cut from a similar cloth, primarily denim and flannel. People live in houses, and mow their lawns on Saturday morning. They work at the mill, or drive trucks, and as a general rule they drink beer. Domestic. They're not prejudiced, but they know a lot of people who are. Overall, I like it. The rules are pretty easy to remember, life is reasonably simple and fairly routine, and airs and graces aren't well tolerated. To a large extent, what you see is what you get and 'the way we do things around here' isn't likely to change a lot anytime soon. Fit in or fuck off. I know those rules.
It's the little differences that throw ya. Supermarkets. It's not that American supermarkets have more variety per se, they just have a different kind of variety. They have cupholders in the trolleys. Stuff has different names. We all know that tomatoes are known as tomatoes here, and many know that capsicums are called bell peppers, and that petrol is gas. Although I'm not sure what they call gas here, I haven't needed to buy any yet. I'm thinking I'll just buy an empty cylinder one day, walk into a gas station and say "fill this up". Thongs are underwear, not footwear. Swedes are rutabagas, polony is baloney, firewood is bought by the cord, whipper snippers are weed whackers and they don't put beetroot on their hamburgers. Myabe that's because here, it's called 'sliced pickled beets'. That's a particularly big mouthful, pardon the pun, if you don't want any - "Gimme a burger, love, without the sliced pickled beets" When you order coffee, they ask if you want cream, even though I've only ever been given milk. The carton is labelled 'Milk', but there's no point ordering your coffee without milk, they don't have any, you have to have it without cream. In an event somewhat parallel with transfiguration, if you want the same white stuff that came out of the carton labelled 'Milk' for your cereal, rather than being cream as it was for your coffee, it is now, mercifully, milk again.
In Australia, there's a bunch of different brands of tomato sauce, more brands than you can poke a stick at. And, until very recently, there was only one brand of barbecue sauce, in a brown squeeze bottle with a yellow lid. I can never remember the brand name, but why would you? It's the only show in town. No-one eats it. In America, there's more brands of barbecue sauce than there is barbecues. Barbecue sauce with Guinness, with Jim Beam, with Jack Daniel's (several types), there's half an aisle devoted to the stuff. If I ate barbecue sauce at every meal, it would take until the end of my days to work my way through the entire selection. However, there are but two types of tomato ketchup - Heinz, and the generic Safeway brand, and they get about two square feet of shelf space. No matter, really, as best I can tell I'm the only person in Town that eats it. I get funny looks when I put it on burgers. Here, they have mayonnaise and mustard on their burgers. Yes, both of them. On a hamburger. You ever seen the Arnie movie, Total Recall? Remember that scene where the fat guy in glasses is trying to convince Arnie that 'all this is a dream, and what gives him away is that lone bead of sweat that runs down his temple, and that's when Arnie realises that he's not dreaming and the world really is turned on its ear? That's what it feels like to watch someone put mayonnaise and mustard on a hamburger.
It's not called tomato sauce here, either. Tomato sauce here comes in cans and it's used for cooking. It looks like something that's half-way between tomato paste and tomato soup. I have no idea why, nor what it's for. I have hitherto been unaware of a deficit in my culinary resources that could not be satisfied with either canned tomatoes themselves, or tomato paste. Or, at a pinch, tomato ketchup. That's it. No wonder meat pies aren't popular here. Whoever heard of putting barbecue sauce on a meat pie, I ask you?
On the rare ocassion I've found lamb here, it's been pushing $20 a kilo. In Australia, they give the stuff away. I buy lean beef here for $4.50 a kilo. Sausages in America cost more than lean steak. A parallel Universe, I tell ya. Pork is the other red meat here, and it's as cheap as steak. I'm told you can buy lamb in other parts of the country at lamb prices, but I haven't seen much of that yet. I think it might be an urban myth.
Eating out is a whole new experience. America is the only country that refers to the main courses as an entree. The first time I ate at a restaurant here, I checked out the entrees and thought Jesus, how big are the mains? It's a French word. It means entry. I've eaten at French Restaurants, in France. And an entree is a small meal to prepare one for the main course. They invented the word. Okay, they kinda invented the word. How and why America came to confuse the word 'entree' with a term appropriate for a 3lb lump of dead cow, swimming in mashed potatoes and gravy, is probably lost in the mists of time. The best explanation I've heard so far is that Americans are all about getting to the dessert, and the main meal is simply an entree to dessert. Not bad off the top of his head, but I'm not buying it. Americans get into trouble when they try and mess with other languages.
This is the only country I have ever visited - and this is a long way from my first rodeo - where people have routinely asked me if they have an accent to me. What the...? I was stunned the first time anyone asked me that. Um - so how else would I have picked that you're an American, I'm wondering? People remark on my Australian accent, often. A rare few try and mimic it. Here's a tip. If you are American, do not try and mimic an Australian accent. Or any other accent, for that matter. It is not a part of your individual or your national skill set. I don't care how much you liked Crocodile Dundee or Steve Irwin. Leave it out. You know how when someone foolishly remarks that they can speak a foreign language, there is almost always someone who wants them to "say something in Lithuanian". Again, America is the only country in the world where I've been asked to say something in my Australian accent. I believe I could make money standing on a street corner in the City, with a tin cup in front of me, reading the Yellow Pages. That might be my next travel-fund booster, I think.
Americans are extraordinarily polite, much to the surprise of just about anyone who visits here. When I first passed through, close on 20 years ago now, I expected everyone to be armed and paranoid. I guess they may well have been both, but I loved how polite and helpful everyone was. Ask someone for directions, and they all but put you in their car and drive you there. I've been called 'sir' more times in the past 18 months than I have in the previous 40-odd years living in Australia. Not surprising really, I guess, having spent most of my adult life wondering whether it's possible for an entire nation to be suffering Tourette's Syndrome. It's not that I want people to call me sir, it's just noticeably different than being called a bastard.
It surprises me how much it surprises Americans that I actually like it here, I think it's a good place to live. I'm told that it's not the country it used to be, the price of everything has gone to hell ('gas' hit an unbelievable $1 a litre last year - a little over half the price that the rest of the western world has been paying for years - and the nation almost ground to a halt) and that all their freedoms have been eroded. I tell them they need to get out more. Australians accepted Random Breath Testing without much more than a murmur. I've told my American mates about RBT, and most have recoiled in horror. More than one has made comparisons with Nazi Germany. It is, apparently, everyone's inalienable right (albeit illegal) to drive home tanked, as long as the lights are all working and you're driving within the speed limit and in a straight line. Pretty much everyone I talk to is aghast that the police could just pull your car over at random, even if you haven't been doing anything demonstrably wrong, solely for the purpose of checking to see if you've been drinking. They really do take this personal freedom stuff seriously here.
I love America. It's a strange place. The people look the same. They speak the same language (albeit with no accent), and live similar lives. It's the small differences. More to follow.
Monday, 22 June 2009
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