That Brand New Tracy Chapman Song...From 1988!
Originally Posted Feb 7, 2016
In many ways, we’ve found Australia to be extremely accessible and welcoming, but there have certainly been a few challenges finding/getting what we need, as well as some eye-opening cultural moments. There are several very interesting differences that we are still adjusting to:
Let’s start with music. I am baffled by two things. 1. The glacial pace by which new music makes its way here from the US (and timing of its popularity) and 2. Just about everything about locally produced music. US films open here at the same time they open in the US. We recently saw the new James Bond movie and hope to catch Mockingjay while it is still in theaters. Yet, most of the music on the radio is from 10+ years ago and is treated as “new.” Today I heard a bit of Prince while driving (not complaining about that!) The exception seems to be only if a popular artist has recently toured here, as is the case with Taylor Swift, whose new songs are played from time to time. What the radio stations here seem to get extremely pumped about, to the point where a song is played nonstop, is a re-make. This is currently the case with Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” This is a pretty somber but catchy tune from 1988. Recently someone took this song, added a stronger bass and sped up the pace, and boom! It has got to be he most popular, most played song here! I hear it on the radio, at restaurants, and at the gym – people are all over this remake that sounds nearly identical to the original. They even played it while we “summited a hill and went into a sprint” at cycling class.
As for the locally produced music? Well, it’s not great, but everyone seems to know it well. My favorite was last month when we had one of those 105+ degree days, the radio DJ says, “On this stifling hot day, there’s really only one artist we want to hear and you know who I mean! Here’s… ICE BOX!” The ice box tune left a lot to be desired. There’s a reason the best thing to listen to is Tracy Chapman’s song from 1988 with an expedited beat! I think I’ll be using Pandora a good bit while we live here.
Moving on to athletics: I have previously alluded to the impressive athletes we’ve come in contact with. Couple this dedication to sports and training with a culture much less concerned about lawsuits (no joke – we took a flying trapeze lesson 2 weeks ago and didn’t even sign a waiver!) and things like cycling class start to feel quite different. I’ve taken a lot of cycling classes around the US and while they are quite diverse and instructor-dependent, some common these are:
- “This is YOUR workout – you decide how hard to push it.”
- “Drink plenty of water the entire class!”
- “If you don’t feel well, raise your hand immediately.”
So far, my favorite quotes from the Australian instructors at my gym have been:
- “Don’t THINK about it, Just do it!”
- “Just hurry up and quickly have a LITTLE BIT of water!”
- “The best way not to throw up is to keep pedaling!”
Needless to say, I’m getting in pretty good shape, but am probably dehydrated frequently. Oh, and a number of you have asked some follow up questions on my open water swim blog post from a few weeks ago. I have yet to join another
Saturday swim (I’ve been sure to have plans for my Saturdays recently…) but I am on the group text so I get updates like “hi all, meet at the pier at
6:45am tomorrow to do a 20K swim.” 20K – OH MY GOD! That is over 12 miles! The Ironman swim is only 2.4 miles and that took me an hour and 15 minutes. Granted, these guys are faster, but they must be out there swimming for 4-6 hours! I remain intrigued, but will not be joining on the days they swim for 4+ hours.
Groceries: One of the biggest cultural shocks that you can experience in any foreign country is grocery shopping. The first true full-on grocery trip here took me 2 hours. By the end of it, Isla was losing it, I was losing it, and as I finally breathed a sign of relief loading up the “boot” of the car, I walked up to get in the driver’s seat only to find I had just sat in the passenger’s seat on the left. “Ugh, I made it through all of that and now I have to drive on the other side!” (I should mention this also was my first day driving here). I’d spent $180 Australian dollars, unpacked the groceries at home, and the fridge and pantry still looked empty. That was a rough morning all around. Fast forward a few weeks, and our grocery trips have become much more productive and I only mess up and drive on the wrong side of the road about once a week (I think this is excellent progress, but Nate does not quite see it this way.)
Grocery stores are certainly different though! To start, the range in prices on items is massive as anything grown here is cheap and if not, it’s massively expensive due to importation costs. Then, lots of items have different names. I must have searched 30 minutes for breadcrumbs (they are not in the baking isle) and I eventually learned they are called “krummies” and they are near the dried fruits. Who knew? The most entertaining part of the store to me, aside from that “Liquor Land” is in every grocery store of course, is the meat section. There is lots of beef and pork, an entire kangaroo meat section, yet almost no chicken and turkey. Good thing the beef is really tasty! They must not have their grocery operations down to quite the science that a place like Wegmans in the US does though because there is always a “quick sale” on lots of nearly expired packages of meat, essentially selling packages for half price or less. I find this to be slightly disturbing, but mostly economical so I cook this “dangerously close to expired” meat for many of our dinners. No illness to report yet, so it seems like a sound strategy! I must admit that the first time I bought quick sale meat, I ran in the door and told Nate I had just bought this awesome chicken on a huge sale that didn’t even expire until
February 1st! He took a look and muttered, “oh jeez, Ashley.” Yup, forgot about those damn backward dates again. The chicken expired the day before, on
January 2. I am proud to say I’ve been error free since that incident on
January 3.
Conversions: We have done a reasonably good job, I think, adjusting to the weather and oven being in Celsius, and the transition to kilometers is pretty easy, but the one that I just can’t wrap my head around is weight. Kilograms are tricky. I went to Isla’s 8 month nurse visit here in January and she weighed just under 8000 grams. I stared at the nurse as she was moved on to talking about sunscreen, and I had to ask her to please pause for a minute while I thought about how many pounds my child weighed. I thought and thought (I’m not sure what about as I don’t even know what the conversion rate is) but finally I apologized, got out my phone and used google conversions. 17.5 pounds…cool…now what about sunscreen? This pound-kilogram conversion also makes he deli counter a challenge. While a pound of meat makes sense for us for the week, a kilogram is way too much meat! After a couple errors, I decided I would just always order deli meat in dollars (i.e. – I order $8 worth of meat) and order my cheese in the number of slices I want. They find my dollar order amusing, but look like they want to smack me when I request 11 slices of cheese. I usually try to make Isla do something cute like wave to them and clap her hands so I don’t seem like such a pain in the ass.
Aside from all these truly minor, mostly amusing differences we are adjusting to, there are some very interesting cultural differences that I don’t think we would have fully picked up on or even understood without spending a lot of time here. Australia is a capitalist society, but one that believes strongly in people being on equal ground and that everyone gets a “fair shake.” This plays out in a few different ways. It actually makes the hierarchical structure at Nate’s job feel quite different as the relationship between supervisors and direct reports is much more informal (in fact, I highly doubt they even use the terms, “supervisor” or “direct reports!”) The two examples I’ve witnessed directly are in cabs and at sporting events. In cabs here, it is expected that a passenger sits in the front seat and chats with the driver as opposed to sitting in the back with a chauffeur.
Even without a lot of money in this country, you can attend some really good events! In watching the Super Bowl highlights so far, I realized that in order to attend this sporting event in the US, you really have to be quite well off financially. Yet, you can buy a grounds pass to the Australian Open here and get to see some of the top tennis matches (that is, if you choose to forego the beer garden). We bought grounds passes for the middle
Saturday of the tournament for only about $30 and got great seats in the arena to watch John Isner play Felicio Lopez! I kept thinking that this would have costed us $300 a ticket anywhere else!
I asked Nate what other things feel drastically different here that I should include in this blog post, and he wouldn’t stop going on and on about Tim Tams! In short, Tim Tams are a wonderfully delicious chocolate-bar like dessert with a great balance of fudginess and crunchiness. We’ll bring some home with us in June, and all visitors here will certainly be treated to them!
