Australia 8

Emory's teacher asked him to focus, in the daily journal he's keeping as his homework, on what is most different. I thought that merited a post here, as well.

In truth, the most striking thing, difference-wise, is the lack of difference. Here we are on the opposite side of the globe, hanging out in a culturally western, English speaking country. That's weird. Though I suppose the US and Canada are a good distance from the seat of the English language, too. We're all operating in a cultural world fundamentally shaped by European colonialism.

Anyway, so the different stuff. One of the most striking differences is the driving on the left, which I've mentioned a couple of times. I'm not doing it at all. David is doing all the driving. I feel wimpy about this, but I'm a nervous, uncomfortable driver in unfamiliar territory even without the major shift. I'm certain I'd be, at best, miserable and at worst, incredibly dangerous. The thing that gets him (and even more would get me) are the knee-jerk reactions. It's not that hard to drive on the opposite side and pay close attention and remember to turn into the correct lane and so on, what's really hard is to keep the difference in mind when you're reacting quickly to something surprising. We had some mini crisis in the car on the way over here (trunk open or some such thing) and David pulled across an empty lane of traffic to pull over on the right hand side because he was distracted. It was no big deal because there was no traffic, but it's exactly that kind of thing that freaks me out.

The next big, daily difference is metric weights and measures. This is actually very neat and I'm enjoying trying to somewhat internalize the metric units. It's so much nicer and more orderly. The small c conservatism of the US in hanging onto the English system (while even the English now use primarily the metric system) is a pet peeve of mine. Measuring veggies in grams is easy, trying to convert the temperature to C is harder.

Another big difference is the topsy-turvy seasons and north/south temperature gradations. We're here in late February and it's effectively late August. When you head south in Australia, the weather generally gets cooler and more temperate.

The final difference I want to note is the money. This would seem to be no big deal. The Australian dollar is pretty close in value to the US dollar, they use cents, etc. The reality is that I have a hard time remembering which coin is which and look like a big goob as I'm pawing around trying for correct change. Another thing they have that I wish the US had are one and two dollar coins in common use and NO DAMN PENNIES!