6 posts tagged “australia”

It's been a while since my last entry; I haven't really been in a writing mood, but I thought I'd post something as a sign of my continued existence. Some things that have been happening:

Australia
I went home for a couple of weeks. It was great as usual. Even though so much has changed since I moved away, it takes about 40 seconds for me to become completely immersed in life at home again. Except for the light switches being the other way around and driving on the left and things like that, which took a little longer. Funny how the superficial differences take longer to get used to than big things like being with family again.

I squeezed in the usual catchups with friends, and as usual most of them felt too short for either party to do any more than skim the surface of what's rolling arouund each other's heads these days. I guess that's part of life; drifting away from people to such an extent that although you trust each other to talk about things, you have so little time with each other, and so rarely, that to dive headfirst into such topics feels like plunging into cold water and so you don't do it.

My parents organised a family trip to South Australia for four days, which was amazing. The highlight was definitely Kangaroo Island, which is like a huge wild menagerie of all different sorts of animals. Growing up in Australia I stopped seeing the novelty of kangaroos or koalas a long time ago, but seeing them just casually doing their thing in the wild really brought back some excitement to the tired stereotypes in my head. It also helps that Kangaroo Island is stupendously beautiful, with wild jagged coastal cliffs, pristine beaches, iconic mallee scrub, green meadows, and random sand dunes in the middle of nowhere. The other places we visited on the trip were the Barossa Valley for some wine tasting, and a tiny bit of Adelaide (unfortunately, we didn't get to walk around and explore very much).

Work
Work has been busy, have been staying past 7 most nights (although the hours that Jon puts in make me feel lazy). Some interesting news from this week is that I will have someone reporting directly to me from next week onwards. It'll be a challenge juggling that with my own work, but I guess it's a good opportunity to figure out whether I like the whole management track or not.

Oot and aboot
There are several travel plans in the works: going to New York for a few days next week, visiting Sam in Victoria (that's Victoria, British Columbia) a week or two after that, and Thanksgiving in Whistler. By all accounts the snow is bucketing down in the mountains, so it's likely we will have some fully sick pow, bro.

Music
Have been to some decent shows recently: Fujiya and Miyagi last week (pretty good), Great Lake Swimmers (even better), Patrick Wolf (outstanding). I also brought back the 2 latest Cat Empire albums from Australia, Cities (more of an experimental album) and So Many Nights (a mainstream release). The former is outstanding and hard to stop listening to on repeat; the latter was pretty disappointing, unfortunately. New album means touring though, so hopefully they will make it to Sea'le.

Someone on the Aussies' mailing list at Microsoft sent an email today announcing that the first Baker's Delight (rebranded as Cobs Bakery in North America) in the US is now open in Bellevue, and that for the whole of today, they are giving out free bread. I got excited, I rang up Al, he got excited too, and we headed straight over to get our freebie.

Now, I love a good pull-apart as much as the next person, but if I were still living in Sydney, I don't know if I would be dropping everything and running out the door all in the name of a newly opened Baker's Delight store. I don't think I went there more than once every couple of months when I lived at home.

I've noticed similar behaviour with my Canuck friends. Anytime a trip to Vancouver is mentioned, the first question is "Oh, did you go to Tim Horton's*? Did you bring back timbits?! Mmmm... I can just smell that coffee now!" And then everyone nods thoughtfully and says how much they wish Tim Horton's would expand into the US. Now, I know from direct experience that the coffee at TH's is totally shite, and I am pretty sure that, if subjected to a double blind test, any Canadian would agree with me. But that's my point. You're not tasting the coffee or the cheesymite scroll. You're tasting the nostalgia.

I realise that these are fairly superficial examples, but I don't think there's anything quite like moving away from your homeland to make you view it more positively. I think in a new place, something in you instinctively yearns for the familiar. And being around different people makes you realise the ways in which your own culture is unique and special. It's helped me to understand why my parents and their friends hold so fiercely onto their culture 20+ years after moving to Australia. I admire the fact that despite bringing me up on the other side of the world, they were able to instill in me the same pride and respect for my Indian heritage, and in turn accept and accommodate my more Westernised world view. As a result I really have been able to enjoy the best of both worlds, and my life has been so much richer for it.

*Canada's answer to Starbucks

I recently discovered that the much-loved Fosters ad that aired incessantly during the 2000 Olympics - to refresh your memory -

- is actually almost directly lifted from this ad for Molson beer in Canada -

As appealing as both ads undeniably are... don't they just reveal the huge chips we have on our respective shoulders? As has been pointed out by several people, it's a little sad that ads that are supposed to define Australia and Canada's unique identities spend half the time insisting that we're nothing like the United States. I still love the sweet polite Canadian guy in the ad though, although I am succumbing to another Canuck stereotype by admitting this...