Culture Shock

On our boring orientation day, the day that we got our ID cards and listened to lectures on surf safety, and the day that our British dorm-mate Stuart memorably and loudly exclaimed "God Save The Queen!" when the presenter asked for the name of the Australian national anthem, they warned us international students about the trials and tribulations of culture shock.  Now, for the students in the auditorium from places such as China, India, France, Russia, Brazil, etc., I imagine this discussion was quite relevant.  I'm sure that adding the language barrier across different cultural customs makes a huge difference in making Australia feel very foreign.  However, the majority of the auditorium was filled with students from either America or Great Britain - and for us, when there's nobody around to bid us "g'day," it's easy to forget that Australia is not the our home country (until either a parrot flies by or you look up at the stars and can't find the Big Dipper).  However, there are certainly differences that I've found quite interesting.

On the day we arrived, we landed at the Sydney airport just before dawn.  Before we had even touched down - before we had been on the ground in this new country - Bianca looked out the window and pointed out great glowing Golden Arches.  Not even on the ground, and the first thing we see in Australia is a McDonald's.  Welcome to the wild outback down under.  Forgive the generalizations in this post, because that's mainly what it will be made of - but a lot of Australians seem to love McDonald's.  However, you're more likely to hear it referred to as "Macca's" than by its full name.  Burger King here is called Hungry Jack's.  Milky Way bars are Mars Bars (except they're a bit different and exquisitely wonderful).  Snicker's and Reese's don't exist, but Cadbury chocolate of all kinds abounds, and Tim Tams are pretty much the best cookie ever invented (read: chocolate, cookie, chocolate, cookie, chocolate, rectangular, and perfect with hot cocoa). 

Sydney - helpful street painters!

I would make the case that Australia's culture is more British than American, but obviously has a heavy American influence.  That really makes sense - Australia was colonized by the British (more specifically, by British criminal camps, a fact that many Australian students I've talked to are quite proud of).  For one thing, the Australians and the British agree on what side of the road they should drive on.  They also agree that there should be a roundabout at pretty much every intersection.  Now, I've spent enough time in New England to have a very solid understanding of roundabouts.  But when they start using them in the wrong direction, it just gets confusing.  Fortunately I don't have to drive, but on my bicycle I've had to be very conscious of it.  At this point, though, it's second nature.  A bunch of us watched a movie the other day, and when Batman got in his fancy car and squashed all of the innocent vehicles on the highway, we were surprised to see all of the people driving on the right side of the road, which is to us truly the wrong side by now. 

Signage can be a little different.  Instead of "Do Not Enter" signs on highway off-ramps, they say "WRONG WAY - GO BACK."  Exit signs at train stations say "Way Out."  Here are a couple of signs that I just can't figure out.  The zebra sign is from downtown Sydney.  The stackhats sign seems to refer to bike helmets - and indeed, bike helmets are compulsory for all riders in Australia - but Australians call them helmets.  Nor have I heard anybody say "whilst." 







Breakfasts here are very British - with a strong tendency towards runny yolks, which I don't approve of.  But they also like to put baked beans and spaghetti on toast for breakfast (not together).  Do the British do that?  We also often have crumpets.  But to make it Australian, there is abundant vegemite available, as well.  I still haven't gotten up the nerve to try it.  The American influence is mostly seen, I think, in the movies and music.  

There are lots of other little differences.  For instance, comforters are called doonas,  pieces of candy are called lollies, flashlights are torches (definitely British), and flip-flops are always called thongs.  I'm sure the list could continue, but I can't think of others right now!

Scuba Diving

I have the good great fortune this semester of not having classes on Fridays.  So what does one do on a casual Friday in Wollongong, during the semester, in the earliest hintings of spring?  One goes scuba diving, of course!

The last time I had been diving was just over five years ago.  With an activity such as scuba diving, which puts a person beyond the realm of life-supporting media such as free air, held down by about sixty pounds of equipment, breathing through a tube, and trespassing on the homelands of all those notorious Australian critters that either want to poison you, eat you, or suck your blood, it really seemed best to do things right and find a way to take a refresher course.  Lauren, the other Colgate geology major on the trip, is also certified and also needed a refresher course.  So we called up a scuba place about half an hour away by train, and they fit us right in on a Friday. 

Our instructor was Mick, a true ole' salt who can throw around tanks and divers with hardly any effort, hilarious, careful, and bent on helping us have a good time.  One other girl came for the course.  Lauren and I were dive buddies, and Mick paired up with the other girl (I can't for the life of me remember her name). 

We dove at a place called the gutter, which is a big weathered gorge into basalt (incidentally, the same basalt flow that heated up the pore waters and made flow features in the sandstone I'm working on).  The water is rather chilly (winter just ended, after all, such as it were), so we wore full wetsuits and oversuits (a second wetsuit layer) with a hood to keep us warm, which evidently had the dual purpose of strangling us and covering up so much of the face that the most recognizable characteristic of an individual is the color of the snorkel.  We had to walk over the basalt for a little ways, wearing all our gear, before we could do a giant-stride entry into the water.  We descended to about three meters, began swimming, and the other girl promptly got lost (we were still in the gutter, nobody knows how she did it).  So Mick made very clear motions that Lauren and I were to sit on the bottom, hold onto a rock, and hold hands, which we did for about ten minutes while he went to find her and bring her back.  It was a nice bonding moment for us, I suppose, and there were for sure plenty of fish around to amuse us.

Then we swam out a ways.  It's kind of a rocky reef area, with lots of seaweed and sea urchins, tons of fish, and some stingrays around.  So many divers dive in the area that the fish were quite unafraid, and one in particular, a large blue groper (yes, that's what the fish is called) hung around a lot.  Mick pulled little slug-like creatures (it's quite late at the moment, which is my excuse for not remembering the names of the slug things, either) off of the rocks and put them in our hands, and the groper came and ate them.  We could feel his teeth, but he didn't really bite us.  We also saw some small stingrays, which were great.  And Mick caught a little cuttlefish - they're very squid-like and squishy - and let us touch it before it swam away and inked at us about four times.

This past Sunday we went back to the dive shop to do two dives, morning and afternoon.  Lauren and I went with Claire (another Colgate girl who lives at Campus East), Bianca, Richard, and Richard's roommate Brett.  The morning dive was just a standard dive, and there were divers EVERYWHERE.  They kind of broke us up into groups to stay with a certain instructor, and the six of us ended up in our own group with Mick.  We did the same sort of dive, but got a bit further than the last time because we didn't have to sit on the bottom and hold hands for ten minutes.  On the way out, Mick stopped and motioned us toward a piece of seaweed.  I stared at it for a long time, wondering why he would show us this particular piece.  Then I realized that one of the leaves was actually a little tiny pipe seahorse, maybe an inch and a half or two inches long, and very skinny.  We also saw a large cuttlefish, more stingrays, and fed the groper.  This time he got my finger all the way in his mouth, but again didn't bite me.

The afternoon dive ended up being just the six of us with three instructors, and was aptly described by the instructors as "herding cats."  Aptly, that is, if cats were to attempt to use jet packs, with a slow learning curve and only basic success.  They decided to give us cats each a scooter - an underwater personal diver propulsion device.  Ours looked like the one to the left.  You sit on the black part like riding a horse, and the throttle is the red button you can see on the handle.  These things are worth about five and a half grand apiece, and are heavy enough that I just barely got mine over the basalt.  Once we had carried them carefully down and jumped into the water, Mick carelessly launched the scooters one by one from the rock platform into the ocean where we were floating.  We then hooked them on to our gear so they wouldn't float off, and spent some time at the surface playing with them without really mounting.

Then we descended, and they instructed us to get on.  I mounted my scooter, managed to find the throttle eventually, turned it on,  and was suddenly several feet closer to the surface than I'd expected to be.  There was then a panicked moment during which I frantically tried to lean my scooter toward the bottom and to find the darn throttle which had somehow seemed to disappear again.  Fortunately nobody noticed my antics (except perhaps the instructors) because everyone was having equal trouble breaking their own steed, going in unplanned directions, running into rocks and each other, and generally admirably imitating confused cats with jet packs. 

Fortunately, after a few minutes we were able to get them under control (mostly), and head off in the correct direction.  You just lean forward in a normal swimming position and let them push you forwards - you don't even have to hold on, though I often felt like I wanted to hold onto something.  They really move!  Divers who know what they're doing cover five or six kilometers on a scooter dive.  To turn you just lean in one direction or the other, and keep an eye on the elusive throttle to change speeds or stop.  Any time we stopped or started things got really claustrophobic, with people flailing limbs and scooters, and I definitely got thoroughly punched in the face once - mask pushed off and everything - which Mick happened to witness and found highly amusing.  It was exceedingly hard to tell each other apart underwater, so I can't identify the culprit, but I can be sure that I did something similar to someone else at one point or another during the dive.  Once we were going, though, it was really quite fun and relaxing!

We saw more rays and cuttlefish (I got to actually hold one! cuddled the cuttlefish?), as well as our groper friend, on this dive.  Mick also picked up a very large sea urchin and put it on each of our hands.  It has lots of little nubby feet on the bottom that actually walk!  But the best part by far was the weedy sea dragon.  He looked a lot like the one on the right (not my picture, of course).  He was maybe six or eight inches long  Mick picked him up carefully and I got to touch him - they're very rough and leathery, just skin and bones!

We're headed up the the Great Barrier Reef for spring break, so it's great to have a chance to remember how to dive before then.  And it was great fun all-around!

Their birds are not like our birds

Kookaburra on campus

When I walk to school, I get mercilessly laughed at.  It's really quite a sad state of affairs.  It could be because people find it weird when I sit down in the middle of the path to watch lorikeets.  Or it could just be the kookaburras.  Because they seriously do laugh.  I saw my first kookaburra on campus the other day, and then we got to see some more at Symbio.  They can be quite large, and have incredibly strong beaks that they use to grab inanimate food and smash it on the ground until it's dead for a second time, kind of the way that cats try to kill cooked steaks. 

Cockatoo with character

I love Australia's parrot-like birds (my own biological classification), including parrots, lorikeets, and cockatoos, and hopefully others that I just haven't seen yet.  They have character.  It's easy to tell that they're smart, curious, and mischievous.  The sulphur-crested cockatoos in the botanical gardens liked to chew on things, I'm convinced, for their own personal amusement.  I also have a hunch that the ones at Symbio learned to say hello to visitors in order to convince people to make fools of themselves by trying to talk to birds (if that was their aim, they certainly succeeded.  I believe a fantastic video of Richard trying to coax them to talk exists somewhere).  We see cockatoos (and hear them!) constantly around Wollongong.  They won't come nearly as close to people, but their mannerisms have so much personality that they're still a lot of fun to watch. 

One of my biggest distractions on campus are the lorikeets.  These small birds are incredibly colorful, incredibly loud, and incredibly common.  They love the trees just outside of the building where I work.  They also, perhaps unfortunately, frequent the tree right outside the library window where I like to sit and work.  Do you know how hard it is to concentrate when there are lorikeets outside the window??  I have indeed sat down directly in the middle of the path in the Wollongong Botanical Gardens to watch them in the tree above me, and I'm sure I'll do it again.  Too bad I didn't have a camera that day - the picture to the right is from Symbio (some of the lorikeets that climbed on my arm).

Then there are the rosellas.  I've seen two species - the crimson rosella and the eastern rosella.  I first saw the crimson rosella as a bright flash of blue wings and red bodies as two of them swept past me on campus.  I got strange looks for trying to follow them and get a better view.  The picture is again from Symbio.  I saw a pair of eastern rosellas while I was walking home from uni.  They are beautiful, but left before I could take a picture, so you might want to look them up on Google images or Wikipedia. 

Campus ponds are also full of birds of unusual characters.  We have an abundance of very fat ducks that hiss and sway their heads back and forth when you get close, and then follow you so you can pet them some more.  I enjoy petting the ducks.  We also have swamp hens everywhere.  They are shallow-water waders, and when they walk around the Uni Bar they seem rather like turkeys.

White ibis

Galahs on campus

City birds can't even be regular around here.  Many of the parrot-type birds do frequent the cities.  But when we were in Sydney, one of the most common birds we saw was the white ibis, wandering around many areas eating plants.  And the pigeons refuse to be normal pigeons - they have to go one-up and grow a pointy bit of feathers on top of their heads.  Hence they are called crested pigeons.  I spent a while confused about some pigeons I saw that had bright pink bellies.  Then one put up its white crest and I figured out that they are a type of cockatoo called a galah (emphasis on second syllable).  They mate for life and are usually seen with their partners. 

Today we were playing soccer near campus and had a bunch of seagulls on the field while a flock of cattle egrets flew low over us.  There are cattle egrets everywhere, often appearing (bizarrely enough) in amongst cattle.  I've also seen a few more exotic birds.  The other day I spotted a black swan, which was really exciting.  I haven't seen too many raptors, but I did get to see an Australian kestrel, and yesterday we got a distant but clear view of a white-bellied sea eagle.

Those are the birds I think of right now... plus pelicans, several types of cormorants, masked lapwings (which look rather like stilts but like to wander around cities), and other common small birds such as mynas, magpies, and crows (their crows don't sound ANYTHING like ours.  They sound like crying babies most of the time).  Also the aptly-named willie wagtails, who like to hop around all day and wag their tails. 

I figured there are enough bird watchers reading this blog that the subject matter would be of interest!