Tiffany and Greg Around the World
After the arduous process of “studying” for our Responsible Service of Alcohol test we passed our course and became certified Australian bartenders!
About 48 hours later came our first outback pub job over at Thursday Island, Australia.
One hitch – where the heck is Thursday Island?
Now we know what you’re thinking –
That question took us a bit by surprise because, well, we hadn’t really put a lot of thought into it…
And we would be dramatically understating things to say that shocked our Australian friends.
Travel is an interesting thing and one of the most interesting things, in fact the very reason Greg states for wanting to travel in the first place, is to discover and challenge one’s own unknown assumptions.
What do we assume is “normal” without even realizing that we’ve made an assumption in the first place because everyone around us makes the same one?
For example, in an urban culture (like the one we were raised in) 10PM is an early bedtime for a young professional. Whereas in an agrarian culture…
(or a sailing one – “sailors midnight” is 9PM)
…10PM is an extremely late bedtime when you are accustomed to waking up at 6AM and 8AM is “sleeping in.”
(and no, we never got used to that… 😉 )
But what does this have to do with Easter?
Well, let us ask you this:
OK so you finally figure out where the heck Uluru/Ayers rock is and you at long last secure some decent wheels to get you there…
…Then you dive for 6 HOURS until you see this
And you’re all –
But you’d be wrong
because once again Australia lied to us
There was one thing the camels, or the train that replaced the camels, couldn’t help us with.
Something that was a serious point of consideration for us when we decided to come out into the pretty much completely uninhabited ‘Red Centre’ of a country that takes a sense of personal pride from the fact that a swift and painful demise is never more than a few feet away even in the most urbanized of areas…
…oh lets not forget the ever present and very real threat of detesticulation…
And that thought was “Ok, so what happens if we’re a few thousand miles from the nearest hospital…
…and we end up getting detesticulated? What do we do!?!
One of our favorite stops in Alice Springs was the Kangaroo rescue center
kinda obvious why…
Where we learned more about the complicated relationship the people of Australia have with their semi-official national ambassador…
Tons of venomous creatures, the barren deserts, dingos that do in fact eat babies, great white sharks, etc, ad nauseum.
That’s part of the international community’s common knowledge right?
Well, we knew about it before we got here at least. And, you’d think, the Aussies would kinda downplay it right? Bad for tourism and whatnot.
The most common car hanger here fits under the theme “stuff that will kill you” and yes, Kangaroos count
Nope, quite the opposite in fact.
For our Thanksgiving festivities in Australia Tiffany made pumpkin pie.
Which, is kinda not a big deal right?
…until you realize that Australians are not familiar with the concept of putting pumpkins in a pie one would eat for dessert. That means no canned pumpkin to fill the pie.
Oh, and while we’re on the topic: They also don’t know what graham crackers are either so, consequently, no premade graham cracker crusts.
(how do you people LIVE!?!)
And just kinda figure out the rest.
Being as Australia isn’t exactly known for its alpine ski industry pretty much no one outside the natives typically makes it to the slopes here.
The upside of this is that working at a ski resort in Australia enabled us to meet one of our main goals for our time down under: we spent 3 months working and living with actual Australians. As opposed to our previous job where we spent the majority of our time around European cowgirls; here for three months we were immersed in a, granted atypical but nonetheless genuine, Aussie cultural experience.
This, inevitability, led to the conversation on Vegemite.
One of several murals over the urinals in Oktoberfest beer tents.
Who do these people think they are, Kiwis!?
We did our very best to have as authentic an experience as we could at Oktoberfest
Continue reading “Lederhosen!”
As we’ve previously stated, friendships lead to a lexicon whose size is directly proportional to the time invested in the relationship. These lexicons lead to key phrases that communicate much more than the simple words involved when we are lucky enough to have been together long enough to be “in the know.”
It’s not just shared experiences like stumbling up the towering mountains of New Zealand that create this shared vocabulary. Another source of this insiders verbiage is simply and consistently hashing out the meaning of words over time. Because while two people may speak the same language, they probably don’t use the same words to describe the same things. Example: what might be “cool” to one person may be “wicked” to another (“phat” could also be substituted.) Though these words may be synonyms, there are variations of meaning that make each more appropriate at different times.
There is a difference between something that is “gross” and something else that is “disgusting.” The choice of using either of these words describes more than just that fact that something is repulsive; there are nuances (for a 12 year old boy “gross” might be a good thing).
As a married couple (or anyone building a joint vocabulary) it is important to nail down these subtle differences in word use to more effectively communicate with each other.
We ran into this particular nugget of nuptial knowledge when Tiffany started calling Greg “cute.” She meant it as a compliment and Greg took it as a bit of an insult. Then Tiffany got confused:
Tiffany – “But you’re good looking. That means you’re cute!”
Greg – “No. Bunnies, baby horses and Mini Coopers are cute. I am not.”
It was at this point that a working definition of the word “cute” had to be established…
