2 Texans Down Under

After nearly three years here in Australia, I am less often pulled up short by evidently English words and phrases that I don’t understand.

Not so long ago, I wouldn’t have known what to think if I’d heard an Aussie say she was planning to buy some avos in the arvo.  Now I immediately cotton onto her meaning, which is that she’s going to purchase avacados in the afternoon.

“Cotton onto,” by the way, is Texan for grasp or understand the meaning of something.  Aussies often abbreviate words.  I guess we Texans go for colorful, both in word choice and accent.

It’s not just us, though.  Years ago, a friend of mine with a foot-thick Alabama accent caused some New Englanders to laugh loudly when he commented, after meeting someone from Louisiana, “She sure does talk funny, don’t she?” 

So, it’s all in the ears of the hearer, and I know there are Aussies (just as there are Texans) who think they have no accent, although Kiwis would disagree.

Most of us probably think we speak and write as everyone would if they just knew how.

But I reckon I haven’t heard everything yet, in Aussie phrasing.  This morning while reading a short column in the weekend “Review” published by The Australian, I hit a moment of confusion.  

A mother, Jenny Thorsborne, was telling about life with her son, who had just left the nest he’d been sharing with mom.  Woops.  Excuse me.  He’s Australian, so it’s “he’d been sharing with mum”.  (Note: I expect to get approval from my Aussie spelling and grammar checker for putting the period at the end of that sentence outside the closing quotation marks, which is not how I learned to do it.)

Anyway, reflecting on times of sharing she’d had with her son, Jenny Thorsborne wrote about trips they’d taken together “when I could gather enough of the readies to venture to different places.”

I never heard of anyone gathering readies.  From the context, the meaning does seem clear.  They traveled when she had enough money.  Correct?  Or are there other “readies” necessary to travel.  Does enough free time also have to be gathered, accumulated?

I haven’t been able to find a reference to “the readies” in my dictionaries or on line.  Can anyone help me?  Are you an Australian (or a person from somewhere else) who grew up using this term?  Any notion of its roots?

I need a definitive answer before I take another trip.  It could be that I’ve been traveling all my life without gathering enough readies. 

Come to think of it, if this term refers just to money, I know that I have. 

“Less tar, more taste,” proclaimed a United States cigarette company
ad a few years ago. Today, the US and Australia could claim this:
“Less smoking, more pollution.”

Americans send huge amounts of toxic stuff into the air and water and
Australians pollute more per person than any other nation, but while
we foul the atmosphere, we are breathing easier at ground level than
we otherwise would because of steady declines in tobacco smoking.

Phillip Adams, a prominent print and radio commentator here, recently
wrote about parallels between the indefensible tactics of tobacco
companies peddling their products over the decades and the way our
political leaders in both countries avoid taking effective action to
stop “giving the planet lung cancer.”

Propaganda and profit, he argues, are keeping us from cleaning up our
environmental act in the same way lies and deceptions allowed
companies to manufacture and sell billions of highly addictive
products that maim and kill.

These little white sticks that Adams labels weapons of mass
destruction (March 22-23, 2008, The Weekend Australian) are still
being manufactured and sold, of course, often addicting the poorest
and most vulnerable before they reach the legal age of consent. Adams
could have written about corporate child abuse, too.

Tobacco use is still the leading cause of preventable death in the US,
according to the Center for Disease Control, but the proportion of
adults smoking there is as low as it’s been since the 1930s. About
21% of adult Americans smoke.

A government report says 70% of Aussie men and 30% of Aussie women
smoked in the 1950s. About 17% of adult Australians smoke now.

In both countries, prohibitions against smoking in enclosed public
places Read the rest of this entry �

Americans want to do nation-building, says Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times after five months of traveling the country while writing his next book, but “they want to do nation-building in America.”

Why? In a May 4 op-ed piece entitled “Who Will Tell the People?” Friedman says ordinary citizens in the US are becoming aware that the country desperately needs to be rebuilt.

He believes people are realizing that the US is not as strong as it used to be, that city-states like Dubai and Singapore are providing money to shore up American banks, that the war in Iraq has the military pinned down, and that President Bush has been reduced to begging Saudi Arabia for petroleum cost relief.

The post-WW II belief in America as the place where everyone wanted to be is, now, harder to maintain.

Friedman cites two transportation hubs as examples of the impoverishment of American infrastructure relative to that of other nations. One is Berlin’s “luxurious central train station” in comparison to the “grimy, decrepit Penn Station in New York City.”

Well, of course, Europe beats us on trains, many Americans would say. We know that.

But the second comparison pits a John F. Kennedy Airport terminal against one in Singapore’s Changi Airport. At JFK, Friedman says, he and his wife recently had difficulty finding a place to sit. In Singapore’s airport they found spaciousness, free internet portals, and children’s play zones.

And he doesn’t even mention some of the things that make Singapore’s airport a preferred stop-over point for me and my partner. In one terminal there are luxurious foot-massage machines. These are stress-reducing and they’re free. Not far away there Read the rest of this entry �

Train service in Europe, as many of you know already, is wonderful. By the standards of most American cities, trains run frequently and reliably here in Brisbane and in other Australian cities, but the wait for a train in the Netherlands and Belgium, from which we’ve just returned, must average less than half the normal wait time here.

As Kristi said to friends of ours this morning, “You don’t even have to know train schedules. You just show up at the train station and you can be pretty sure there’ll be a train going where you want to go in a few minutes.”

Such high levels of train service, along with the predominance of bicycle travel in both the countries we visited, make us green with envy or, more exactly, envious of the “green” values manifested by the policy decisions of the Dutch and Belgians.

Given the great bus and subway/tram availability, too, getting around in much of Europe is easier than it is where we’ve spent most of our lives and, it turns out, better for health.

Population density, of course, is necessary for the economic viability of mass transit, but culture-wide expectations matter, too. There are plenty of places in car-dependent America with enough people to make train or trolley service feasible if people understood how much better off they’d be getting to work or school without jumping into their own cars.

Australia is no less car-dependent Read the rest of this entry �

Here we are in Belgium, and I forgot to mention chocolate. Yesterday I said a person cannot live on beer alone. I said you need cheese, too, which the Netherlands has in great varieties and impressive quality. But I forgot to mention chocolate.

Belgium is famous, of course, for its production of that cocoa-based product, and travelers shocked by exchange-rate inflated restaurant prices here and in the Netherlands (AU$35 for lunch, US$80 for dinner, per person, without wine?!) quickly learn to supplement their diets with chocolate as well as cheese.

Relative to restaurant meals, the luxurious brown, or sometimes white, stuff — said to have health benefits, to be a mood lifter, and even to be an aphrodisiac — is cheap here. You can, of course, pay high prices for it molded into various shapes including shells, small animals, and bare human breasts with prominent nipples. (Chocolate shop windows can be aphrodisiac.)

In Bruges’s tourist area, you can buy assorted chocolates elaborately gift-boxed in any one of 40 shops, but you can get the same good stuff in plain bars in grocery stores for much less. What a diet! So relatively frugal.

Fortunately, given our high-calorie intake, our main mode of getting around in the towns and cities here is walking hour after hour through the sight-laded streets. We’ve even rented bikes a couple of times.

Bicycles are everywhere and amazingly well provided for by the planners of infrastructure, especially in the Netherlands. We rode from a small town called Oss to a smaller town called Heesch on the country’s longest dedicated bike path. It’s marked with a symbol proclaiming bikes to be king.

Bike riders surely rule on Amsterdam’s downtown streets even when Read the rest of this entry �

Moving to Australia gave us a new perspective on our home country, the United States. Now Kristi and I are traveling for a bit in the Netherlands and Belgium following a work conference she had in Amsterdam and we’re getting a new perspective on Australia.

 * Most noticeable of all is the fact that Australia is, relatively speaking, less pricey than we thought. We asked our friend from Amsterdam if anything is cheaper there than in Australia, where she now lives, and here answer was unequivocal: no.

 Our experience verifies that with one exception: beer, very good beer of many varieties, costs less than a euro per bottle in stores and you surely can’t beat that in Brisbane.

 * One cannot live on beer alone.  But you can come pretty close if you add in cheese.  The Netherlands has incredible cheeses.

 * The Internet speeds I experience with my ADSL connection at home are put to shame by all the connections speeds we’ve experienced here. Gmail comes up fast! I watched a brief movie sent to me via email and there were no interruptions for more downloading. None. Amazing.

 * Really old things in Australia tend to be trees, like Read the rest of this entry �

People everywhere, even those of us who enjoy travel and find ourselves able to adjust well to living in countries other than the one in which we were born, long for “the comforts of home.”

Being near family and friends is at the top of the list of what we miss.  Knowing one’s way around and speaking the most-common language, is up there, too.

But sometimes what we expatriates miss is  “comfort food” or, at least, food we’re accustomed to buying and eating.

Friends of ours from Amsterdam were missing “pindakaas” until they found a Dutch food store not far from where they live now in Brisbane.  That Dutch word means “peanut cheese,” which is Read the rest of this entry �

The best places for us to see birds and wild creatures during our hiking trips turns out to where we leave our car, in car parks where the hiking trails begin.On the lookout and with binoculars ready, we hike kilometer after kilometer along trails through eucalypts, in rainforests, and in open spaces, seeing little that hops, runs, slithers, or flies.Then, if we’re to see wildlife at all, we find it back where we left our car an hour or two or three earlier.