Characters on the Tram

Tram rides home aren't always this interesting.  But I guess, over the course of an hour and it being after midnight you can meet some interesting characters.  Usually I hop on, sit, and mind my own business listening to my i-Pod or just watch the stores, cafes, and pubs go past.  But last night I had some more excitement than usual.  I was taking the hour long tram ride back to the city from the suburb Bundoora, where I'd been visiting my friend Mark at La Trobe University, when a couple of girls stepped on and literally fell into the seats directly across from me, apparently having just come from a wilder place than another public tram.  Before these Australian white girls had jumped on the tram, the occupants in my immediate area were myself, several Indians speaking another language I couldn't begin to name, a black Muslim couple with the male in very modern day clothing and his significant other in the traditional head scarf and full length dress, and what I assumed was an Arabic couple, again, with the man in modern day clothes and this time the woman in head scarf, long plain dress, and some fabric covering her entire face leaving just enough space for her eyes to look out.  

Before these two girls sat down, no one had been speaking English on the tram.  They both had helium-filled balloons and those very Melburnian/European razor-straight-bang haircuts.  They were talkative, but I was not in the mood to chit chat at the moment and continued listening to my i-Pod.  The tram began to fill up more and more as we approached closer and closer to the city center.  Then a girl dressed up as a pirate got on the tram and sat down next to me.  Suddenly it just seemed silly to continue listening to my music with all these characters surrounding me, so I took them off and the girls soon engaged me in conversation.  Oh... we talked about everything you could think of: the party they'd just come from, why this girl was dressed as a pirate (21st birthday party), the engagement story of one of the girls involving her high boyfriend asking her to marry him in the middle of a mosh pit at a concert... You know, the typical things strangers strike up conversations about.  The best part about being in a foreign country and talking with strangers is the minute you open your mouth, you suddenly expose an excellent conversation point: where are you from?  Melbourne is full of different languages and ethnicities, but they don't get too many Americans.  A lot of times I get asked if I'm Canadian.  I briefly got in a word or two about where I was from when the two girls with the balloons and strange engagement story departed.  Just me and the pirate girl.  

My stop was next, so I said goodbye, or arggg if you like, to the pirate girl, and walked to the next tram stop to wait for my final leg of the journey back to my apartment.  A guy sitting one bench away from me asked for the time, and when I told him, he again noticed my accent.  He asked where I was from, and I told him Kentucky.  "You're a long way from home, mate."  Sometimes I forget that I'm almost 10,000 miles from home being here for almost four months now.  We struck up a conversation because it turned out he worked with racing horses and knew about Kentucky's reputation for being horse country.  This guy gets up everyday at around 3 am to go take care of the horses before they do their training.  Why on earth he has to get up that early I have no idea.  It ended up that both of us were catching the same tram, so we continued our conversation.  He was originally from New South Wales, just over the border, and was the first non-Victorian Aussie I've met.  Of course, he downplayed Melbourne's dominance as Australia's best city and talked up Sydney a bit.  He said that Sydneysiders call people from Victoria Mexicans since they're south of the border.  I found that an odd but flattering comment, as it sort of suggested a comparison between Sydney and the U.S.  It was like the guy was saying, "You know what I mean," with a slight elbow jab and a wink.  I told him about Lexington and the beautiful horse farms surrounding the city, and he seemed pretty excited to find out something new about Kentucky horses.  The tram arrived at my stop, and we said goodbye.

I mention all this because I think it speaks to how life is different in a big city like Melbourne.  Meeting people on a tram, hearing their crazy stories and then parting ways never to run into each other again is something that never happens in small towns and even most American cities lacking Melbourne's unique public transport system.  Before those girls got on the tram, I was the lone American, lone white person, lone English speaker.  I guess that points to Melbourne's multiculturalism as well.  What a funny night.

Professors Strike. Students Rejoice.

Today my professors are on strike.

Well, to be fair, not all of them are. Two of my four professors decided to participate and not come in for work today. I first heard about it on Monday of this past week when one of my professors made the announcement that he would not be holding the usual lecture on Thursday due to his participation in the Melbourne wide strike by members of the National Tertiary Education Union. Most of the University of Melbourne staff are not coming into work today meaning that a few libraries are closed, most of the different school offices are closed, and lectures were canceled. I've asked some of my professors about the strike, and they've offered different answers for why it's happening. One said that workloads on teachers are becoming unbearable. Another mentioned that faculty budgets are in such deficit that many teachers were let go in past years, and now class sizes are too large, and teachers are having to take on too many classes per semester. The strike is trying to bring the university administration "back to the negotiation table", as one of my professors put it, so that some agreement can be made about working to increase funding by the government and decrease class size and workload.

My first reaction to this whole event was: seriously? The professors are on strike? Wow, I've never thought of that. To me a strike is for factory workers or public transit workers. They strike and production stops or everyone is late for work. The point is made very directly and is easily observed. However, with a professor strike, I'm not so sure the effect is quite the same. Today has seemed like a normal day, just with a few of my lectures canceled, some libraries I never visit being closed, and a few people handing out fliers promoting the strike. I'd say lots of students are glad to not have classes, and will gladly "participate" in the strike by not attending lectures. I guess I just don't quite see how this is effective. Seems to me the only people inconvenienced by this are the professors themselves, who will have to alter their course plans, or possibly a few students who may have to work a bit harder to learn material not covered by the professor that day.

My second reaction to this was: why doesn't this happen in the U.S.? Maybe it does and I just haven't heard about it. The Australians do use their unions more than we do, so maybe this is a product of that union mentality. Although, this doesn't quite compare with some French university staff, who according to one of my professors who didn't go on strike today, once went on strike for three months. That's disruptive and the point would be driven home real quick. I asked this professor, who happens to be American, why this doesn't happen in the U.S. He suggested that maybe conditions at universities are better for the most part. Or is it that Americans just don't go on strike as much and the teachers don't utilize unions? I'm not sure, but this whole event is odd to me, and may point to a few cultural and societal differences between Australia and the U.S.

100 Days

So in keeping with the tradition of arbitrarily assigning importance to the first 100 days of the presidency, I would like to use this post to mark 100 days of being in Australia. I can say that I've settled in pretty well. I wander the city map free frequently, and recently gave advice to someone who is coming to Melbourne about house hunting. Amazing how three months can turn you into an expert. I mentioned in a past post that Uni Melb's campus was hard to navigate, but as a mouse soon learns the correct path to the cheese, so have I learned my way around campus rather well. It's really just a matter of getting used to how the university operates, and letting the unfamiliar become familiar with time. I also ride my bike everywhere. To university, to the market, to the park, to friends' flats, to the central business district, any and everywhere. I've ridden my bike so much that it's now second nature to hop on it and start pedaling. I don’t get near as tired as I used to pedaling around everywhere, and Melbourne is set up to accommodate cyclist really well, with bike lanes on almost every street. Because I’m always on the roads, I’ve become well acquainted with driving on the left side. I saw a movie the other day (Star Trek, which was excellent), and a scene showing a car driving on the right side of the road looked strange to me. Now I know I’m settled here.

This Isn't Your Ordinary Football

America is sports crazy. We love football, basketball, and baseball. All other sports are just filler for these big three that rule the talk on SportsCenter and dominate the topic of everyday conversations among a fair chunk of the population. America has plenty of people who don't pay much attention to sports or find the topic boring, but I'd say everyone would agree we are a sports obsessed nation as a whole. Well so is Australia. In some ways they might even be more sports crazy per capita. I found this out when I attended the ANZAC footy match a couple weekends ago. There I came face to face with the funny and entertaining sport of Australian rules football.

At first glance you'd think you were watching rugby. Of course, I don't know much about rugby but I know enough to recognize it. Footy (as the Aussies call Australian rules football), however, is not rugby. And you'd run the risk of insulting the Melburnians of Victoria by saying that. Victoria is known for it's footy teams, and for awhile the sport was only played in Victoria. Rugby on the other hand is very much a New South Wales sport that Sydneysiders get into more. This comparison of footy versus rugby plays into the larger competition of Melbourne versus Sydney that raises its head every now and again when I talk with Australians.

So as I said, at first glance you'd think you were watching rugby, but then you notice that they aren't laterally passing the ball, but bumping the ball to each other with a clenched fist volleyball style. Or they kick the ball to each other or towards four goal posts at opposite ends of the oval field to score a goal. As I over heard a guy from Los Angeles explain to some of his American friends, "It's like if football, soccer, and volleyball all got together and had one love child." I don't know that I totally agree (or if that's physically possible), but I see where he's coming from. Footy's a fast paced, high scoring game, and once you get the gist of the rules, it's a lot of fun to watch.

As I walked to the game with my Rotarian host, Kevin, his daughter, and her friend, I began to feel the excitement in the air. The sky was a bit overcast, but the stadium loomed large ahead of us, a gigantic oval with towering poles with hundreds of lights spaced evenly around the sides. To say this stadium is big doesn't quite cut it. It's enormous, titanic, gargantuan. Kevin told me that on some ANZAC Day matches, over 100,000 people show up to the match. This special match is always a face off of two of the oldest and most popular footy clubs in Melbourne: the Essendon Bombers and Collingwood Magpies. My Rotary host counselor had set me straight when I first arrived in Melbourne about who I should be cheering for. "Who do you barrack for?" he asked. I didn't really have an answer for him and was a bit stymied by his use of the word "barrack". "Well it better be the Bombers or you can go ahead and find yourself another place to stay," he chuckled. The Aussies ask this question a lot when the footy subject comes up. "Who do you barrack for?" is not interchangeable with "Who do you root for?" however. The second question takes on an entirely different meaning, as the Aussies use the term "root" in a sexual context. Anyway...

The game was exciting and entertaining to watch even for someone who didn't quite know all that was going on. The two teams were pretty evenly matched this year, and the game wasn't decided until a final kick by Essendon in the last 10 seconds to put them just a few points over Collingwood. That's right, my team won. The stadium that day had about 85,000 people in the stands all of them either Essendon or Collingwood fans. The fans erupted with excitement or complete frustration after that final kick and the whole place was an uproar. Some were jumping up for joy, spinning their Bomber scarves around in celebration, hollering at the top of their lungs, and others were cursing the umpires and loudly complaining about the last second clutch kick that put the victory away for the Bombers. Talk about being into the game. It doesn't get much more devoted than this.

Again, I'm struck by the fact that hardly a single American knows a thing about this sport. Little do we know that about 9,000 miles away there's an island nation of around 21 million people who go nuts when guys in really short shorts run around for a good two hours punting and volleying the ball to each other, racking up scores like 98 to 86 or so, and taking some pretty gruesome and even bloody tackles while doing so. Just goes to show a bit of the insularity that America still has in this ever more globalized world especially towards Australia and what is happening down here. However, it does make for some great surprises when you visit, and I'd say that footy has added another fan to its ranks.

ANZAC Day

As Americans, we like to think of ourselves as the professionals of patriotism, but after yesterday's events, the Aussies have proven themselves just as patriotic in my view.  ANZAC Day marks the day on April 25th, 1915 when thousands from the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps stormed the shores of Gallipoli, Turkey during World War I.  In a devastatingly ill-fated mission, thousands of Australians and New Zealanders lost their lives that day, marking a significant loss of life for the two countries who at the time weren't boasting the larger populations they have today.  Around 5,000 Australians were killed that day, and a total of 8,000 were dead by the end of the battle.  The Battle of Gallipoli was the first time the Australians acted on their own behalf as a nation.  Before that, I'm assuming Australia either wasn't involved very heavily in many wars, or they were fighting as Brits for the Her Majesty's empire.  Some say this day signifies the making of Australia as a nation in the minds of the people, even more so than Australia Day does, which marks the arrival of the first fleet of British ships in the late 1700s.  I guess the equivalent for the U.S. would be a mixture of Veterans Day and Memorial Day.  The Australians commemorate that first sacrifice those soldiers made for the newly formed nation of Australia, and they also acknowledge the living veterans of all the wars that have since happened.  

The day started out with a 4:45 am wake up in order to get to the dawn service for ANZAC Day and potentially have a good view of the service.  One of the Rotarians from my host club had offered to take me to the service with him, and I happily agreed to it.  I thought it would be interesting to see how an event that had no large bearing on the U.S.'s course in the war, and one I didn't know a thing about would be commemorated and acknowledged by a country who had a very special and painful connection to the event.  In the still quiet of early morning, Kevin and I groggily got into his car and drove from his house to the Shrine of Remembrance.  This mammoth monument situated on the south side of the Yarra River just off St. Kilda road was built in the 1930s originally just for ANZAC Day, but has also come to serve as a shrine to all Australians killed in subsequent battles and wars.

As we drove, Kevin had tuned the radio to the equivalent of NPR for Australia, ABC (Australia Broadcasting Company).  There was constant talk on the radio about different dawn services for ANZAC Day going on all over the country and even the world.  Not only were there numerous services in Australia, but one in Gallipoli, Turkey as well as one in France.  Once again I was reminded of how important this event is to a millions of people, and I barely even knew a thing about it.  The shrine is near the Royal Botanical Gardens of Melbourne on the South side of the Yarra River, but we were coming from an eastern suburb of sprawling Melbourne during lots of traffic so it was about a fifteen minute drive.  I noted how lots of cars were out and about as well, and activity was unusually high for five in the morning.  I quickly realized that this event was hugely attended and that I was about to be among tens of thousands flocking to the shrine for the dawn service.  After parking the car a few kilometers away, we began our hike over to the service.  As we got closer, more and more people began converging on our same path around the gardens.  With all the people headed towards a common point in the dark hours of early morning, the event began to take on a specialness even to me, someone quite new to all of it.

I soon heard a soothing, deep voice over speakers in the distance and knew we were close.  We rounded a corner and in the early morning light, the Shrine of Remembrance loomed before me.  At the time, I didn't know how many people were there.  All I could tell was that many people had aggregated in front of the monument, and we weren't going to get a very good viewing point.  That didn't really matter, though, because everything was spoken over a loud speaker to the whole crowd.  

The service was very well done, and I can see why Australians would swell with pride in their country after attending this ceremony.  The speaker told the story of ANZAC Day, read poems from some of the soldiers, and accounts of what those men had to face, the few that did survive.  Gun shots were fired during one of the hymns sung by a choirs of former soldiers.  They also sang "God Save the Queen" which, to my American ears, I recognized as "My Country, 'Tis of Thee."  Then the whole place joined together in singing Australia's national anthem, "Advance Australia Fair."  It was a moving ceremony, even to a bloke like me who didn't know a thing about the whole affair until now.  Later that day I found out that around 40,000 people had been in attendance that morning.  Forty thousand people got up at the crack of dawn, many of them hours before the service started so that they could be up front, to remember their past countrymen who died in the heat of battle, in a mission that was almost doomed from the beginning.  Those in attendance weren't just old folks either.  I saw people of all ages in attendance, paying their respects.  The event was a moving one even for me as a foreigner here, and the Aussies showed their true form as supportive and mindful citizens of their country. 

Confusing Lingo

Lately, my house mate Rob has been calling me "Aluminum".  Why you ask?  An odd choice of nickname, I know, but it came about one night as I asked him for some aluminum foil for cooking.  "Say it again, mate," he told me.  "Aluminum," I said.  "Aww, mate, that's all wrong.  It's aluMINium!"   The Australians say it as the rest of the world does: aluminium  (see my spell checker just told me to correct that).  The extra "i" at the end makes all the difference.  It's so funny how the way I say this word throws Rob for a loop every time, and it's become kind of a joke every time we cook.  Rob will even come home from his work and say, "How ya going, aluminum?" with a cheeky grin on his face.  It's so funny to me how in one part of the world, 300 million people won't bat an eye at hearing the word aluminum, but on the other side of the world, saying the phrase, "Where's the aLUminum foil?" causes these short pregnant pauses where the hearer grins slightly to himself, always reminding you that you say things quite funny.

Another prime example of how the lingo and pronunciation here can cause a bit of confusion happened when Rob and I were biking through Princes Park situated just north of the University of Melbourne.  We had a choice of a couple of different paths to head down through the park, and Rob said to me, "Let's go down this way, mate.  The symmetry is really nice."  I thought to myself, well this is a sensitive side of Rob I haven't seen yet.  He's perceptive of the balance and beauty bestowed on things because of symmetry.  Must be the architect in him.  So I responded in agreement saying something like symmetry tends to be universally thought of as beautiful and a lot of times really attractive people are thought to be that way because of the symmetry of their face.  Rob cranes his head around while standing up on his bike and gives me this perplexed look.  "Mate, what the hell are you talking about?  There's a bloody cemetery over here!"  I then looked to my left and sure enough, a huge beautiful "sim-eh-tree" was there, plain and simple.  These sorts of things happen from time to time here in Australia.  The lingo and expressions developed on this island nation will take awhile to get down, I guess.

"Alex from Kentucky"

I'm coming up on two months in Melbourne, and Easter break is just around the corner.  Australia isn't that religious of a nation (especially compared to the US), but for some reason they still schedule their "non-teaching" period to coincide with Easter, an autumn event for Aussies.  As can be seen by my lack of posts, the work is picking up in classes and the reading is becoming fairly lengthy.  My fifth week of class has begun and I'm steeped in reading and papers.  Ah, the life of a humanities student: ideas, papers, tests, and grades.  This next week will be a doozy as all mid terms seem to be.  Not looking forward to the two papers and one test all happening on a Thursday a week and a half from now.

So in order to catch up on the month of March, I'll provide just one vignette for the sake of brevity:

During the second weekend of March, my host Rotary district had its annual conference where all the various club members within the district are invited to attend.  For three days the conference holds sessions that spread the word to all its members about what Rotary is doing locally, nationally, and internationally and bring them up to date with where Rotary is and where it's going.  All the ambassadorial scholars were invited to attend which included six others and me.  The event was well done and the speakers and entertainment they had lined up were excellent. However, the best part was... the venue was Tasmania.

Honestly (I must admit this because that's the first step to recovery), I had no clue before my trip to Melbourne that Tasmania was a state of Australia.  Had you asked me about Tasmania before, my mind would have immediately fixated upon Looney Tunes'  Tasmanian devil and the location of the island would have been a complete mystery.  To my ignorance's allay, this conference trip brought me up to snuff on the location and nature of Tasmania.  The plane ride there was a short hour just south of Melbourne to the town of Launceston in the northern part of the small island.  Tasmanian gets substantially more rainfall than the mainland and hence there's more greenery.  Launceston (pronounced lawn-ses-ton) is the third oldest city in Australia and is a quaint town with quiet streets and easy-going locals.  The trip provided a nice contrast to the bustling streets of Melbourne .

I won't go into the ends and outs of the conference, but one particular day bears mentioning.  The last day of sessions had quite a bit of entertainment scheduled, and as one of the final acts before the closing ceremonies took place on stage, Rotary invited a female improv duo to perform for the conference similar in style to "Who's Line is it Anyway".  These ladies romped down the aisles and assumed the stage, asking everyone in the audience to stand up.  One of them explained that she was going to ask us all a few questions and if our answer was yes, we had to sit down.  She began with easy questions that only singled out a few people, but then she asked a biggie, "Are you married?"  A sequence of scoffs and chuckles emitted from the audience as almost everyone in the entire theater sat down.... except for the Rotary Ambassadorial scholars.  The others and I were just about the only ones standing, and for some reason, I found it necessary to throw my arms up in the air and give a few little fist pumps to show my pride for staying in the race.  Suddenly the attention was on our little group and one of the ladies pointed at me and said, "Yes, the young gentleman there who expressed so much joy at not being married.  Come up on stage!"

A bit shocked but kind of excited, I shuffled past a few people in the adjacent seats and headed up on stage.  Now, the conference was fairly large, so around 500-600 people were staring back at me from on stage.  The woman proceeded to ask me my name and other questions about myself.  "Where are you from?" she asked.  I replied Kentucky which threw her for a loop.  Here we were in Launceston, Tasmania and some unmarried bloke she picks out of a room full of Melburnian Rotarians is from Kentucky?!  She asked me more questions like what and where I was studying, about what was in Kentucky (horses and Derby I gave for short answers), and she asked me what a pet-peeve of mine was (I grappled with this for a bit but answered when people say "ummm" too much).  She thanked me for my answers and then told me I could return to my seat.  With the information I'd just given her about myself, she produced an improv rap about, "Alex from Kentucky" and incorporated all the answers I'd given her from our short conversation on stage.  The rap was hilarious, but even funnier was that for the rest of the day, Rotarians I'd never met before would come up to me and say, "You're Alex from Kentucky!  Nice to meet you."

The final night of the conference, the district threw a big gala dinner party with around 800 guests all under a large outdoor tent, with a nice Tasmanian rain pouring down for most of the evening.  There were stage performances of operas singers and a live band, but the most hilarious part of the evening was at the end when people began to do a bit of dancing around the stage and suddenly the district governor (THE head honcho) gets on stage with the band and a slew of young women join him and dance all around him as he does his thing on stage.  At this point, I was confirmed in my belief that Australians are a laid back bunch that know how to have a good time.

As I flew back from Launceston, an unexpected feeling came over me.  I felt like I was coming home.  I hadn't felt this feeling in a long time, and I took comfort in it.  It told me that I'd finally reached a point where this foreign place had become less foreign to me.  I knew what I was doing when I came back here, and that's a good feeling.  Leaving a place you are familiar with, exploring an unfamiliar place, and then returning to the familiar seems to be the theme for the year.  And I like that.