Culture Share: Australia - Through the Looking Glass

This post is part of The Writer's International Culture Share, in which writers discuss their personal experience with world cultures: Juliette Wade discusses her discovery of Melbourne, Australia.

Before I ever went to Australia, my images of it were mostly about animals. After all, we see them on nature programs - the koala, the kangaroo, the dingo, the emu, the platypus and occasionally the echidna. When I met my husband, who hails from Melbourne, I'm embarrassed to say that was the first time I'd ever taken the time to think about the human population of Australia to any extensive degree. Obviously I've learned a lot more since then! (Phew!)

When I started visiting Australia with a view to making it my second home, I got a very different view of it. I came out of the experience of Europe, where there are lots of countries side by side, often with distinct and mutually unintelligible languages - that, and Japan, where almost everything is unintelligible at first. From that perspective, Australia seemed much like home. It's not even just that the people speak English. The place is clearly a former English colony, and all kinds of little things resemble America, even as a whole lot of other things resemble England. The result is something uniquely Australian, but to this day whenever I'm there I have the sense that I've traveled through the looking-glass.

I remember how Lewis Carroll described the world within the looking-glass: every part of it that you could see by looking in the mirror was the same as this world, but every part of it that was outside the reach of the mirror's view was entirely different.

It fits rather well, of course, with the fact that in Australia, people drive on the left-hand side of the road. On my first visit, I had come direct from Japan where they also drive on the left, so it didn't trouble me much to look right first when crossing the street. However, since I never actually drove a car in Japan, the trouble I had was in walking to the incorrect side of the car. To this day, even after all the time I've spent in Australia, I still occasionally walk to the right side of the car expecting to find the passenger's seat! When you're driving, in fact, it's less difficult to figure out which side of the road to be on, and much harder to choose the correct side of the steering wheel (windshield wipers or turn signal, which in Australia is called the "indicator"). Also, because of one's different position in the car, it's easy to drive too close to the left-hand shoulder.


There are other things too that seem literally backwards. The toilet and other drains swirl the opposite direction (I had a commenter point out that the association between this and the Coriolis effect was considered urban legend - but I have noticed the backwards swirl, and I wonder what else might cause it!). Then of course there is the fact that autumn (they don't call it fall) comes in April and spring in September.

I very clearly remember walking down the sidewalk (the "pavement") with my husband on a beautiful 80-degree-Fahrenheit day (roughly 27 degrees C to an Australian) which happened to be Christmas Eve. You could buy Christmas cards with Santa on a surfboard at the news agent's, which is like a stationery shop plus newspaper and magazine source, and all the while the public speakers were playing "Walking in a Winter Wonderland." It was extremely surreal for someone from the northern hemisphere.

One of the other interesting things I've discovered in Australia, which may or may not be common to other places in the southern hemisphere, is that the quality of sunlight is different. My gut instinct is to say that the sunlight seems brighter, though I'm pretty sure it's not literally brighter, only coming from a different angle. Certainly to anyone accustomed to gauging direction based on the sun's position, it can be a confusing place (my father and my brother noted this particularly).

As a person from California I am quite accustomed to the presence of eucalyptus trees. The San Francisco Bay Area is full of eucalyptus groves. What stood out to me about the gum trees of Australia were the sheer number and variety of them. Australia is home to vast forests which appear, at least at first glance, to be composed of about 75% eucalyptus. The other thing, of course, is that when you're in a grove of gum trees in Australia it's worth looking up to see if you can find a koala. It took me a good three years or so to break my husband of this "looking-up" habit whenever we encountered eucalyptus groves. I can see why he misses the possibility of koalas, though. While I haven't seen many, in spite of much looking, I still love the possibility of finding one myself. And of course I love the sound of kookaburras.

There are so many details that I could go on forever, but I do want to mention two things I particularly notice about Melbourne. In California we have a lot of strip malls - on a piece of land to one side of the road you'll have a large parking lot and on the inward side of it will be a long building, sometimes with end pieces like a bracket. This building will be divided into a number of smaller shops and restaurants. Melbourne doesn't have these strip malls. There is no "parking lot at the side of the road" phenomenon. Going to run errands is called "going up the shops" and the shops are right along both sides of the main road. Often enough the shop buildings share a wall, even if their heights and appearances are different. The closest thing to a strip mall is a long building along one side of the road (with the pavement directly in front of it), which gets divided into smaller establishments. You might find a news agent's, a chemist's (pharmacy), an op shop (like Goodwill), a bakery, a milk bar (like a snack bar, with ice cream bars and meat pies and candy bars, etc.), all side by side. Their doors will be kept open, but will have thick strips of clear plastic hanging down across them to prevent the entry of flies (you push them aside as you enter). The stores won't have small cloth awnings. Often what you'll find is something that appears half awning, half roof - an awning that sticks far out from the front of the building, supported by poles, which entirely shades the sidewalk. The names of the shops are labeled above this, or at the front edge.

Melbourne also has some beautiful historic homes with special ironwork which deserves mention. I see it as one of the defining characteristics of Melburnian architecture, much like the ironwork that you see in New Orleans, but in an entirely different style.

Australia is an awesome place, and I find Melbourne to be one of my favorite places in the world, even beyond the natural affection that comes with its being the home of my favorite person. I hope you'll have a chance to go through the looking glass too, one day. When you get there, remember that "G'day" is pronounced with some stress on both halves, like you're saying "good day" without the first "d."

G'day everybody!

Culture Share: Unexpected Differences - Japanese Taxis

This post is part of The Writer's International Culture Share, in which writers discuss their personal experience with world cultures: Juliette Wade discusses Japanese Taxis and how they might inspire fictional worlds.

Unexpected Differences - Japanese Taxis

Sometimes a simple object can provide an example of unexpected differences across societies. The other day I got thinking about the day I arrived in Tokyo as a Monbusho exchange student, and the craziest taxi ride of my life - and I realized I'd found one of those objects.

The taxi.

Say you're writing a story, and your character has to get from here to there, so you need a way to move him or her. One way is to stick this person in a public paid conveyance of some sort. Give it a non-Earth appearance, an alien driver, pay in the local currency, and you might think you're done.

But the fun has just begun. There's a possibility for difference at every step, even in something so seemingly ordinary.

Let's start with the way you find a taxi. In Japan it's not all that different from large cities in America, where many taxis are on the road. The only thing you have to remember as you approach the curb is that the cars are driving on the left-hand side of the road, not the right, and that will influence which direction the taxi will be able to take you. So you stand at the side of the road, and raise your hand. (Of course, there's also the calling-ahead option, which was what we had when we arrived in Tokyo; the government had sponsored our scholarship for us, so they called us the taxis.) For story purposes, I could imagine possible alien variations on the curbside stance - do you hold up two fingers or five? Does it matter, or should you really be waving your tail instead?

Anyway. For now, assume you're on a street with a sidewalk, standing at the curb. Do you yell "Taxi" at this point? The Japanese word for "taxi" is "takushii" which sounds almost the same, but yelling in the middle of the street is generally frowned upon, and let's face it, the taxi driver probably won't hear you.

Next comes the first major sticking point of taxis in Japan - or, it was, when I lived there. If you're a foreigner, the taxi may choose to ignore you completely. In your story world, think about what kinds of qualities might be used to justify excluding your character from service. Pure foreignness? Possibly. Or maybe a particular feature that the hosts find alarming. Or maybe when this transportation is sponsored by individuals with diplomatic clout, there's no overt objection, which could set your character up for an unfortunate surprise later (when he tries to procure his own ride).

Let's say the taxi stops for you. Great. In the US, you reach out and open the back door on the passenger side. If you do this in Japan, you might end up with skinned knuckles or possibly a major bruise. Japanese taxis are equipped with a special mechanism that allows the driver to open and close the door, and this is part of their job. They don't want you moving the door. This for me is interesting because it's a difference in the construction of the vehicle, but also a difference in the way that you are supposed to interact with the vehicle - which functions of the interaction are your job, and which belong to others.

Once you're in, you discover that in most Japanese taxis, the headrests and seats are covered with white doily material. It's a weird but charming touch. Also, the drivers generally wear white gloves. These aren't just signs of charm, though - they're also evidence of Japanese concepts of hygiene.

Next, you ask for your destination. If you're working in a fantasy or science fiction setting, do think through how your people organize their cities. Japanese streets are generally not named unless they are quite large, and blocks are numbered, and houses numbered based on their position on the block - so houses across the street from one another aren't consecutively numbered, but in fact dictated by the separate numbering sequences of the blocks they are on. In the city of Kyoto, streets generally run North-South or East-West, so it's easy to navigate, but the addresses almost sound like walking directions. In Tokyo, things are wacky and a single missed turn can get you lost in seconds, but their addresses are pretty reliably tuned to the block numbering system.

Once you're moving, consider whether you want to worry about road rules or street signs. Road manners are a question as well. In Japan we'd sometimes see people stop their cars in the middle of the road and leave them running while they ran into 7-11 to buy an ice cream or a drink (because there is no parking to be had anywhere). Our general response to this was "whaaaaa?" But it happened often, and often when we were in cars our hosts or taxi drivers had to navigate around stopped vehicles.

I couldn't actually tell you whether it's standard for Japanese people to talk to their taxi drivers. Taxi drivers generally seemed to like talking to me, but that could have been because I was something of an oddity there: a light-haired foreign girl who spoke Japanese fluently. That would be another place where manners might differ in a fantasy or science fictional environment.

When you get where you're going, you have to pay. Money is a great source of potential strife. Taxis in Japan are expensive - usually 1000 yen or so base, just for getting in, and it meters up from there. On my crazy ride from Narita Airport to Setagaya-ku, the meter kept going up so far that the guy I was riding with and I were incredulous, praying that we wouldn't be asked to pay when we finally arrived. Just a tip? Never try to take a taxi from the Narita Airport to anywhere in central Tokyo. It will cost about $300. We were lucky, because it turned out that the price didn't have to come out of our arrival stipends. A standard taxi ride costs more like 1850 yen, and don't ever try to pay with a 10,000 yen bill. The one time I found I didn't have enough smaller change, the guy wouldn't even take what small change I had - he yelled at me to get out, slammed the door and drove off. A free taxi ride, I guess, but I felt awful. And of course, in Japan, you don't tip, but in America, a taxi driver who hasn't been tipped may actually leave his vehicle and pursue you on foot.

Now, I'm not trying to say that when you get your character from one place to another, you have to include every one of these details. No way. Maybe the trip itself is unremarkable in the context of your story; in that case you should put as few words on it as possible. But paying close attention to the physical and social details of transportation can give you ideas for unusual elements to change, or especially pertinent details to include. And even one or two of those can be enough to make your reader think, "Wow, this place really isn't like Earth. It's a whole new world."

Juliette Wade lived in Japan for a total of three+ years, spending a year with a host family in Kyoto, a year in a dormitory for foreign students in Tokyo, and a year and a half in an apartment in the Tokyo suburbs.

Announcing my new author website!

It's official - my new website is up! It's got all that fabulous art that I commissioned from Jared Fiori, and my magazine covers, and a free story to read ("Let the Word Take Me")... So go and see! Look around. Tell me if there's anything I've missed, or if there's anything you'd like to see added just for the heck of it. The link is http://juliettewade.blogspot.com , but you can also get there by typing in http://juliettewade.com if that's easier to remember.

Thanks again for all your support!