Minor Adjustments

Since Melbourne is a city with all the modern conveniences of home and is of the Western culture, I have not had to make major adjustments as of yet, but here are a few things I'm getting used to.

PEDESTRIAN WAYS
Australians drive on the left side of the road, and I'm still getting used to looking the right way when I cross the street. (If you've been to a country with similar driving practices, you'll know what I mean). If I waited patiently at the crosswalk for the little green man to light up, this wouldn’t such a problem, but because I am a frequent jaywalker (after years of training in Boston and New York), this is actually a matter of life and death. Looking left when cars are speeding at you from the right is unhelpful, to say the least. The habit of turning my head to the left is suprisingly hard to change. The strange and annoying thing is that even when I manage to look the right way at the curb, I still turn my head the other way, looking down the same lane, not even the one across the street, only to see, of course, that no cars are coming from that direction.

MONEY, MOBILES and MESSAGING
I'm not sure when, but Australians got rid of their penny. The smallest monetary denomination is the 5 cent coin. So when you buy something, the cashier just rounds to the nearest 5 cents. If your meal comes to $8.97, you pay $8.95. Or if the book you're buying costs $12.43, you pay $12.45. What's puzzling is why they still have prices like $19.97. The sales tax is included so that's the price. I guess it still sounds cheaper than $20. Well, I hope it all evens out in the end so that I'm overpaying and underpaying the same amounts overall.

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Since I'm only here for 12 months, I got a pay-as-you go mobile plan here, or a prepaid plan, where you pay, say, $30 and get a certain number of minutes. Seems simple enough, but then there are several types of prepaid plans with my company, and with the same $30, I get a different amount of minutes, plus or minus some free calls to other phones of the same company or free text messages. Well, I hate text messaging--I dislike it more than emailing and blogging and got rid of it on my cell phone in the U.S.--so I eventually decided on a plan where I pay $30, but get $120 worth of credit to call or text. And not just the first time. On this plan, every time I pay for a $30 recharge, I get $120 of credit. I had to ask the salesman twice if I was understanding this correctly, and I was. I was puzzled, but stopped asking for clarification.

But, alas, I am forced to text message here. The cool thing about the mobile plans here is that you don't pay for incoming calls, only the calls you make. The not-so-cool thing is that it costs 37 cents per HALF MINUTE to make a call. In U.S. dollars, that's 28 cents per half minute or a whopping 56 cents per minute! Texting, on the other hand, only costs 25 cents per message, or 19 cents (U.S.).

TABLE MANNERS AND RICE
I had my first meal with Australians on Monday, July 10. Bruce took me to the meeting of the Keilor East Rotary Club, my host club in Melbourne. I read in the Lonely Planet before I came that Australians use their utensils as the British do. That is, holding the knife in the right hand and fork in the left, they bring food to their mouths with the fork still in the left hand, tines down, rather than switching hands, as many Americans do. The guide also noted, however, that Americans would be forgiven for using their fork like a shovel. Not wanting to have to be forgiven, I was careful to observe others at the table, and indeed, they all ate as the Lonely Planet described. In general, eating this way is not that difficult and not particularly noteworthy, except that this meal included rice. Not sticky Korean rice, but fluffy, highly independent grains of rice. Now, I’m someone that thinks eating rice (particularly the non-sticky kind) with a fork even when using it like a shovel is hard enough. I have always wondered why Americans choose to do so. I prefer to pick up rice with my chopsticks or use a spoon if it's not sticky. Anyway, seeing that there was rice on the plate, and being conscious of how I was using my fork, I can honestly say that for a few minutes I was at a loss for how I should eat my meal. How was I supposed to bring the rice to my mouth on the underside of the fork? [Have you ever tried this? I’m sure you can see the difficulty just by imagining it.] I was truly puzzled. So, again, I observed those around me. The way they accomplished this feat was to push the rice grains onto whatever piece of food was already on the fork, almost using the portion of the food sticking out from the tines as the scoop, whether it be a slice of zucchini, chicken, potato. They would also sandwich grains of rice between pieces of food. So first poke a piece of chicken, push some rice grains onto and next to it, and before the grains can fall off, poke the fork into a slice of zucchini. And voila, you have mini rice kebab on a fork, ready for your enjoyment. Of course, then you have to be careful the rice doesn’t fall off en route to your mouth. At least I had to be. I believe this was one of most difficult meals I have ever eaten. I kept looking at the plates of those around me to see if they would actually be able to get to all the rice. Because that’s the other thing—trying to balance each bite so that you don’t just have a mound of rice left over. Well, this is something I was concerned with because I didn’t want to have a mound of rice left over with the primary reason being that I couldn’t get it onto my fork. How stupid would that be. It seemed that very little rice would be on the fork each time, but amazingly, everyone got to the rice pretty well. Even more amazingly, I managed to do so too with maybe fifteen grains left. I should say I was helped a bit, but only the tiniest bit, by the watered down sweet and sour sauce that the chicken was cooked in, which left much to be desired, and since I can’t say anything nice about it, I will end my story here.

GENERIC STICKY RICE
Okay, so I have another rice-related comment. Bear with me. I needed to get groceries a couple of days ago, and I made a bee-line to the little Korean supermarket I stumbled upon, which is right by the bad Korean restaurant I stumbled upon. I was hoping it would be like M2M near Columbia, which was just about my favorite place in New York City. I was really excited because this grocery store is right on the tram line that runs by my new place (just moved in July 16, more in another post). Anyway, it's pretty good, but I was surprised and disappointed to find that that they don't carry Korean rice. They carry Japanese rice and some other generic sticky rice, but they don't carry Korean rice. These types of rice are not that different, and it's not a big deal at all, but I was just surprised. I asked someone who works there (a Korean guy) if there was anywhere that carries Korean rice and he said that he's never seen Korean rice in Melbourne. His own family eats the generic rice. Korean rice is too expensive he explained. So I guess I'll be living without Korean rice for 12 months.

BEING (SEEN AS) AMERICAN
Although I was born in the U.S., I have never felt strongly that I identified with being American. Much of this has to do with the fact that my family is Korean. I am not much of a flag-waver on the Fourth of July (and didn't even live the day this year), and in international sporting events, I admit I am always more inclined to root for the (South) Koreans and would be proud if they did well; by the same token, if a Korean person (whether in the States or elsewhere) did something shameful, I would feel some embarrassment.

People say that spending time in another country helps you understand yourself better as a citizen of your own. In my case, that happened in some small ways before I came here because I was emailing potential housemates descriptions of myself, and I had to consider whether or not I wanted to identify myself as American, given our nation's role in world events and the impression non-Americans may have of us as a result. Most often, I would choose to say I was from the States rather than describe myself as "American" and I would sometimes qualify that by saying I was Korean American. (But then I wasn't sure if it was a good idea to say that I was Korean American because I've heard that Australians are less "open" towards Asians). Since I've been here, I haven't run into any serious problems as an American or a Korean American. There was one instance, though, that my being American did create a small obstacle for me in my housing search, as the Australian woman renting the room expressed her discomfort with American culture. Curious, I asked what her concerns were and she said, acknowledging that this was a big generalization, that Americans seem to be loud, opinionated, and insist on their being right (I wonder where she got that idea; it's a good thing I don't also speak with a Texan accent and say "nucular"). It was interesting to have this American stereotype applied to me since when I'm in the U.S., I usually find myself fighting (internally) to not behave in the stereotypically Asian way of withholding my opinion.

There was another instance that impressed upon me my being American, but I felt it internally, rather than externally by somene's impressions. I went to watch Pirates of the Caribbean 2 with fellow Rotary Scholar Ryan Diehl during my first week here. I was still suffering from jetlag and needed a brainless activity to keep me up. Given that Pirates is an American movie, all the previews were also for American movies. One of them was for the movie, Little Man, the new Wayans brothers comedy. I saw the trailer for this movie before I left the States and was disgusted by its utterly asinine sense of humor. When I saw the trailer in Melbourne, I had another reaction, in addition to disgust—I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed that the American movie industry not only produced this rubbish, but also that it then thought it was something worth exporting. Before the series of previews began, the woman I was sitting next to had started a conversation with me. I mentioned that I had just come from the States, so she knew I was American. And I was embarrassed sitting next to her. I'm not sure if she said this for my benefit, but I heard her say with digust, "Just some more American trash, I’m sorry to say."