Low Riders

One of the first things I noticed on the roads of WA was the appearance of pickup trucks that are the same height off the ground as cars; these are commonly referred to as yutes. H has always wanted a pickup and joked that he was going to get one in Perth. I have always considered pickups as leisure transport rather than a necessity for work to be rather redneck. Put a pickup truck on a car base and you have a recipe for total hillbillies. (Although H does claim to be from south of the Mason-Dixon line so maybe that tells you something ;) ) H asserts that pickups are great for haulin’ things. Ask him what he’s planning on hauling and he doesn’t have such a fast response. I’m sure what he’s thinking about hauling couldn’t possibly be massive amounts of bags from the shopping mall? For those trips he prefers taking his convertible, which has the smallest trunk you’ve ever seen in order to limit the possible damage to our credit cards.

Another thing I observed about WA is that the locals don’t always like to wear shoes. The first time I ever saw someone walking shoeless outside in an inappropriate place (i.e. not grass or sand but rather city streets) was the tour guide for my pre-application visit to the Brown University campus. The guide claimed he liked to feel the earth against his soles but I wasn’t quite sure how much he was feeling through the inch of Providence grime on the bottoms of his feet. The next notable inappropriate shoelessness incident of my life occurred about nine hours into the eleven and a half hour flight from Dubai to Perth when I was waiting online to use the airplane lavatory. The “Occupied” lock on the bathroom door went off, the door opened, the person exited, and the woman in front of me went in BAREFOOT. Yes, she went into the airplane lavatory barefoot (no socks, no shoes, nothing) towards the latter end of a long haul flight. And let me just say that the floor was both wet and sticky when I went in after her, GROSS!

Since then I have observed countless incidents of inappropriate Western Australian shoelessness: individuals and entire families walking barefoot through restaurants, malls, and city streets. But the epitome of WA as redneck territory showed up last night at the gas station in Belmont in the form of a terribly overweight middle-aged man, hauling himself out of his sparkling black yute placing his BAREFEET on the gas station ground and proceeding to pump gas and go into the gas station to pay, all without shoes on. Tell me, do you think these people wash their feet before getting into bed at night? Such Low Riders…

What?

Dear McDonald’s,

Why are you advertising that one can save $13 on one of your family dinners? Since when can one even spend $13 on food for 2-4 people at McDonald’s? Perhaps this proves that having a ~$20 an hour minimum wage is not good for society? Paying someone ~$20 an hour for unskilled labor just makes everything more expensive for everybody and means that it takes more money to buy basic goods and necessities.

Thanks,

Anonymous Expat

Wine and Cheese, Beer and Vurst

Over the weekend, H and I went on a tour of the Swan Valley wine country with H’s company. We showed up at H’s office promptly at 9:45 AM for the 10:00 AM bus departure. Shockingly promptly at 10:00 AM, we boarded the bus. Five minutes later, we disembarked. Why? The bus lacked seat belts which per H’s company’s safety policy, was not allowed. Safety first! Cowboys wear chaps, Eskimos wear fur, engineers wear coveralls and seatbelts.

It took about forty minutes for a bus with seatbelts to arrive, during which time I got a very enjoyable tour of H’s new office, very different and much nicer than the one in Doha, despite the lack of Tea Boys to hand deliver coffee, tea, biscuits, and fresh fruit. At about 11:00 we finally departed to Swan Valley wine country and were reminded by the ‘tour guide’ to pace ourselves through the two vineyards and two breweries as we would be sampling about sixteen different wines and up to ten different beers.

The first vineyard left us almost a bottle per person to pour our tastes ourselves. Unsurprisingly, there was nothing left when we departed less than an hour later. The only real winner of the bunch was a late harvest dessert wine but nothing was terrible. Sadly, the same couldn’t be said for the second vineyard. Some of the wines were so terrible that I was almost tempted to dump some of my samples onto the grass. The only redeeming factor of the vineyard was the local assorted cheese plates that they provided alongside of the wine. The creamy cheddar was so good that we bought a wedge to take home.

The real winner of the day was Duckstein Brewery where we sampled the entire range of their incredibly delicious micro-brewed beers and had a tasty and fun pork-filled lunch, accompanied by live music. (After two years in a pork-free country, H and are going a bit crazy with the pig consumption). Having recently visited Berlin, let me just say that this beer was even better than the motherland brews! I recommend visiting and tasting them all, H and I will definitely be going back! As my tour guide of Potsdam said “some fun there can be had!”

You’re American?

I haven’t mentioned this before, but our accents attract a lot of attention here. In Qatar over half the population is foreign so we never really stood out that much, at least in the grocery stores, restaurants, and shops that we frequented. In Perth, people stop and stare when we open our mouths. It’s kind of bizarre because I’ve never seen a reaction quite like that, in all of my travels across North America, Europe, Qatar, and Israel. Western Australia (WA) seems like a world in itself though. Perth is known as the most isolated city in the world and it is completely different and separate from the rest of Australia. If there was cause and if people were at all motivated, one could perhaps justify the secession of Western Australia and the creation of a new country.

Anyway, today I went for my second round of interviews at one of the large multinational natural resources companies in Perth. After a three hour case study and a one hour review with two managers, I was sent to lunch with two men who currently work in the same position that I am interviewing for. During the two minute walk to the restaurant, they determined that I am American, and during the course of perusing our menus, I learned that they are both born, raised, and university educated in Western Australia. Neither of them has ever left the region before although one is contemplating a trip to New York and the other is considering a trip to Europe or New York. The most pressing thing that one of them wanted to learn about the U.S. was whether or not it is true that in the U.S., you can make a right turn during a red light. I explained that yes, generally if there is not a sign indicating “no right turn on red,” that you can indeed turn right. He exclaimed rather excitedly that you can’t do that in WA! Given that a right turn at a traffic light here is like turning left at a traffic light in the U.S., I had already determined that road rule. I did ask if it’s possible to turn left on red here (the equivalent of making a right on red in the U.S.) and was told that that’s not allowed either. If you were meeting someone from a different country for the first time, what question(s) would you want to ask them? I think the right turn on red would get a big X on the Family Feud board.

Not Yet

This morning I went for breakfast with a group of women whose husbands are all employed by H’s company. They meet a couple of times a month for different events and I figured that as I know absolutely nobody in WA apart from H, I should go to meet some new people and get some tips on things to do and places to go in WA. As I sipped my iced tea on the restaurant’s balcony overlooking the Indian Ocean, I learned that at least one thing I considered to be unique to the Middle East actually is not.

In Qatar, H and I frequently (and by frequently I mean almost daily) got asked if we have children. Upon hearing our negative response, the person would say, oh, “not yet,” and the next question would be if we were expecting a child. Upon hearing our negative response to that, the next question would be when we got married. At the less than a year mark, we were told oh in’shallah, soon it will happen. After we had been married for a year, we worried that we would start getting fertility clinic referrals. The widespread expectation there would be that if you were married, you would procreate as soon as possible. I went for a pre-employment medical and the physician asked if I had children and if I was pregnant. Upon hearing my response of no and no, he wrote down on my medical form next to those two questions, “not yet.”

But apparently, those questions and that response are not unique to the Middle East. At breakfast this morning, each woman I met, introduced herself, asked my name, asked if I had children, asked if I was expecting children, and when I said no and no, said to me, “oh, not yet.”

To those people who view these as appropriate questions, they’re not. What if I have been actively trying to get pregnant and have been unable to conceive? No, I haven’t been trying to become pregnant but if I had and had been unsuccessful, all the “not yets” would make me feel pretty bad about myself.

How to Run a Business in Australia

During our hunt for “permanent” (I say that lightly as any expat on an international mobile contract knows. Perhaps it is more apt to say temporarily permanent, or permanent until we have a week’s notice that it’s not) housing in Perth, we are staying at a hotel that H’s company chose for us. It is a similar cost to any four star global chain you might recognize, but it’s a national chain and appears to be locally franchised. Our introduction to it on March 6^th was that at 8:30 PM, reception was closed for the night and we could get our keys from a box by the door and find our room ourselves. We were told on the slip of paper left in the envelope with our room key that housekeeping excluded Sundays and public holidays, the first of many hotel firsts to come. I should pre-empt this post by saying that I adjust my expectations based on country (i.e. first world or third world) and cost of the hotel, among a variety of other things. I may like nice things but I don’t require them.

The next hotel (or even youth hostel) first that we encountered was upon entering the room to find ants all over the kitchen and bathroom. Lovely but at that late WA hour of 8:30 PM, there wasn’t anything we could do about it until the morning. So we settled in to find our next first world hotel firsts, no toilet paper in the ant covered bathroom and three channels on the television.

The next morning we went to formally check-in and to deposit our “room maintenance request” asking that they do something about the ants that were not just in the kitchen and bathroom, but all over the hotel room. When we got back to our room that evening, we saw a can of bug spray sitting on the ant covered kitchen counter, that request was a success. As it was Saturday evening, the reception office was closed, and the next day being Sunday, we would have to wait until Monday to try again. On Monday we submitted another request for something to be done about the ant problem as well as the leaking shower that we had listened to the constant drip of for two nights, about two and a half feet from our bed. That afternoon I returned to find that nothing had been done about our maintenance requests, and also found that none of our empty toiletries (soap and shampoo), had been replaced, another hotel first.

Finally on Tuesday, I learned how to run a business in Australia when I came back to my room after lunch to put away some groceries I had purchased and found two people knocking on my door. The first was an overweight woman in a denim mini skirt, white tank top, and bright red bra who introduced herself as the “owner” of the hotel. The man with her was the exterminator that she had brought in, “on her own expense” to deal with, “our ant problem” that she implied we were responsible for, having opened our hotel room door four nights earlier to an ant infested apartment. She then continued to tell me that the ants can be a result of our messy kitchen (that I had yet to cook in and where I stored all of the food in the refrigerator), if I wasn’t happy with the hotel, I could check out (knowing that I was a month long corporate booking, good business sense) and move into a “less leafy” high rise hotel where they were less likely to have ants and cockroaches. I thanked her for that suggestion but reminded her that I was booked into “her” hotel by my company who used them as a preferred hotel for their numerous bookings, that thankfully we hadn’t seen any cockroaches, and that given that the ants were there when we arrived, I had yet to use the kitchen and had no food out of the refrigerator, that I didn’t really see what else I could do on my end. She ignored this and went to look at the still unfixed leaking shower, because apparently that was my fault as well. Shockingly enough, we never saw another ant after the exterminator’s visit. Moral of the story is, to run a business in Australia, be aggressive and rude to clients. Blame maintenance issues on them and don’t replace bathroom toiletries or clean a multi month old crusted piece of pizza off the wall behind the clear glass television stand. Obviously if you do not do any or all of the above, you might continuously have a relatively full hotel, make some kind of profit, and have to pay the ~40% Australian tax rate on income over $80,000. It’s much better to earn less, pay less taxes, and come out with about the same amount of cash in your bank account.

Convicts and Beer

H claims that I am going to get into a bar fight if I keep declaring Australia to be the land of convicts and kangaroos. I see this as nothing more than an entertaining declaration of truths. Australia was the recipient of British convicts who opted for life on a new continent in lieu of staying behind bars in their homeland. And despite not seeing a live one yet, Australia is most certainly the country of kangaroos. Where else can you find grocery store meat departments full of ‘roo meat, including “Kanga Banga” sausages, road laws detailing what to do if you hit a kangaroo (stop and check its pouch for a baby ‘roo and if there is one, wrap it in a blanket and bring it to the nearest vet), and statues everywhere depicting these adorable creatures? Kangaroos are even in the news with coverage ranging from what to do about the overpopulation problem to a kangaroo getting into a house and a man wrestling him out in nothing but his “Bondie” underwear.

Today we checked out some of WA’s convict history in Fremantle at Fremantle Prison, a limestone jail built in the 1850s and used as Perth’s maximum-security prison until 1991. We met one of our Japanese friends, K, there and took the Great Escapes tour which led us on an interesting tour of the prison during which time the guide told us some stories of a few of the most notable escapes and escape attempts from the prison. To read about some of them, visit the Fremantle Prison website. After the tour we walked around Fremantle, admiring its 19^th century mostly convict built architecture, and walked through some nice looking cheese, meat, and produce markets, and some tacky souvenir and handicraft markets.

As we walked around, we noticed multiple groups of people collecting money for Sea Shepherds, a whale conservation group that takes it upon itself to patrol a whale sanctuary in Antarctica from Japanese whaling vessels. There is a show that follows the group’s activities on Animal Planet , called Whale Wars, that H and I have enjoyed watching. Recently in the news, we heard that a Sea Shepherd member, Captain Pete Bethune, had been arrested for boarding a Japanese whaling vessel to serve a citizen’s arrest warrant to the captain for ramming and shipping his ship, the Ady Gil. He was transported back to Japan on that whaling vessel and is awaiting trial in a prison in Tokyo for a variety of charges. I suspected that the press coverage in Japan of the group was fairly intense and asked our friend K if he had heard anything about the group. He had and viewed the group as a terrorist organization, a representation that seems to be common in the Japanese press. K saw nothing wrong with collecting whale meat for research and using the remains as food, apparently he views whale meat as quite a delicacy. I disagreed saying that not only are whales endangered species, but they are so cute and so helpless. He asked me if I am a vegetarian and I said no but I don’t eat animals that I view as cute such as sheep, baby cows, rabbit, and whales. He had to concede that chickens and fish aren’t really cute so the argument went to me. The loser should have had to make a contribution to Sea Shepherds ;)

To end the day, we visited Little Creatures Brewery, located on the Indian Ocean in Fremantle, where we sampled some of their great food and tried out some more of their beers and their Pipsqueak Cider. The Pipsqueak Cider was quite good, I like it better than Strongbow, which was recommended by an Australian friend, but my favorite is still Savanna Dry, a South African cider that I discovered in Qatar.

Why Australia is a Good Place to be a Retiree

Towards the later end of this morning I went for a run by the Swan River in South Perth. It was absolutely stunning with my view of the Ferris Wheel and Western Australian sized skyscrapers of the Central Business District across the river. Sailboats drifted lazily through the currents, manned by schoolchildren in yellow and green matching uniforms. Wild pinkish white cockatoos screeched from the trees and I even saw a pair of beautiful black swans floating along the shoreline. Toddlers ran through the covered playgrounds and groups of people gathered for coffee mornings and picnic lunches. Yes, today is a weekday, and yes, the parks along the river were full of people. But what else do you expect in a country with a 37.5 hour work week (that is 7.5 hours per day) and commercials that promote leaving your job as an accountant/financial planner/engineer etc. to work less hours per week as a gardener or house cleaner and make more money. Socialism at it’s finest! Don’t work hard when you can earn the same amount of money and have the same benefits working less. Don’t strive for career satisfaction, stimulation, and innovation when your bank account will end up looking the same as the person serving you at McDonalds. How countries stay competitive in the global economy promoting such work ethics is beyond me but that is a discussion for another day. Because today I saw the payoff of a Socialist society, the ~60 year old retired couple meeting about eight other retired couples in the park for a picnic. Each couple brought with them two chairs and a huge totally full cooler that they struggled to carry between them. And what was in each of these nine coolers? Beer, ice, and nothing else. Oh, it is so good to be a Perth retiree!

It's Raining Turn Signals

One of the things I need to adapt to in Australia is learning to drive on what to me is the wrong side of the road. Since I’ve arrived I have repeatedly gotten into the passenger side of the car and needed to get out to reposition myself on the other side of the car, in the Driver’s seat. I drift a little bit towards the left side of the lane (and sometimes a little over it) and before each turn, say aloud, “left into near lane, right into far lane.” But I have to say that hands down, the hardest “wrong side of the road” driving skill to conquer has been mastering the art of the turn signal. In the U.S., the turn signal is on the left side of the steering wheel, and pushing it up indicates a right turn and down indicates a left turn. The windshield wiper is located on the right side of the steering wheel. In Australia, it’s the complete opposite; the windshield wiper is located on the left side of the steering wheel and the turn signal is located on the right side of the steering wheel. Moreover, pushing the turn signal up indicates a left turn, not a right turn, and vice versa. Surprisingly I have quickly adapted to the reversal of the left and right turn signals. But the turn signal and windshield wiper switch is a whole other issue. Today’s windshield wiper instead of turn signal count? 10. Ok, in an attempt for full disclosure, I probably made about 11 turns today. Yeah, I’m that awesome.

Why Australia is a Better Place to Live Than Qatar (Well, Obviously)

In the four days since we have arrived from the Middle East, I have been taking advantage of some of the key perks and freedoms that I have encountered living somewhere that is NOT the Middle East. Some of these include:

1. Being able to wear shorts.

2. Being able to wear skirts/dresses that are above my knee and don’t make me look like a Fulla Special Prayer Outfit Doll (or a certain Human Resources woman wearing floor length skirts, fitted through the knees and ankles with no slits. Shuffling everywhere can really be a full time job. You need head count slides? Insh’allah. A letter confirming your employment? Insh’allah. A staffing list? Insh’allah. I mean really, get your priorities straight. First one is shuffling to find the Tea Boy so he can bring you your Nescafe and biscuits. After that, you need to shuffle back to your desk to await your Nescafe and biscuits. Baby steps…)

3. Wearing tank tops (are we noticing a theme here?)

4. Wearing shirts that may show my bra straps (i.e. tank tops) or not wearing a bra if I really don’t want to. Or even skipping underwear à la Brittney Spears. Not like I would do that but if I wanted to, no one in Australia is going to throw me into jail and whip me for doing it.

5. Doing things outside and still being able to breathe during and after said activity because my lungs are not full of sand and pollution. Also not feeling like I am going to pass out after more than five minutes outside because the temperature in Perth is well below 100+ degrees F. These activities include reading outside, sitting by the outdoor pool or at the beach, and running/walking (ok maybe walking/running) by the beautiful Swan River.

6. Using SIDEWALKS and pedestrian crossing signals to walk anywhere I please. If I had a bicycle, this item would also include using bike lanes to cycle almost I want. In Doha there are no sidewalks and cars accelerate when there are pedestrians in the street. 100 camels for every Western man you hit, 25 camels for every Western woman you hit, 10 camels for everyone else. Hit a Qatari? Impossible! They don’t walk anywhere.

7. Being able to go outside by myself without getting harassed and or stalked by men in flowing white dresses, cough, robes.

8. Being able to buy alcohol. I don’t need a license and there is more than one liquor store. Moreover, I can’t go five minutes without seeing a liquor store.

9. Being able to drink said alcohol outside.

10. Not needing letters of permission from H if I want to work, get my local driver’s license, leave the country, buy beer, or do anything else.

11. Being able to kiss H in public. I can even kiss him in front of a police officer or other people if I want to, eat that Qatar. I can look at it as my personal payback for the British couple in Doha who were arrested in a Western hotel car park in Doha for kissing each other. They were both thrown into jail overnight. Too bad they didn’t get deported!

12. Green things. I can see trees, grass, and wildlife every single day. Beautiful, nothing else needs to be said.

13. Rain. It rains here, and when it rains, things get washed clean, not coated in a mud/sand mixture.

Ok, it is time for me to go outside in a tank top and very short shorts to look at some trees. Perhaps I’ll even bring a glass of white wine with me. Hey, I’m just trying to fit in!

Different Country, Different Continent, Same Company

Dear H’s Boss,

Thank you for telling H this morning that you want to give him some time to get settled in before sending him offshore. I can’t tell you how much that means to me. I did not however appreciate you telling him this afternoon that you are sending him to a land job next week. For the record, going to a rig less than two weeks after arriving on a new continent is not enough time to settle in. And a land rig that you have to fly to is really no different than a rig offshore.

Yes H, if you’re reading this, I do understand that this is a step up from Qatar where your Boss almost had to pick me up at the airport when I first moved there because you were almost offshore. And Readers, my ticket was purchased two days prior to my departure to time it so that H would be in town.

XOXO,

Anonymous Expat

Cultural Adaptation

I’d like to say that we’re just trying to adapt to our new culture, but after passing one too many drive through liquor stores (yes, you read that right, there are drive through liquor stores here), H and I decided to go stock up on some beer. Prior to coming to Perth, a few friends had told us about Little Creatures, a Fremantle (aka local) brewery, and we had enjoyed some of the Little Creatures Pale Ale at our $25 per entrée Vietnamese dinner our first night in town. Yes, $25 for ginger chicken that would cost me less than half of that almost anywhere in the U.S., including Manhattan. But I digress because today I also learned that not only will $25 buy you one entrée at a casual restaurant in Perth, it will also buy you one, yes one, six pack of beer. Now I am left pondering how Western Australians can afford to drink the copious amounts of beer and other equally/more expensive alcoholic beverages that they appear to consume all of time. I mean I’m all for cocktail hour, but pass by any restaurant or bar before lunchtime and every table is drinking beer and white wine. Coffee seems to have found its replacement here.

Asalaam Aleikum

Last night Husband (H) and I arrived in Perth, disembarking from the first plane I’ve ridden in over two years where the passengers were predominantly from first world countries with at least a marginally decent level of personal hygiene. Eating airplane beef brisket for breakfast may have shown a lack of common sense but I have quickly been learning that Western Australia isn’t quite like the rest of the “civilized world.” I mean, after flying for almost 12 hours straight, cramped from too small seats, dehydrated from too few fluids and re-circulated air, is your first thought really how many cold beers you left in the fridge and how many might still be remaining if X number of friends had access to your house and knew you were away? Welcome to Western Australia, welcome. Maybe I’ve just been living in a dry country for too long…