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…