Australia is a Parallel Universe (Or In an Aussie Accent: Orstraliar is a Parallel Yeunivas)

Australian people are obsessed with Pink. The artist. The one that we Americans grudgingly allow to permeate our airwaves with her occasionally good, but never great, pop/rock songs. The other day I saw an Australian magazine with her on the cover and it said something like “Why We Want Her to Be One of Us.” It might be a good idea for her to go native in Australia; she might even be more popular than in the States, due to America’s perception of Australia as an infinitely cooler country — I know that’s why I wanted to go to the land of surfing, panoramic landscapes, and the iconic Sydney Opera House.

The moment my 1,000-hour flight ended and I landed Down Under, I got the eerie feeling I know many Americans feel: Being in Australia is like stepping into a parallel universe. At first glance, it looks the same as from where your plane took off. But more and more subtle differences emerge. They speak our language, only they sound cooler. They drive the same cars, but on the wrong side of the road. They look like us, only better (and let’s face it, thinner). Their advertisements are like ours, but the words are spelled differently. And at the “International Coffee House” I went to, they call coffees “long blacks” and “flat whites” and other confusing names. It’s like America’s culture got a little warped when it crossed the equator on its journey “Down Undah.”

Australia certainly isn’t the most cultural place to study abroad. You choose Australia for its amazing wildlife, endless beaches, heaps of celebrities, or if you’re like me, because your 10-year-old self was so enchanted by Sydney when it held the Olympic Games. Or maybe because Pixar made you want to see the Great Barrier Reef (which, by the way, is magical). But even though Australia as we know it is pretty young, and it doesn’t have cathedrals and Roman ruins, it does have a totally unique culture, with didgeridoos, Crocodile Dundee-style bush hats, and its colorful language. What are the emblems of America? Cheeseburgers and blue jeans? Oz is like our quirky second cousin who we rarely think about but we know looks up to us, bland as our English may be. It’s so funny how they export their culture; it’s the best resource they have. You always hear “Fosters. It’s Orstralian for beeah!” but you never see it on tap at the pubs in Australia. They have more souvenir shops than anywhere else I’ve been in the world, and they’re filled to the ceiling with boomerangs and stuffed koalas. Far from being the embarrassment you’d think it would be, the 1980’s song “Down Under” by Men at Work is played at all their social functions. And you know what? It captures the essence of the land down under pretty well.

You get the sense that Australia is struggling to define itself. It doesn’t know how to think of itself in relationship to the Asian countries it shares the Pacific with. Walking down the streets of Sydney, there seem to be at least as many Asians as Caucasians, though Wikipedia claims Asians make up 16 percent of its population. I know I would move to Sydney if I had grown up in the overcrowded cities of Asia. Australia is afraid of losing its Aboriginal + British culture, but it can’t ignore its proximity to Asia. It’s not really a situation where the immigrants are going to assimilate into the culture — it’s quite surprising when you meet an Asian Sydneysider who speaks English with an Aussie accent — so Australia has to decide if it’s going to lean on Asia’s economy or shut it out completely. This gives Australia the feeling of a country in limbo. It’s a Western country being tempted by the East. And if there was an easy answer, Australia would have decided already.

But the Aussies know who they are personally and they’re very proud of it. They are rugby-lovin’ outdoorsy surfers who bring their dogs everywhere, without a leash. (If there’s one thing that Americans find alarming about Australia, aside from the thousands of venomous creatures, it’s the loose dogs. They seem to have learned to chill out like their masters; they just trot along next to them, ignoring all the wildlife that would have an American dog shaking with excitement.) Aussies don’t suffer from the American quest for glory; they’re a very middle-class country and they all seem to be comfortable with that. They’re a little behind technologically, but with so much land space and hardly any people (they’ve got 90 percent of the land mass of the U.S. but one-fifteenth of its population) you can’t blame them for their expensive and slow Internet service (the coffee shop I went to didn’t even have Wi-Fi; there’s one thing you’ll never find in the U.S.). Of course, that’s the most frustrating thing for us spoiled Americans in Oz.

Living in a country with such a small population showed me how streamlined and efficient America is. Our buses come when they say they’re coming unless a snowstorm stops them, an excuse Australian buses never have. Often I would look at a product that says “Made in Australia” and just wonder how 20 million people who are that spread out can keep up economically and technologically with us big countries. How do they have enough people to staff all those companies and factories? And still they don’t stress about things like we do in America. It’s so admirable.

The strange thing about study abroad is that it’s just life. You leave the country for a handful of months with the expectation that every day will be an adventure, but you quickly come to the realization that you’re going to have to grocery shop. And do your laundry. And put chapstick on your lips (this one especially, since the sun is inescapable in Australia and sunburned lips are no fun). When you study in Italy or Argentina, the language barrier probably makes day-to-day life so challenging, it stops being relevant to your life back home. But in Australia, your surroundings, both visually and culturally, are so close to what’s back home, it feels like life in another dimension. To get to my job in Australia, I walked a couple blocks to a local strip mall. This could be what any pizzeria employee does in the U.S., only the backdrop of my quick commute looked like Lost, the strip mall had a skin cancer clinic (imagine that in Minnesota!), and my coworkers were four guys who had each emigrated from a different home country. And when I walked by the news store, Pink was on the cover of about five magazines. Definitely a parallel reality — a very fun and beautiful reality.