Living in the Land Down Under

When my American Airlines flight landed in LAX that night, it was the beginning of an exciting journey. While I had left my family in Paris and most of my friends in Boston, I was embarking on a 6 months adventure to Australia. People seemed more concerned with the endless 14 hour flight than I was. Sleeping was the last thing I wanted to do. I was way to excited, I just couldn't wait to get there...

People tend to think that Australia is like the United States, with the exception of kangaroos and koala bears. And believe me, they couldn't be more wrong. When we arrived to Melbourne after 26 hours of traveling, we could barely understand our taxi drivers. You have "heaps of luggage" is the first thing that came out of his mouth, and we didn't really know if that meant he was going to help us carry them or not... Then, our US group found out that we would all have Australian room mates, which most of us were not happy about. I was pretty curious to see how this was going to go. Would this experience turn out to be a real culture shock?

Living with someone from another culture is both an interesting and a hard experience. Little things that you do on a daily basis, without even thinking, and that no one in your own country would even acknowledge, can be considered "weird" or even outrageous. When someone is cooking a full meal with meat, vegetable and eggs in your kitchen at 6.30am in the morning, you might think that it is no appropriate time for a feast. When one of my new friend looked at me and told me "You're a good egg", my jaws literally dropped. I thought he was bluntly insulting me when he was in fact telling me that he thought I was a nice person!

In our new daily routine, cultural differences were everywhere. For example, Americans are well known for using and abusing water, which in most states cost practically nothing. On the other hand, Australians were raised thinking of water as scarce and extremely valuable. Taking a half hour long shower, talking on the phone while doing the dishes and let the water run are considered disrespectful and rude actions. Many of my American friends were getting annoyed when their room mates rambled about "wasting water" and "creating rubbish" that would probably not be recycled. While I was sometimes getting annoyed as well, because I was getting dirty looks after washing my hair, I tried to keep an open mind and understand that the environment meant a lot more to them than it does to us. And with time, we all tried to be more conscious not to waste resources that were precious to the country that we were living in. And I believe that it changed us for the better...