April 05, 2006
No, your other left.
There are plenty of things that will make you stand out as an expat -- your accent, your language, your spelling, your hair color, your clothing, etc. One that you don't usually hear about, however, is your sense of lateral spatial positioning.
In other words, what side of the road do you drive on?
For instance, I grew up in a country that drives on the right; I'm currently living in a country that drives on left. Now wait a second, you might say, unless you're actually driving, what sort of real difference would that make?
Besides having to learn which way to look when crossing the street ("right-then-left" was my mantra for a few days), it comes out in much subtler ways that you don't even think about until they crop up.
The first time I lived in Australia, for example, my then-boyfriend kept chiding me for standing on the wrong side of the escalator, blocking all of the people behind me who were trying to walk up or down it. No matter how many times he mentioned it, my muscle memory would always steer me to the right side of the step — the slow lane back home, but the passing lane here.
And even more frequently I'm caught in an awkward, shuffling pas de deux with some stranger walking towards me on a narrow strip of sidewalk. I instinctively move to my right to let them go; they, being raised in Australia, instinctively move to their left. Their left, my right. This happens at least once a week.
Even though I have a car here and drive on the left side now — and that was a whole other story, learning how to shift a manual transmission with my left hand instead of my right; the gears are in the same exact position, so have a think on that one for a second — I still can't get the hang of moving to the left instead of the right. Decades of conditioning win out every time, I guess.
Posted by wildsoda at April 5, 2006 08:23 AMI feel your pain, except I had to switch from left to right. I was still caught out with the footpath waltz after two years, and now I've had to switch back but keep forgetting.
Going to London and having them ask everyone to "keep right" on escalators, even though they drive left, is highly confusing (and a bit bizarre).
The main challenge with driving, for me, was lane positioning - I'd tend to drift so that my body was in the right side of the lane, as you are if you're driving on the left. This means that the bulk of the car is on the wrong side of you - nice and safe from oncoming traffic, but not much fun for any passengers. This lasted much longer than any gear/indicator/windscreen wiper confusion (which was very transient).
The only problem now is that I can't remember which direction to give way to, so I tend to want to give way to everyone, just in case.
Posted by: flerdle at April 5, 2006 09:08 AMi have all the exact same experiences, except the other way around. im living in your motherland and come from Sydney, Australia and am always running into people on the footpath doing the left/right/left tango of trying to stay out of each other's way. doesn't help right now that DC is so crowded with tourists!..but if you live here for a while you will get enough passive aggressive dirty looks to quickly learn the sacred rule of keeping right on the metro escalators unless you plan to move quickly and steadily on the left side.
Posted by: Celine at April 5, 2006 03:07 PMIm quite familiar with this problem. During time in Australia, I had the continual problem of walking on the 'right' and oddly enough 'wrong' side of sidewalks (footpaths), excalaters, ect. Even on a sidewalk in Melbourne someone shoved me out of the way one day and shouted 'move', which actually annoyed me a bit (I tried to punch'em but he was too quick). Either way, going to Australia as an American can be a difficult experience, especially in this day and age :P
Posted by: Robert at April 8, 2006 01:21 AMBy my reckoning, Swedes have a terrible sense of personal space - they constantly run into each other on the sidewalk without apology or even acknowledgement, and have devised systems so that they can avoid standing in lines at places like banks, ticket counters, the butcher's - which someone once told me is because in the late 1960s or early 1970s, in one day they made the switch from being left-side-of-the-road drivers to right-side-of-the-road drivers.
Posted by: francis s. at April 9, 2006 09:46 PMFrancis -- Yes, I read somewhere how the Swedes switched over so that they could manufacture and market Volvo cars to a majority of the world (as far as I know, many more countries, and more populous ones, use left-hand drive cars instead of right-hand drive ones). That's really interesting, though, because after a generation or two you'd think it would have evened itself out.
Posted by: wildsoda at April 10, 2006 01:33 AMFrancis--> I'm a Swede myself, and it is true what you say about people bumping in to each other all the time. It's quite sad when you think about it. It's so much easier to be in the States (or just about anywhere else than Sweden) where everybody have their own personal space. It was a huge chock (a positive one) for me, when I first visited USA as a 8 year old. I found it truely amazing, and yet today I wonder why we have to have it this way.
Posted by: kaiser at April 17, 2006 05:14 PM