Lost in transit

Mail Call

What expat doesn't like getting mail from home?

So before I left, I bought a pack of blank inkjet-printer postcards, printed my address on one side of 30 of them, put air mail stamps on them, and laid them out on the table at my going-away party.

The first ones just started coming in couple of weeks ago.

Click on the postcard to see the rest.

Of not going home

How many times have you said, that's it, I've absolutely had it, I am going home? And how many times did you not do it?

Speaking for myself: a million times. At least a million and one times.

I have just spent hours on my application for this really cool job in Munich where I have good chances to get it. That's it, I said, in terms of career the dumbest thing I have ever done was moving to Austria. I deleted the mail. I couldn't click "send". Leaving would break my heart.

At least I got smarter. So smart to a) not move to a country smaller than Austria and b) not to move to a country that people leave to go to Germany to make a career and c) not to move to a country that only has artificial beaches.

A million and two, a million and three, a million and four ...

Sauce pans, size pants

First off, everyone has an accent. We all know this, right?

However, the particular accent I have is a basic East Coast American model. If you're an American, or perhaps a non-American whose ear is attuned to this sort of thing, you can most likely tell that I'm not from the Midwest, or the South, or California. Whether it's my accent, my manner, my dress, or a combination of all three, people know I'm from somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean. Other than that, thought, they generally can't pin down that I'm from New York City.

Why? Well, I don't tawk like a Noo Yawker. I say the "liquid u" in "new" and "Tuesday". I pronounce my r's on the ends of words: I say "her" and "mother" and "water", not "huh", "mothuh" and "watuh". And so on. Part of that is from growing up in Manhattan, (my parents, who were raised in Long Island and the Bronx, have more recognizably "New York" accents), probably another part of it was being sent to private schools, and some of it is certainly from taking speech and voice classes for my undergraduate degree in theatre.

Anyway, the point is that I have a very general American accent, and I've really never had any problems being understood when traveling or living abroad. Sure, I have to slow down sometimes, depending on the person I'm talking to, but in terms of pronunciation, I've never found that people had a problem understanding what I say — until I moved to Australia.

Now some of it is definitely a matter of syntax and idiom. For example, when I first got here, I kept asking store owners, "What time are you open until?" That's the way I've always said it in New York, but here all it got me were confused looks. Pretty soon I figured out I had to say "When do you close?" and then I was instantly understood.

But then there was the afternoon I went to The Big W downtown (that's Woolworth's version of K-Mart or Target) to buy some cookware. I found an employee and asked, "Excuse me, where can I find the sauce pans?"

"The what?"

"Sauce pans."

"Size pants?"

Try saying "sauce" and "size" out loud a few times. Even if it were the case that my vowels for the "au" and the "i" were a bit close (and they're not at all), the hissing "s" sound in "sauce" is nowhere near the buzzing "z" sound in "size".

Then again, it goes the other way too. Yesterday in a technical writing class, my teacher was talking about the documentation process and mentioned that there's always trouble when "the software is running light". I wondered if that meant something about not having a fully-featured version (like a shareware program will have certain functions disabled if you haven't paid for it), and asked him what that meant. "Well, you know, developers are always behind schedule, so it can take more time than you think to get the software." Oh, not LIGHT, but LATE. Or rather, "late" with an Australian accent. I'm sure the Australian students didn't blink an eye, but it sounded just like "light" to me.

The cool thing about Australian vowels is that they're really a world unto their own, where pure vowels get turned into drawn-out dipthongs (or sometimes even tripthongs). I used to love hearing my old Australian boyfriend say "no" as "ni-au" (see Wikipedia for the IPA symbols). Here's a native Sydneysider speaking (although keep in mind that this is more of a "Broad Australian" accent, whereas most Australians have a "General Australian" accent). Listen for the "snow" in "snow peas" and the "go" in "go to the store".

But then again, this is coming from the girl who clearly asked for "size pants", so who am I to talk?

overheard at Pod kastany (pub)

(some details, including the real names of the people who had this conversation, have been changed, but the tone and flow are still true as i can make them).

Vaclav: Lately things haven't been so good at home. I mean, I don't know. Maybe at a certain point in marriage people just lose interest in... you know.
Ludek: ...
Vaclav: You know, man. We’re not young anymore. We’ve had our kids. I work hard, I have a few drinks, I come home, and I’d rather just sleep. It’s natural, don't you think?
Ludek: Did you ever hear about the Moravskys?
Vaclav: What, they famous?
Ludek: No, they used to be regulars here. This would be, what, '92, '93?
Vaclav: Ehn, a little before my time. What about them?
Ludek: So they lived in some village, okay. Poor. In the fall they'd go mushroom picking early, come into town with some huge pile of mushrooms --really the best mushrooms you could find, I mean top quality-- and they'd sell them and that would be enough for a few days of drinking, and they'd be here. They sold other stuff, too, but I remember the mushrooms.
Vaclav: So a young couple?
Ludek: No, that's what I’m telling you, they were old, in their sixties the first time I saw them. They’d been married some thirty, forty years. And Mr. Moravsky, he was a bit of an exhibitionist, I guess. He used to get well into the cups and start unzipping his pants and waggling his member at anybody who would pay attention, "See how an old man can still get it going!"
Vaclav: Ugh. His poor wife. Wasn’t she embarrassed?
Ludek: No, you know, they were the same. He’d be waggling and she'd be laughing. What was odd, they didn't fight. You know how the drunk couples will go at it? Never a word in anger, these two.
Vaclav: Hm.
Ludek: And then one time, this was funny, they were both plastered, of course, and I guess the village was too far to go, and so somehow Mr. Moravsky convinced his wife to go at it with him right there on a park bench. Where of course they were seen by some cops, and they got fined for public indecency, public exposure...
Vaclav: Fined?
Ludek: Yeah. Of course Zdenek over there says they should have been given an award for even accomplishing it. This was I think three years before Moravsky died, so he would have been sixty-seven, I think.
Vaclav: Sixty-seven, married for forty years, and still randy enough to go at it on a park bench?
Ludek: Yeah.
Vaclav: That’s practically romantic.
Ludek: That’s what I’m telling you. Age isn’t the question, a hard day’s work isn’t the question, drink isn’t the question.
Vaclav: So what is the question?
Ludek: Man, I don’t know. You think I’d be sitting here drinking with you if I knew?