Friday open thread: ask me anything

[dolorosa_12]

Hello, and welcome to the end of another working week! I hope the first week of February has been kind to you.

This week's Friday open thread is inspired by the snowflake_challenge friending meme: given I've subscribed to a bunch of new people, and a bunch of new people have subscribed to me, I felt it would be nice, rather than doing a new introduction post, to instead offer a space for more general questions. With that in mind, the topic of this week's Friday open thread is: ask me anything! Is there something you'd like to know, or something you'd like me to talk more about?

As a starting point if you have no idea what to ask, my intro post is up-to-date in terms of who I am, my fannish interests, and general approach to Dreamwidth and internet community. My fic is on AO3: Dolorosa. 'the via dolorosa' is the tag I use in posts talking about my day-to-day life, if you want an overview of things that have been happening to me recently (although there are hundreds of these posts, so be warned).

If you don't want to ask me anything, please do feel free to use the comments to tell me something if you feel you'd like me to know about it.

Comments

[peaked]

I'm going to cheat and ask two because my second question is probably the most important one you'll ever answer.

1. Do you miss anything about Australia?

2. Has your partner had Vegemite?

[dolorosa_12]

I miss my family a lot — I grew up in a very close-knit maternal family where everyone was constantly dropping by each other's houses, and where most of us socialised a lot with each other, within and across the generations. Over the years I have adjusted to the way our relationships have reformed and reshaped themselves as a result of me living overseas, but it never stops being hard.

In the early years when I lived in the UK, I missed the Australian attitude towards (good) food: the idea that it was a normal thing (at least in my various Australian social circles) to care about food, to be interested in cooking and eating a wide variety of things, and to shop for ingredients outside of big supermarket chains when necessary. When I first moved to the UK, this was considered — even in the fairly middle-class social circles that I spent my time in — to be an incredibly snobby, weird attitude. Thankfully that has changed a lot over the past decade and although stereotypes about British cooking persist, there's actually a really thriving food scene here, including outside the big cities.

On a related note, I used to really miss the lack of good, Australian cafe-style barista coffee. It used to be impossible to get outside of a handful of Australian/New Zealand run cafes in London, and antipodean immigrants would pass on details of these cafes as if it were super secret classified information. (And when I complained about the lack of good coffee, British friends would respond with bafflement: 'but can't you just go to Costa/Starbucks/Caffe Nero?'. Those kinds of chain coffee shops were considered to be the expensive, good quality coffee! I'd try to explain how Starbucks in Australia actually failed and is generally only drunk by tourists and teenagers, but it made no sense to my British friends!) Again, thankfully the cafe situation here is way better than when I first arrived!

Above all, what I really miss is the sense of having a set of common cultural references. Obviously there is a lot of overlap between British and Australian pop culture (and for example the British got a lot of our children's TV — British kids watched shows like Round the Twist, which really surprised me when I found out!), but I miss that sense of knowing that pretty much everyone I meet from my generation grew up with the same set of children's TV, popular books and games (by which I mean playground outdoor games rather than video games), or even just common childhood experiences like school swimming carnivals, 'slip, slop, slap' campaigns, and so on. And I grew up in Canberra (I sort of grew up in Sydney simultaneously, but that's a bit complicated to explain here so I'll leave it at that), and Canberra, at least in the 1990s and early 2000s, had its own really oddly specific subculture and childhood experiences and insularity, and being taken away from that has always made me feel unmoored. It used to be the case that I could meet anyone roughly of my age from Canberra and we'd be able to figure out connections within one degree of separation after five minutes of introductory conversation!

I wonder if the fact that most of my friends in the UK are fellow immigrants (although not a lot of Australian immigrants) was a way to compensate for this, since we're all very much in the same boat of lacking common cultural references and can all feel unmoored together.

Regarding your second question, Vegemite is actually something I miss (Marmite is no substitute!) and my mother sends it to me in the mail! I couldn't remember if my husband had eaten it, but he thinks he has at least once on toast. However, he's German and in Germany they use the same product that Vegemite is made of as flavouring in two-minute noodles and cheap cups of dried soup (the kind that you add boiled water to). It comes in little packets of dried seasoning, and you add it to flavour the noodles or soup. It also comes in liquid form as a condiment — he says he typically had it as a sauce to go with dumplings, in homemade soup, and so on. So for him the flavour profile of Vegemite isn't weird, it's just weird to eat it as a spread on bread or toast, and in hot main meals he would find it completely normal.

I've never experienced anyone trying Vegemite as an adult and liking it, though. Even my closest friend in high school, who immigrated to Australia from Russia when she was eleven, couldn't stand it. It really has to be something you basically eat from birth.

Is there anything you think you would miss if you lived overseas?

[peaked]

It's so interesting how our culture can be so different to another's, and in such small ways, too. I think your commentary on the coffee is one I've heard from others, too. (I don't drink coffee and I don't have a palate that goes beyond "all the coffee I've tasted tastes like burnt milk", but I know from working in one of the coffee chains that Starbucks wasn't even considered much of a competitor at all. The American taste profile is so different to ours.)

Are swimming carnivals not universal!? 🤯 The more you know and the more you take for granted. I always kind of thought British pop culture would be very close to ours, especially since I know there's a huge Neighbours fanbase there, but it's so interesting how there's very minor but significant differences. (I take for granted that "slip, slop, slap" is just something we all know as Aussies. Surely, the person next to me would-be grown up with such an iconic campaign!?)

Firstly, I'm glad your mum has your back and is supplying you regularly with Vegemite!

Secondly, wow—that's so crazy how your husband has experienced what essentially makes Vegemite in a different way! (He definitely needs to come around to eating it on toast. How else will you start your day on the right foot!?)

Thanks so much for answering! It's so interesting seeing the familiarities and differences between how we grow up in our Aussie bubbles vs the British bubble vs the Geman bubble.

Why did I ask you such a hard question! 😂 I think what I would miss most is what I take for granted. I went to America a few years ago for a holiday and really learned that even though they're another English-speaking country, the cultures are so, so different. I take for granted our meal portion sizes and our taste profiles. Aussies know what I mean when I say I want tomato sauce over BBQ.

Along with Vegemite, I would miss our Cadbury chocolate. (I think we have the best chocolate. Full bias.)