Holi

Just got home after a weird Good Friday. Tonight I went to a Hindu festival called Holi. There was the usual funny dancing but the main activity is a type of colour-fight. That is, throwing handfulls of powdered pigment at each other! Everyone ends up with patches of bright blue and green and purple and red all over them. I've washed it all off now but my skin is still a little stained in places.

There's no Canada like French Canada, it's the best Canada of them all!

One of the requirements for my PhD is reading knowledge of at least one foreign language. Unfortunately, for my smattering of Italian to count I'd have to demonstrate it's relevance to my dissertation, which I can't. So I've decided to learn French, which is automatically approved. But the on campus courses that I could take over summer only teach reading. So I've enrolled in a language school in Montreal for three weeks of intensive French lessons. (Then back to Bloomington for the second half of those reading lessons.) I've booked my flight and just got my travel documents today.

I'll be boarding with a French-speaking family, which should be interesting seeing as I'm an absolute beginner. But I've bought a French dictionary and have started labelling things in my apartment, just to learn a few nouns before I start with the actual grammar. As of 2001, of 3,380,640 Montréalers, 1,283,145 spoke French only, only 254,765 spoke English only and 1,792,750 spoke both. Almost half of the French speakers don't speak English! But all the travel sites say that the shopkeepers all speak English so I'm not too worried. Still, having found myself a new confort-zone here in Bloomington it will come as a bit of a shock to be out of it once again.

Tax

I just finished preparing my tax return. (Actually, two! One for Federal, another for State and County taxes.) I discovered that the tax treaty Australia has with USA is worth nothing to me as a student, teacher or researcher. But after spending over $300 on books I'll be getting some back.

Where are you from?

I noticed early on that Americans can't tell the difference between English and Australian accents. Not unless you're doing a Steve Irwin impersonation can they place you as Australian. When I first got here I was a little self-conscious about my accent, mainly because everyone kept asking, "Where are you from?" But then I realised that Yanks use the same locution when asking each other what part of America they're from.

Yesterday I was asked one of those uncomfortable questions. You know the ones where everyone knows that the answer will be offensive to some, so no one asks. One of the guys in the department asked me, "The English accent sounds really sophisticated to us. How does the American accent sound to you?" Now, I try to take seriously my position as a guest in this country, I've already had to bite my tongue when they've been insulting the South. So, instead of a direct answer I told him about how I'm trying to learn to distinguish the different accents. Eventually I summed it up as, "The British speak with their lips; Australians speak with their throats (i.e. gargle words); and Americans speak with their noses." Everyone seemed satisfied with that.

But longer I'm here the more I see the cultural similarities we share with the British and not the Americans that go beyond accent or dialect or units of measurement. It's not just the tea-drinking (although the coffee here is so bad that my tea intake has gone up dramatically!). It's the food and the humour and so many little things. The wierd comments come when they have a little knowledge of Australia (a dangerous thing!). I already told you about the guy who asked me about The Boot! But a little while ago another HPS student who's spend some time at Oxford (and met a few Colonials there) asked me if I knew anything about tropical medicine! (Well, it is her area of interest.) I then realised that she sees us as Brits stranded down under; she probably expects me to walk into class wearing a pith helmet! For the record, I know nothing about tropical medicine but do try to dose myself with quinine via gin and tonics during monsoon season (which has just started, so that's what I'm doing right now!).