Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Typically Australian snapshots

No, not actual snapshots, like with a camera. Verbal snapshots.

- Sitting in the park at the foreshore, having a family picnic (which in Sian's family means mostly ducking projectile foodstuffs...anything small and round is fair game, which means we have a lot of salads with cherry tomatoes and grapes to ensure plenty of ammunition), when we saw a wedding go by. Everyone, including the bride and groom, were carrying their shoes and meandering around barefoot; everyone, including the bride and groom, were carrying stubbies; and everyone, including the bride and groom, had sunglasses on. The groom was also dragging an Esky. Which he put in the trunk of the Rolls limousine.

- I walked past an elementary school in the middle of the afternoon the other day, and saw all the kids bouncing off the equipment, screaming and yelling, all with their bright green Cancer Council hats on. Hats are mandatory for schoolchildren in Australia, because otherwise they are one giant melanoma before they even have a chance to vote. Which is also mandatory.

- Standing on a street corner, I heard the screech of tires as a Holden ute thundered up next to me, the open window blasting AC/DC. The driver was young, about eighteen, wearing sunglasses, and a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. This is such a stereotype of a bogan hoon, you have no idea. I love that newspapers will have headlines with the word "hoon" in them, since it basically means "thug who drives around dangerously in a car" as well as "the act of a thug driving around dangerously in a car" (noun and verb, all purpose). So you could say that somewhat was a hoon, or that they were hooning around Perth. And a bogan, well...hmm. See if you can figure that one out. It took me a while to get the contextual gist of it.

- Speaking of bogans, Sian and I noted: bogans always have dogs with muscle-y names, like Macho and Mustang and Tractor and so on. So we voted that bogan dogs are now called "dogans". This may only be funny to Australians. And me.

2 comments:

Sharp11Girl said...

I wish I knew what more of these words mean: like Esky. Did I miss that in an earlier blog?

Claire said...

An Esky is a cooler. Like a rolling cooler on wheels. I think it's a name brand.