A Stranger In A Strange Land


My experience as an expatriate is by no means unique, like many millions of others before me I have had to come to terms with reconciling my background, culture and experience to my chosen new home.

I do have some observations that I would like to share. I am an Australian transplanted to the USA. Now my expectations on making this move was that it would be an easier move than my past experience of moving from Australia to South East Asia. Now that was indeed different. I may explore it a later missive dear reader. My expectation of moving to the US was that I would have little difficulty in moving apart from changing my spell checker to the US dictionary from the Australian spelling all would be sweet. Oh how wrong can one little swagman be?

The first thing I noticed was just how friendly the local people were, the first person I saw was the friendly person at the customs counter at LAX, I was greeted with a very friendly ‘Welcome to America’, now I thought, this is a great place, they are happy to see me. Well to cut a long story short, some 3 hours later and a small forest of paper filled out I was clear of the place. It seems not everyone comes to America with a couple of suitcases of computer gear, a lot of explanations later I was clear. Now lesson one learned, a friendly greeting does not necessarily mean a friendly experience.

Over the last few years I have observed some very different approaches to life, one that intrigues me is the American attitude to porn, now as a former professional soldier I have had had a small amount of exposure to porn. The other diggers always had some. Now a great deal of this stuff is produced in the US. But try as I might I cannot understand the attitude in public to this. The population is subjected to the most draconian censorship on late night TV, to the extent that it is laughable. While some of the most disgusting porn is sold over the counter. Americans have a split personality on this whole moral issue. I have decided that the explanation is in the founding of our respective countries. Religious extremists, excommunicated from Europe, founded the US. While for the most part Australia was founded by pimps, thieves and prostitutes. Thus the developments of the respective counties while similar in looks are so different in attitude.

I could go one for hours on this matter of the differences, but will no longer bore you dear reader. The differences make for a very interesting, sometimes perplexing, but never boring life.

Viva la difference.