Vegemite, Fuck, and the Three Mammals

Why don’t people eat Vegemite properly? By people, I mean non-Australians. By properly, I mean thinly scraped across freshly buttered toast. It’s awfully unfair that people judge Vegemite by the teaspoon-full they popped in their mouth, or that Nutella-esque slathering they put on bread. This is not how you do it, people!

The smell of Vegemite on hot toast is superb to me. It conjures up a wiff of childhood. It’s the most basic of comfort foods. It’s the perfect morning accompaniment to boiled eggs and coffee.

It’s the scraping from the inside of a beer barrel, but that’s beside the point.

Ok, so Vegemite is basically nutrition free, funky gunk. Who cares? It’s a well loved spread that is basically the only food Australians can claim as their own (no one else wants it, and we will never win the pavlova debate). I genuinely love it. If I make Vegemite on toast around my siblings, they’ll go in for a bite before I have had one. Fine, I’d do the same to them, but that just proves how great it is.

Here’s my point: you don’t have to like it, but I will forever defend my right to love it. You probably haven’t eaten it properly, but I won’t force it down your gullet. Every country has their weird as hell national culinary love that no foreigner would go near willingly. Let’s just accept it and live in peace.

Speaking about cultural understanding…

Last night I was in a bar with a friend from Perth. Our waitress was also from Perth. As soon as we found this out there were excited squeals, high fives, and enough f-bombs to make a sailor blush (unless he was an Australian sailor).

Australians swear more liberally than any other English speaking culture I’ve come across. Please, if you know a country with a reputation for swearing more, let me know. This Perth party got hectic when we talked about how swearing is a total faux pas here. In Australia, “fuck” is almost a friendly word (depending on context). In Canada, it’s a big no-no (again, depending on context). The urge to swear build up, then explodes at the next Australian I bump into. Heaven forbid an Australian calls someone here a “mad cunt” (one of the highest compliments that can be bestowed in the Land Down Under).

Last, but not least, koalas are not bears. Do not refer to them as koala bears in front of an Australian, unless you want to receive a look that could melt steel. Bears are placental mammals from the family Ursidae. Koalas are grumpy little marsupials who sleep around 20 hours a day, have phenomenally long appendixes, and seem to be prone to syphalis. Native mammals in Australia are not placental. They are either marsupials (the ones with the pouches) or monotremes (egg laying mammals). Monotremes, for the record, are specifically Australian, because there are only two types: echidnas and platypuses (or platypi, if you prefer).

I’m not here to give a biology lesson. I’m really just here to rant about the little things I didn’t realise would be so big.

Mary Jane Pulls Weeds From Her Pot Plants

Today, for the first time in my life someone offered to sell me drugs.

There I was, making coffee for the hardworking folks of Marpole, when another hardworking bloke came up to the counter. He starts chatting to me, which is totally fine – talking to customers is a great perk of working in a coffee shop (perk – geddit?). He mentioned that he worked at the dispensary down the road. It was only after he said, with heavy insinuation, that he could help me with “all things medicinal” that I finally clued in. Until that point, I thought he was a scruffy looking pharmacist. He told me to hit him up any time, got his coffee, and left. Not a big deal (no pun intended this time).

Vancouver is fascinating in its totally lax attitude to marijuana. My first time walking through the downtown area made me wonder whether I had just walked into a big Dutch oven. When I’m in the city, I still don’t know whether I’m hungry or I have the munchies. Dope is a total non-issue here. I still don’t know the societal effect of this, but I’m fascinated to find out.

This casual societal acceptance of pot is hugely different to Australia. I never noticed it on the street there, and certainly never knew where I could buy some (though I never tried). Well, now I do. I have my handy neighbourhood pot man. I’m not going to go out and start smoking pot. It’s never interested me, and it still doesn’t. I do want to find out what it is that makes it so acceptable here (though I think it’s still technically illegal), and so unacceptable in Australia.

Please leave your thoughts and feelings. In the meantime, I’ll stick to coffee and beer.