Transcript of AE 1329 - 10 British Culture Shocks After Migrating to Perth, Australia

G'day, you mob! Pete here! Welcome to this episode of Aussie English. Today we are going to be reacting to the video Moving to Australia: Ten Things That Shocked Us About Moving to Australia from the UK, from the channel Sarah Bolson. So go check them out. Don't forget you can listen to this episode on the Aussie English Podcast for free as well. It's on Spotify, it's on Apple Podcasts anywhere you get your podcasts. Besides that, where are my headphones?

We are going to tell you about our top ten shocks or things that were unexpected for us since moving from the UK to Perth, Australia. So number one, there is a niche shop for absolutely everything. So we knew that we weren't going to be able to rely on online shopping or specifically Amazon as much as we did back in the UK. But what we weren't expecting for that to mean is that the shopping culture has developed into the fact that there is literally a shop for everything barbecue. Shop, shops specifically for barbecues. A tennis shop, just for .. tennis only sportswear.

Wait, this is weird. This is weird. What?

Window tinting. The shaver shop, which specialises in men's grooming tools.

I don't understand, these are all normal things, right? Like, they're just stores for very specific things. Do you not have these in the UK?

It's just a bit of a shock when you're used to going to big Tesco for everything. You can just get everything at Big Tesco. But here. Definitely not.

You have to fill me in on Tesco. I know that's a large mall, sort of store, thing in the UK, but I don't know much beyond that. Is it like Costco? How does it work? Obviously they have loads of shavers there, but is it just a one stop shop for everything?

Number two, this may actually be the biggest shock that we had. The fuel prices are so weird here. It's not like you have a set price.

Oh, lie down guys. Sorry, sorry. Batteries ran out. Just have to do without it for this one.

And every day it will go up a little bit. Maybe go down a little bit and generally follow trends here. What it does is on a Wednesday, the price is set. That's set at its highest price. And then slowly over the week, it will slowly go down every day until you reach Tuesday, where it's a massive discount on the Wednesday price. It's really quite strange.

I don't know if it's that simple, but it does drive us nuts as Australians, just the fuel price constantly fluctuating. I'm pretty sure it's, what is it called again? The rocket and feather, is that it? So when oil prices go down, it's like a feather falling for the price that you actually pay, where they lower it very slowly. But the moment that fuel prices go up, they shoot the price of fuel up that they've already purchased and have in Australia to match that. So it's just constantly a win win for the petrol companies. It drives us frickin nuts because it is that thing of how come also, every Wednesday in the middle of the week when a lot of people are filling up fuel, you just arbitrarily decide to increase prices. And the same for weekends. It's usually, I think, a Saturday or a Sunday. The prices will also go up. It's a game and it's done for them to make as much money as possible. If you want to go to good fuel stores where the prices are cheapest, I think is at APCO and Ampol, I think it's those two that typically have the lowest prices. But the caveat is it's because they have stores selling food and other stuff that is probably marked up disproportionately to recoup the difference in how much they're discounting their fuel prices.

And to show you exactly what we mean, I conducted a little experiment. So I cycled past the same petrol station every day and every day this week I have stopped and just taken note of the fuel prices. So today's Wednesday. Monday we were sitting at 171.9.

Shell is probably one of the most expensive places to get fuel in Australia. They always seem to have prices through the roof. Bp and Shell. Brutal.

The next day, Tuesday, I cycle past and we are down to 162.9.

Funnily enough, diesel is the same.

Australian cents per litre. So today is Wednesday. The new fuel price today. And my goodness, the price is 213 cents per litre. 213 cents per litre. That is $0.51 more than it was yesterday.

Yeah.

I didn't even know that there was going to be a new form of anxiety in my life. And that anxiety is the fuel light coming on on a Wednesday.

It's pretty nuts, right? Because I guess you would imagine if you bought like 100l of fuel, you would be paying an extra 50 bucks based on that $0.50 a litre increase. I think the main trick is work out locally which day has the lowest rate on a weekly basis, and try and always fill up on that day if possible.

Number three. It's the dry heat. Everyone talks about the dry heat and about how different it is to, well, I wouldn't say a wet heat, but a humid heat. It is a lot different. I feel like 40 degrees here is really hot. It feels like you're in an oven, but then a dry heat at 25 with a little breeze actually feels quite cool. It's not like 25 degrees back in the UK where that feels quite oppressive and really humid and muggy. Here it's 25 degrees and it's sort of nice, pleasant with a bit of a breeze.

This is what I never get. My wife always complains about the heat here. She's from like the tropics in Brazil and just hates it. And I'm like, back home it was 35 degrees every day and like 100% humidity two degrees south of the equator. And yet here you complain because of the dry heat in summer. I'm like, it's great. I love it because even if it's 40 degrees, you can go outside and as long as there's wind, you can sweat and it dries almost instantaneously and you cool down. Whereas if you go to Queensland and it's like 35, 40 degrees in that humidity, it is just brutal. I think Australians down south here actually, by and large, enjoy the dry heat because yeah, it just dries you off. It dries you off in the heat, makes you feel cooler.

A little side note, I like the Perth humour around dry heat or everything is dry, so it might be crowded in Perth, but at least it's a dry crowded.

There might be a little bit of traffic, but at least it's. A dry traffic. Number four. We are going to talk about birds. Ornithology. Ornithology. What's that? Ornithology? It's about birds. This is an ornithological point then.

It's funny she mentions that. Something cool to note is that the genus for platypus is Ornithorhynchus. I believe I have to double check that now. Did I get that right? Yeah. Ornithorhynchus anatinus. Anatinus. And it's because it has a bird like bill. Some extra knowledge there for you guys. That's a bit of fun.

So we just are absolutely fascinated by the birds here. From the little fairy wrens.

Oh, they're so beautiful. The blue ones.

.. National park. The noisy rainbow lorikeets. Noisy. Noisy rainbow lorikeets, we got kookaburras on our in our back garden. Black cockatoos. White cockatoos. Rainbow bee eaters.

Wow.

Miners. Noisy miners. Even the magpies. Yeah. Quite cool here.

Oh, they got weird looking ones! They're different from ours in Victoria.

I think they're sketchy, I think..

Sketchy!

A pair of magpies. I think they've got some sort of cunning and devious plan that they're about to enact.

Magpies do. They tend to give you eye contact. So when you're walking around you will see magpies out and about on the ground. They tend to not be afraid of you as much, especially in populated areas where they're used to people. They'll give you eye contact and you can see that the cogs are turning in there and you're just like, what do you want, man? What do you want? What are you looking for? What are you, what are you after?

And from the very first morning where I sat there being interrupted by crows trying to do the video intro. See, what, you know. See what's happening out and about at 6:00. And honestly, it's like from that very first morning, I just knew as the crows were sat there talking to us that, oh, they're ravens, aren't they? I could just tell that we were going to be fascinated by the birds here. Whilst we were talking about that first morning, point one was the ravens. The next point, which is number.. Five. Five, on our list today, is how early everyone gets up here.

Well the sun rises at like five..? I think even earlier! I think it might be 4:30 in the middle of December.

Oh my god.

Sunrise is really early, so everyone gets up really early and the day starts at 5:00 in the morning. Everyone's out for a run. Everyone's out for a swim, which is delightful. The coffee shops open at like 6 a.m., which is great, but. It's almost like you need a system where the clocks shift forward by an hour in the summer? Who would have thought of something like that? I don't know...

She's referring to daylight savings, so we have that on the East coast here, guys.

Next up on the list we are going to talk about four wheel drive culture. So it struck us when we landed that every other car seems to be a Toyota Land Cruiser. And then you've got all the other four wheel drives that are hanging about, but particularly the number of Land Cruisers that are around. So again, to show you exactly what we mean, and also to test our every other car theory we are-

There was one that just went by in the background.

When you go on a little drive. So we're currently on the West Coast Highway. So the road that runs up the coast and we are going to set a timer for ten minutes, driving up the West Coast Highway and take a tally of the number of Land Cruisers we see. And for clarity, this is going to be anything that says Land Cruiser on it. So that could be a Prado, it could be a Troopy, it could be the weird ones with the flat bit at the back. So anything that's-

Utes?

Says Land Cruiser on it is going to count. So here we go. It's quite stressful. It is. One, two. Three, six.

Jesus.

Yeah. 45. 48. 49. So that ten minute drive, we saw 49 Land Cruisers.

Oh my God.

So maybe it's not every other car, But I don't know. Let me know what you think.

It is, one of these common things, I guess we just take for granted the fact that young men in particular, have the hobby or interest of four wheel driving and camping. You will see that quite often. They are also so many tradies who are young men who end up with these cars because they're tax deductible, so they end up with, you know, huge four wheel drives. And it's a cultural thing where I think young men like that really get into quite often camping, fishing, you know, four wheel driving. It's a very blokey kind of thing that we do in Australia. And you'll have to let me know, do you guys do this overseas? Do you have some sort of equivalent where you guys end up with vehicles of a certain type or nature? Because it is funny that if you were to think about other cultures, like migrants that come here, like you don't see the same kind of interest in four wheel driving, it's a very Australian, young, male, blokey dominated kind of hobby. Yeah. And I think you'll see Land Cruisers because they're so reliable. They're cheap to repair. They're Toyota, they're very, very reliable. And they just don't conk out. They just keep going. It was funny. I had a lesson recently with an Indian student and he was telling me, I just bought a new car and I was like, Camry. And he said, how did you know? And I'm like, Indians and Camrys, man, culturally, for some reason, you guys just seem to only get Camrys. Like this is a stereotype, obviously. And he's like, I know everyone I know who's Indian has a Camry. And I'm like, clearly you guys just cottoned on to the fact that Toyota Camrys, they're reliable, they're cheap to repair. And so anytime another Indian mate you meet says, I need to get a car, you just say, get a Camry, get a Camry.

So we're now on the Mitchell Freeway, which most persons will recognise. It's a pretty major freeway around Perth. Um, and I just thought I'd comment on the general driving attitude. They tend to stick to the speed limit.

I'm laughing here because it couldn't be the opposite here in Victoria. And this is something my wife pointed out to me when we were she got her license only a year or so ago and she's driving around. She's like, why does everyone always zoom past me doing ten 20km above the speed limit? Why are they in such a rush? And I'm like, don't know. But that's why we have speed cameras everywhere. That's why you see people getting pulled over all the time. I feel like Australians have a bad habit of speeding. It's interesting if it's a different culture in Western Australia, where apparently everyone sticks to the speed limit, I have a feeling that, I don't know, maybe they're speeding, maybe they're the ones that are driving too fast and they're like, God, everyone else is driving so slow.

I've got my cruise control currently set to 100, which is the speed limit, and apart from the odd car, I'm basically sticking with all of the traffic.

So this never happens to me. I will stick it on 100 or slightly above, because I know that my car's odometer is slow for the actual speed that it's doing. So anytime it's at 100, it's actually doing something like 93. So I'll quite often stick it at where I think about 100 is and everyone just overtakes me.

That is quite a bit culture shock moment, because back in the UK we had the sort of 10% rule, which is you can go 10% above the speed limit.

So really that's a rule.

On motorway speeds. That's a fairly significant portion of the speed limit and not get in trouble.

Doesn't that just shift the speed limit up 10%? Isn't that really what you've done? You might as well just say that there's no 10% rule, and the speed limit is 10% higher than we otherwise have it.

You're speeding. Fines start a lot earlier than I was doing three kilometres.

I think it is three kilometres above the speed limit if you do that. So if you're in 100 zone, you're doing 103. Or maybe it's you have to do over that. You have to do 104. That's when you get fined. So it is yeah. There isn't that much leeway.

I think that leads to less people speeding.

And, you know, it leads to people slowing down when they know speed cameras are coming up, especially if they're fixed ones or if people are flashing the lights at them because there's a parked car with speed cameras or police up ahead. So I think there's more of that that happens. People still speed. They just slow down when they think they're going to get caught. So don't get like like.

People whizzing past you. Yes. Like if somebody is going faster than you, they're.

Like creeping past you. Exactly. Yes. You obviously you get the odd person, the odd maniac who's going to go down the highway, but on the whole, someone will very slowly go past you.

I always love that line. Is that George Carlin who says something like.

Have you ever noticed when you're driving that anyone who's driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone driving faster than you is a maniac?

Point number eight every cafe Ubuntu is excellent. I haven't had a bad coffee yet in Perth, and I know that there's some quite fierce rivalry between different cities and Aussies to where the best coffee is. I can't comment on where the best is, but I can tell you the coffee here is really good.

Before, like in the UK, if we were going to go out for coffee, we would do a lot of research. We would look on TripAdvisor, we'd look at Google reviews to make sure where we're going was actually really good, but we just don't need to do that here. Even when we were doing our big, long ten hour drive to Esperance, just pull over on the side of the road in the middle of absolute nowhere.

Good coffee, it's true.

Pretty much everywhere in Australia. It's easy to find it. That doesn't mean to say that there are no places where you can get shit coffee. It is just a lot less common because I think there is just so much competition for really good quality coffee, and it's easy to do. Get an espresso machine. Get good beans. Don't overcook the milk. Don't pour the espresso too fast. You know, grind it correctly. It's easy to do this well if you know how to. And the competition has just led to good coffee being everywhere. It's just really funny because there are definitely places that they'll mess up one aspect to the coffee. They'll make it too hot, they'll pour it too fast, they'll burn the milk, they'll do something. And it gets to the point where, you know, like, you know, almost instantly if you get a bad one and you'll just be like, what the fuck? Like, like the number of times my wife and I have pulled in somewhere random or gone through, you know, a random drive through coffee place, and she'll get the coffee and just be like, what the hell? Like, what the hell? Like, almost pissed off, and I'll taste it and be like, I mean, it's not awful, but it isn't what we're used to. You know, your expectations are now up here.

Number nine, we are going to.

Talk about.

Drinking cans sizes. So here we have I've sourced.

A tiddler.

A British size.

A little tiddler drinking can.

He's tiny.

Jamie is now going to show.

Us an Australian.

Size drinking can.

This is one of.

Those things I think. I remember having reverse culture shock after coming back from the US. I went to the US on a holiday in like the late 90s with my parents. My family and I remember all the cans were so tiny over there. I think the bottles to the Coke bottles, sprite bottles, whatever it was, were really thin. I think they were 500ml, 450 mil, whatever it was. And then you get back to Australia and there's 600 and you're kind of like, oh, I missed the chunk. You know, I missed the I missed the girth of these bottles and cans. What the hell? What the hell, America. I thought you guys were the land of the. Everything is oversized. And I would have thought the same about Britain. So it's funny that we have these bigger ones. And you can still end up too. With even bigger cans, you can get like 450ml cans that are like another inch or few centimetres taller as well.

They aren't the same size. What's that about?

I think it was our first night. Like literally when we landed, we needed something to eat, so we popped down to Red rooster and we got two cans of drink with our meals. And I looked at it and went, this is bigger than I expected.

You're welcome.

Giggity giggity.

But not massively bigger, but definitely noticeably bigger.

It's larger, but it's not unpleasant.

So Australian canned sizes are 375ml.

Yep.

And we would be more used to a 330ml can.

Ah, I'd feel jibbed.

It's amazing how just small things like this throw you off. Especially when drinking alcohol and beer, because the beer bottle sizes are still 330ml. So here we are. One of us will be drinking bottles. One of us would be drinking cans, thinking we're getting through the same amount. But no, the person who's drinking the cans has a far better deal.

One of those things you'll notice too, if you get hipster type beer. The cans sizes vary all over the shop. I don't know how they decide, but they they'll be small ones. They'll be fat ones, thin ones, tall ones. They seem to not be a consistent 375ml size with those kind of niche brewery type beers. I've noticed that at Dan Murphy's, when I go and check those out, I'm always like, God damn these sizes all over the shop. The cans are all different sizes and they just don't stack evenly. Or if you get a mixed pack and you chuck it into a six pack type thing, you sort of like, why are they all wonky? You know, they don't match up.

Number ten.

Here we go.

Last part of the list. And that is why on earth it took us so long to make the decision to come out here.

Oh come on guys. Like, that's the 10th one? How amazing it is? Come on.

Because it is so fantastic. The weather's great, the food's great, the coffee is great. I mean, everything's just been great. So what was all the fuss about? Yeah, and.

I think, I think the point is, I think we were both bracing a bit for some negative feelings or a bit of why have we done this? Have we made the right decision? And I think we're very, very fortunate. And I know this isn't the case for everyone, but we're very, very fortunate that we didn't experience any of that.

I thought they were going to say that we didn't go to the East. Maybe this is just Perth, guys. Does Perth just rock? I've never been. I need to go. It's almost like it must be another country. It seems like everyone abides by the rules. Loads of birds, loads of animals and it's just the most amazing thing ever. So yeah. Anyway, let me know what you guys think down below. Youtube reckons you're going to enjoy this video next and I'll see you there. Tooroo!