AUSTRALIA - ADELAIDE

An 8-hour time difference and a country bigger than Europe awaited me in mid-July. Australia, the big orange continent, is now my home for the next five months, and Adelaide in particular will be my hometown. The distance has always appealed to me. I knew the language wouldn't be a big problem, but what are the people like? Are there big differences between the cultures and what is Australian culture anyway? These were the questions I was asking myself just before I left. I've been here for over a month now and I've already got a lot to tell you. So, this blog is about the first cultural differences I've experienced so far.

At the beginning of this adventure, everything was as expected, the language was not a big obstacle and the people dressed roughly like us. But after the first few days, I noticed a big difference. The friendliness and passion with which Australians go about their work. Be it the taxi driver on the first day or the elderly lady in the supermarket who will even pack all your groceries into bags and always smiles. No matter where you look, people don't just work here to earn money and wait for the weekend to finally come so that they can then live "properly", they work for the joy of it, because about 70% of their life is spent working and they want to enjoy that 70%. This is what fascinated me so much that I am determined to take this aspect with me for my future.

As well as the friendliness of the people, I also noticed the more negative side of Australia. The problem with the Aborigines. Especially in the cities we often met Aborigines who were not very friendly or even drunk. You can usually find them in large groups at the edge of parks. Before I came to Australia, I knew that Aborigines were still a big problem and that integration and coexistence didn't work everywhere, but I didn't know that it was such a big and visible problem. Somehow you felt guilty when you saw these groups carrying just a few things and illegally drinking a bottle of vodka in public. Guilty because Australia is actually their country and you're just visiting, but because of the past and everything that's happened, you know that a lot of harm has been done to these people. Sometimes I felt like you could see their hatred for anyone who wasn't from them. Nevertheless, it was interesting to see how other cultures collide in Australia, which I was able to experience very well, especially in the first two weeks at university. Apart from the Aborigines, Australia is a great mix of cultures from all over the world. For example, some of the people in my studio were of European descent, from Greece, Finland and many other countries. So they all had some connection to Europe, but almost 90 per cent of these students had never been to Europe. I told them about Italy, France and especially about the mountains in their own country. And in return, they told me all about the must-see places around Adelaide.

In many other conversations, I have asked various fellow students what Australian culture actually is, and they have all said more or less the same thing: there is no longer one Australian culture. It's the many different cultures that make up Australia, including the behavior, the buildings, and the food. When it came to food culture, they listed everything they could think of, from Chinese to the typical American burger, except for Vegemite, a very salty Australian spread, almost everything had been integrated into Australia from other countries. After this experience, I was glad that we have real Austrian food at home, but also glad to have so many different food cultures in one country and to be able to taste them.