language barrier

Late night walk through the freezing fog. “Like Blade Runner.” We turn down all the opportunities in the park to buy pot. Here is a street where all the houses are Fifties, which must have been a firebomb hell in the 1940s. I stand there picturing it. Smoke curls up from the narrow tin chimneys […]

In the supermarket carrying my two jars of honey, because it’s been nonstop chai masala weather, I fetched up queuing behind a guy in a vinyl blouson jacket who had just unloaded his entire cart. He turned his back on me to demonstrate that there was no way he would be letting me in front […]

7

A German’s interpretation of my Australian pronunciation of flasher just yielded the phantom of the flesher: a guy who walks round with his coat open, flashing people with his flesh. Having cherished sundry other examples like “this cost fifty bugs” and “you have a great bump” I was reluctant to point out the error – […]

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In New York we had dinner with two New Yorker friends, one from Chicago, who are both broadcast journalists, and a Southern boy one of our friends had picked up in the street and they had bonded. Southern boy had on a Hallowe’en pumpkin shirt over an American flag t shirt. My German companion made […]

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Jeez, America, stop shooting each other. At least in Australia we only drown refugee babies, jail children, beat young Indigenous men to death in jail cells with phone books. I am thinking today of the Albanian security guard who came out of her way to welcome us to the Cloisters, a museum in Tryon Park […]

Feeling a bit unsettled and displaced today in unfamiliar Berlin humidity and the eventual but sudden storm, I got into a conversation with my love about Australia which seems so far away and I feel so denuded of it. I got out photos of my little cat and began to paw over them. Outside his […]

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A literal translation of the conversation that took place between me and the gorgeous dark-eyed Turkish boy working in the Turkish deli just now: Me: Hi! Can we have two pieces of that, please, to take-with? Gorgeous dark-eyed Turkish boy: Sure! Rightfully to take-with or simply for underway? Me: Oh, just for underway please. We […]