20 Ways You Know You’re An Australian In New York
By Kat George
1. Every now and then you smell something exactly like sausage rolls then you realize there are no sausage rolls in New York, which strikes you with a deep, difficult to shake, melancholy.
2. Whenever your mum asks what you want in a care package the first words out of your mouth are either “BBQ Shapes” or “Tim Tams” (because let’s be real, there’s two kinds of people in this world: BBQ Shape people and Tim Tam people).
3. You have a mental rolodex of every other Australian in New York, most of whom you met here rather than in Australia.
4. Despite 3, you are fiercely defensive that all Australians in New York DON’T actually know one another (they do).
5. You have had approximately 7,892 lengthy, in depth conversations about visas.
6. You have spent approximately all your money obtaining said visas.
7. You hide your vegemite from your roommates because that shit is more precious than gold.
8. When you see a stranger pull out a red tube of Paw Paw in public you feel weirdly connected to them, like family.
9. You’re annoyingly smug about the free health care and education in Australia, but you still don’t want to live there.
10. You can mentally calculate the time zone in at least 6 different cities in a split second.
11. Toby’s Estate.
12. When you saw The Wolf of Wall Street in theatres you told your American friend, no less than 3 times during the course of the movie, that Margot Robbie is an Aussie.
13. You have, shamefully, stood in the middle of a group of people at a party and proclaimed, in your thickest Australian accent, “A dingo ate my baby” so people could laugh at your expense.
14. You have a sofa bed to accommodate the constant flow of your vagrant friends and family visiting from Australia.
15. You’ve started saying things you never said before, like “crikey” and “mate”, just to increase your novelty amongst Americans.
16. You miss going out for Greek food. Indian too.
17. You will never, ever admit it, but when you’re in Australia, sipping on that first class latte, you actually miss drip coffee.
18. You’ve switched “jumper” to “sweater” and “footpath” to “sidewalk”, but the second you’re around other Australians you regress to your most Australian self and even drop words like “bogan”, which makes you feel like you’ve just said something illicit.
19. When you walk down Bedford Ave you hone in on all the Aussie conversations of people walking past you and pretend you’re on Brunswick St.
20. You regularly play up your accent to bum cigarettes from strangers.