Dominica Malcolm

I’ve been holding off posting anything new because I didn’t update about the latter part of my trip across Australia, and wanted to. I think I shall have to just write a summary of the last couple of months instead, for those not already in the know.

After Adelaide, we drove on to Melbourne, where I got to meet a number of Internet friends, and had a lot of fun with them. Then we flew to Tasmania to visit another Internet friend, who did a great job showing us around Hobart. On our last day in Hobart, Jeremy got an email to say he had a job interview in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – essentially before we were due home in Perth. So we had to decide pretty quick what we were going to do next.

We had left our car at Melbourne airport, so as soon as we flew back, we hopped in our car and drove up to Wodonga that night, which was probably about halfway to our next destination, Canberra. We met up with a few of Jeremy’s friends from school whilst in Canberra, and I enjoyed all the sights like Old and New Parliament House, the National Gallery, Floriade, and so on. I didn’t think it was anywhere near as bad as I’d heard described to me in the past, but we were only there about two days before heading on to Sydney, where we stayed with our ex-boss, and Doyle and I were very sick.

From Sydney, we said goodbye to Jeremy, as I dropped him off at the airport so he could fly to KL. He was pretty promptly offered the job, and by the time I got home to Perth (I drove home on my own, with Doyle in the back seat of the car, in only four days), Jeremy had accepted the job and had already started making arrangements for the move, including getting a real estate agent to sell our unit.

It was around the 10th of October that I got home. Jeremy was off to Malaysia two weeks later (we had sold out unit in only a week), and left me to finalise anything we had left to deal with over the following two weeks.

Doyle and I arrived in KL on November 8th, and if you recall that we left for our Australian adventure on September 15th, I think you’ll appreciate how busy we’ve been over the past couple of months.

Here are my thoughts so far of KL:
* Alcohol, cereal, milk, blu-ray movies, video games and cars are expensive, though a lot of other things like some services, public transport, taxis, clothes, shoes and furniture can be quite cheap.
* It’s very hot, humid and sticky most of the time. It’s nice when there’s a cool breeze, though.
* The wet season can be rather wet. It was not so nice for our colds when Doyle and I got stuck in the rain yesterday.
* The food is fantastic, as are the drinks.
* I love our apartment, and the furniture we’ve bought mostly from Ikea suits it very well. I’m looking forward to our things arriving from Australia so I can put them all away in their rightful locations.
* Everyone seems pretty friendly. I made friends with someone on the bus, and I’ve had help from several people when trying to get onto the bus with more than I should carry on my own.
* There are SO MANY places to shop. I honestly don’t know how they all manage to stay open!

One of things that I’ve noticed a lot when travelling the world is how cultural globalisation has affected each country. I imagine that one of the most fascinating aspects of travelling the world in the past would have been the ability to really catch not just a glimpse but an experience of each locality’s culture. The biggest problem I’ve seen with globalisation is the sense of sameness all over the world. Apart from at traditional events (for example, weddings), national dress seems to be a thing of the past in a good portion of the world. Fashion seems to be accepted across the globe. Culture and traditions seem to have become a giant mesh. Cuisine is quite possibly the least affected cultural aspect in the globalisation bid, though it has taken a rather opposite path as everything else in that cuisine has spread all over the world through restaurants.

The emphasis of the world today seems to be about creating sameness, rather than appreciating the value of different cultures and societies. While we in the Western World tend to put a lot of focus on democracy (even in countries with monarchies), who are we to judge what works for someone else? Even in Australia where our culture might be seen as largely derived from Britain, we used to have more of our own identity before globalisation sucked it up and we decided we needed to be able to produce things for the global market, rather than sticking to targeting our own people and interests. I notice this most in the film industry, but of course the industry in Australia is not so much to blame as globalisation itself, for encouraging the population to see the big Hollywood films over films they can relate to.

However, despite this, I am less concerned about the changes globalisation has made to Australian culture, where at least the majority of our fashion and cuisine, amongst other cultural aspects, has been modelled after Britain, and far more concerned with the likes of European, Asian and South American countries. Admittedly as an English speaker, it makes travelling to distant lands far easier to understand, what with English being the most widely used second language in the world, but sometimes part of the fun of travelling to another country is not being able to understand. Is the next victim of globalisation liable to be language? I mean, how many languages in the world have we already lost due to other more domineering languages?

For once I’d like to travel to another country and actually feel like I’ve left the one I started in. I don’t want to just see small differences in the culture, such as perhaps occasional different architecture or restaurants or signs in other languages. I want to see different fashion, go to an artistic performance such as a play and not understand the performance, see differing architectural styles everywhere I look, and really need to learn the language spoken by the country I’m travelling to in order to understand it. And I want it all to be genuine, not just a tourist trap.

But then again, maybe I’m not travelling to the right countries, or the right cities of those countries, or the right towns.

Please, though, people of the world – and especially America – I plead with you. Let us appreciate the artistic talents of the world, rather than dumbing everything down because you don’t think the people in your country will understand them. Stop remaking television shows from other countries in a way that you think your country will understand it better. Maybe they would be better off learning and appreciating the humour from those countries instead. Look how widely popular Monty Python was – and still is. Doesn’t that tell you that Americans can appreciate British humour without having to remake The Office (as an example)?