Accentuate the positive

In my last entry I alluded to a positive side-effect of the language barrier.  If I was surprised to find that I often have a hard time making myself understood to Americans, I was absolutely gobsmacked to discover that they love hearing me try.

My wife had told me that my accent was attractive:  I assumed that she was just listening to me through rose-coloured ear muffs.  But it became abundantly clear that she had not been exaggerating when we visited a local hairdressers together a couple of months after my arrival.


I don't generally speak much to strangers (those stranger danger warnings as a kid must have really sunk in).  I assume that's why I hadn't noticed this earlier.  But even I can't resist the conversational demands of a hair dresser.  The woman tackling my hair had extracted only a few words from me when I heard her colleague remark to my wife across the other side of the room that she "could listen to him all day".  Meaning, me, apparently!

Hairdressers seem particularly candid about expressing this view, but I've also heard it from others, sometimes as an aside to my wife, sometimes to my face.
 
It continues to astound me each time because as a New Zealander I'm used to thinking of myself as an ill-spoken provincial.  I assume that's because, even in the twenty first century, we look to the refined and urbane speech of southern England for our example.

But it turns out that here in the US, a lot of people can't really tell the difference between the twangy New Zealand accent and that of the English middle class.  When I first arrived I thought I might sometimes be mistaken for an Australian, but that almost never happens.   If you speak English and don't come from North America, it seems the overwhelming majority of locals generally assume you are English.

And, boy, do they love an English accent here.  You might think that after taking all that trouble to throw the British out they might go sour on the accent, but no. 


I'm certainly not complaining.  If I did they probably wouldn't understand me anyway - but they'd think it was the sweetest thing they'd heard all day.

They say TO-MAY-TO, I say TO-MAH-TO

One thing that I really didn't anticipate coming to America was the language barrier.  True, it isn't a very high barrier, but it exists and it can be frustrating.  It's especially frustrating because it's a bit like a two-way mirror: I can usually see through it as if it wasn't even there, but to those around me it is all too apparent.

This is all television's fault.  The schedules of every English-speaking country outside the US are stuffed full of American shows.  We foreigners have all been exposed to a wide variety of American accents and words for years and years.  We have no trouble understanding them and many of us even have quite an ear for different regional accents.

But the opposite is not true.  There is very little British television on US screens, and virtually none from Australia or New Zealand (but they do exist - Planet Green seems particularly fond of them).  The net result is that while I've been listening to Americans talking all my life, most Americans have never heard a New Zealander speak.  Never heard my accent, my idioms or the little phrases with which, I now realise, Kiwis pepper their speech.

Of course people here are too polite to say they don't know what the hell I'm talking about, but I'm reliably informed that many of my interlocutors are just smiling and nodding when I speak - and sometimes I catch them at it, for example if I ask a question and receive only a look of panicky bewilderment in reply.  Otherwise I wouldn't know: I can understand them and it is very difficult to remember that they can't always understand me.


That's not to say that there aren't occasions where I have trouble understanding people, but generally only with vocabulary: slang that I don't get or words whose meanings have a subtly different meaning in the US.

Linguistic differences can get in the way, but they aren't all bad.  There is an upside, which I'll get to next time.

A winter wonderland - in spring

We woke up yesterday morning to a few inches of snow, even though spring officially started here three days ago (I'm never sure who the officials are that declare the "official" start of spring, but here it is the equinox on or about the 21st of March, rather than the 1st  as in New Zealand).

My wife warned that this might happen, and it's not that surprising considering we had the heaviest snowfall of the year just a couple of weeks back.  But come on, it's spring!  Enough with the snow.

For those who hail from climes where snow is a novelty, let me assure you that the novelty soon wears off when you live somewhere that measures its snowfall by the foot.  You see they're prepared for it here.  It's not like New Zealand where a skiff of snow is enough to close the schools, shut down the roads and spend the day making snow men or admiring the transformed scenery with a cup of hot chocolate.  Here life goes on.  If it didn't nothing would happen all winter, when the snow doesn't melt for weeks.  If you don't clear it it quickly becomes overwhelming.  We didn't clear our deck off last winter and it looked something like this for ages.

Snow ploughs (or rather plows) take care of the roads, you can hear them grating along the street in the middle of the night, but each is expected to do their bit with their own yard.  For us that means the walk from the door to the drive, and the drive itself, have to be shoveled as clean as possible and then scattered with salt to melt what's left.

I shouldn't really complain.  Thanks to warmer weather there wasn't that much left to clear this time, though there was still plenty of the white stuff clinging to the lawn even this morning.  It only took a few minutes to clear off the car and shovel the debris onto the grass.  In the past I've spent over an hour out there making it safe. And Pennsylvania got off relatively lightly this winter, unlike New York which had several falls over a foot.

Anyway, things are looking up though.  As I wrote this yesterday afternoon a thunderstorm passed overhead.  That's encouraging - spring really is on the way after all.

Dining out on dining

There are many remarkable things about food in the US, not least the scale of things.  For example they have the temerity to call this a sandwich:

If you look closely you can just see the bread peeking out from beneath a mountain of corned beef, sauerkraut, Swiss cheese and thousand island dressing.  Technically I suppose the bread makes it a sandwich, but only in the way that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic.  By the way that particular combination is a Reuben sandwich for the uninitiated and it is delicious - just make sure that the bread, even token bread, is rye and toasted.  They don't have to be monstrous, that's just how they make them at the Carnegie Deli in New York City.

Big portions don't really confound me - my appetite can hold its own here - but there are lots of little things that took my by surprise.  Like the convention in restaurants that you hold on to your knife and fork between courses.  If you leave them on your plate they're whisked away and don't return, so you pretty much have to lick them clean and sit them on your napkin.  I still get caught out by that one.

My biggest restaurant faux pas so far happened after I'd already spent several months here and dined out a number of times.  What I hadn't done was to order salad - for one thing it comes out at a weird time and for another who needs salad when you're tackling with the mutant sandwich or a steak the size of a tire?

This time, though, the salad came with whatever I'd ordered.  Fine.  Then came the fateful question: what salad dressing did I want?  I should have asked for a list, that's what I usually do, but I got cocky and just went for it.  I knew what I wanted, what any reasonable Kiwi would have asked for.  "Mayonnaise" I said.

It didn't help that this was one of the unusual occasions when we were out with a large group.  As I recall the table fell silent and all heads turned in my direction.  I could sense concern for my mental health from several of my dining companions, worried perhaps that I might suddenly turn dangerous and have to be restrained.  The waitress looked faint.  Somebody repeated back "Mayonnaise..." and then added "...on salad?" with a tone of both distaste and incredulity.

Because, you see, Americans don't put mayonnaise on salad.  They put it on sandwiches, they make other salad dressings from it, like ranch or the aforementioned thousand island, but they definitely do not put it straight on salad.  If I can save one person from the humiliation of asking for mayo with their salad in a US restaurant, this blog will have been worth it.

They did bring me mayonnaise, in the end, because another thing restaurants do here is take customers wishes seriously - more on that another time.  I think it may have hurt them on the inside to do it, though.

I eventually recovered from the embarrassment.  I've even ordered salad since.  With ranch dressing, thank you.  And I always ask for a list of the options if I'm not sure what they are.

Penn's Woods

Before I left New Zealand my impending departure would often become a talking point, even with people I had only slight contact with.  Reactions were mixed.  Many people weren't sure where Pennsylvania was, and said as much; far more amusing - or perhaps worrying - were the people (more than one) who were excited that I was going where the vampires come from.

I assume (unless there's something they haven't told me here...maybe that's the reason we keep so much garlic in the house) that they were getting confused with Transylvania, the region of Romania where Bram Stoker set Dracula.  I laughed to myself but the joke was eventually on me because when I finally got here the extent of my own ignorance became clear.

It wasn't only ignorance.  There were plenty of things that I didn't know about the US and life here (there still are, and they pop up every so often to confound me), but there were also things that in a way I did know but nevertheless didn't expect.

Take that confusion between Pennsylvania and Transylvania, for instance.  They both end in -sylvania, Latin for "woods".  Transylvania is "on the other side of the woods" and Pennsylvania is the name Charles II gave to the vast region of woods that he granted to William Penn - "Penn's woods".  That should have tipped me off that there would be some trees here.  I'd also read Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, recording his hiking of the Appalachian Trail through several eastern states, including Pennsylvania.  Again, just the title should have been a sufficient hint.

And yet it came as a great surprise to find that vast tracts of Pennsylvania are covered in trees instead of, oh I don't know, rolling hills or something.  Maybe this comes partly from growing up in Central Otago, where forests are something you visit in the car.  New Zealand, too, was once largely covered in trees until farmers turned up.  Here, though, even after the farmers took their share the trees are everywhere.  There is a stand of them in the back yard and visible beyond the next row of houses are woods which stretch on and on out of sight.

These aren't evergreen forests as you find in New Zealand, either, but largely full of deciduous maples, oaks, hickories and dozens of others. I'm used to these trees as interesting ornamental plantings in parks and gardens, and I think that the very idea of millions of them growing in the wild didn't quite register before I came here.

It's not just Pennsylvania, by the way, but most of the eastern part of the US that's this way.  Outside the towns the trees generally rule unless beaten back by humans.

That's one of the reasons I'm writing this blog - to draw attention to the unexpected things about America.  Some are like the woods: the evidence was all there but I never joined the dots.  Mostly, though, it's things that Americans only rarely refer to in books, movies and TV, presumably because they are considered too mundane to mention. They can't be blamed for that: when you're so close to the action it's easy not to see the wood for the trees.

Cute, cuter, cutest

There is an episode of The Simpsons, the one where Lisa becomes a vegetarian, in which the family visit a petting zoo and see a series of three ever-cuter sheep.  As they ooh at the cutest of the three one of the other two wanders back into view and Homer shoos it away.

I've been feeling a bit like Homer recently with the wildlife out the back window.  All winter I've been happily watching squirrels, like this happy fellow.

Cute, no?  When I first arrived here the squirrels just frolicked on the hills.  Now, thanks to a liberal application of nuts to the back deck they visit several times a day for a free feed.  They've even been known to knock on glass door and beg for more.


Now all the snow has melted, and spring is stirring, I've been getting excited about the chipmunk which has been stirring along with it.  Here's a picture I took while it had lunch with me today.

OMG, how cute is that?  They make the squirrels look like lumbering giants.  They've even got go-faster stripes down each side (they must work, too, because they can move like the wind).

Never mind that on its first appearance this season the cute ickle wickle chipmunk had a dead baby mouse in its mouth, while the squirrels stick almost exclusively to plants.  Squirrels set off the cute fuzzy animal detector in my brain, but chipmunks set it off more, and I'm feeling a bit bad about that.

Mind you, I'd shoo a hundred little chipmunks away to get a closer look at one of these things.

That's a groundhog, also known as a marmot, woodchuck and Wikipedia knows what else.  In fact, looking at the Wikipedia page I'm dismayed at all the photos from people who have clearly gotten a lot closer to one with a camera than I have.  My picture, snapped last summer, might as well be of Nessie it's so grainy.

Anyway, groundhogs are about, as evidenced by the dead one I saw at the side of the road a couple of weeks ago, so it's only a matter of time.  And what then?  Like an extreme sports addict I need more and more elusive and exotic animals to feed my habit.  Maybe I'll be looking for beavers, or hellbenders.  There's plenty to choose from.

"But what," ask the poor squirrels, "about us?"

"You'd better keep up with the nuts, or we'll chew through the precious cable TV cable!"

They make a compelling argument.