There's a certain knack, I think, while travelling to correctly picking the nationality of your fellow travellers.
Is the super stylish woman walking down the street French or Italian? And it's fairly probable that guy with the bum bag and the map is from the States.
But I've found it's impossibly easy to pick out a fellow Aussie, both by sight and sound.
At the moment in France it's cooling down, the days are getting shorter and the nights cold. But only an Aussie it seems would react to this by simply pulling on a beanie and jumper, hunching against the cold but leaving their board shorts and pluggers firmly in place.
Walking around the streets of Paris I've even turned this into a game, picking out a potential fellow Australian for their unseasonable attire and walking as close to them as I can (without being, you know, even more creepy than I'm already being) to check if I'm right. So far the odds have been in my favour.
But I find it's the Aussies I can identify by their voices well before I see them that make me cringe and wish I could pull out a charmingly French phrase to hide behind.
On a recent trip to Amsterdam I had this exact experience.
I was walking down a beautiful street full of restaurants and the odd coffeeshop when suddenly, out of the darkness, came a voice yelling 'fucking this, fucking that' as loud as possible.
Now don't get me wrong, I love spending an afternoon in the beer garden of a pub nursing a beer, and can out-swear most people when I'm in the mood, but in this instance I wanted nothing more than to give the guy a swift shove into the canal to shut him up.
But it struck me the next day that if this had been a Brisbane street I would have just rolled my eyes and kept walking, or possibly, that person swearing at the top of their lungs could even be me.
Why is it that in a different context what I accept at home becomes immediately repulsive somewhere else?
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