Trivia

Last week Will and I decided to reinstate a long-held Stone tradition and visit pub Trivia Night. We used to participate in a trivia game at least once a week or so, but hadn’t had the opportunity yet here.

Now, let it be said that I am no great prize when it comes to trivia, choosing instead to sit quietly by and pretend that I am the humble yet mastermind force behind Will’s genius. (Sooooooo not true, in case you were wondering.) Will is truly the one-man-strong cavalry of the Stone clan when it comes to the game of trivia, as he is finally able to utilize his under-appreciated gift of remembering lots of useless crap in a newly popularized pastime that has been deemed not only socially acceptable, but also rewarding for those who have no other outlet for this store of unnecessary knowledge. My primary contribution, on the other hand, usually comes in the form of remembering that someone had said something about something once upon a time, and while never exactly sure where it might lead, occasionally my aimless mental meanderings manage to jog at least one [smarter] person's memory and land us a point. All in all, however, while we were by no means undisputed champions, we Stones did okay for ourselves on the trivia front.

Until last week.

Over the last seven months we have driven on the left side of the road, had winter in July, grilled kangaroo, and eaten Lamingtons and Tim Tams for dessert, but leave it to Trivia Night to make it hit home that we are really in Australia. Who knew trivia could possibly be so different from one country to the other? Gone are the days when questions about national parks, American football players/teams, and David Hasselhoff were not only expected, but a given. Wake up, America: Australian trivia is playing by a whole new set of rules.

Sink-or-swim contests: will the Indian curried potato dumplings float in a jug of water or sink to the bottom?. Skulling (aka chugging) contests: will the poor smuck who volunteered to chug the Indian curried potato dumplings with his pants around his ankles be able to keep them down or not? Bogan Bonanza: a Price-is-Right-like competition in which you have to guess the price of a junker based on its actual classified ad. I said $500. Others said $3500. Of course it's $3500, because everything's absurdly expensive in Australia. Karaoke interludes: there's only one possible, painful meaning for that.

All part of Australian trivia.

But wait, there's more!

Not only were Will and I flailing in the unknown seas of trivial despair, left to navigate these unfamiliar, unwelcome additions to the game that we had come to know and love, but when it finally came time for the actual questions, we realized we would suffer no better fate. All sporting questions were hopeless, as they only pertained to footy, cricketers, and famous yacht races (to which we responded, "Who knew there even were famous yacht races?"). Music, a category Will normally excels at, turned out to be no better than sports once we realized that one-hit-wonders that made it big in Australia didn't necessarily find their way across the Pacific. Even the one question actually pertaining to America--a celebrity baby photo of a mini-Obama on a tricycle--turned out to not be recognizable to these particular American expatriates (maybe it's because we haven't been watching the news as much lately???).

Australian Trivia Night was an interesting adventure in a sort of detached, Discovery-Channel-esque, bird-watching way. To the casual observer, Australian culture is very similar to American (I mean, they actually have trivia nights, for one, which is more than I could probably say for Beirut or Bangladesh, among other countries). Only when you get a little deeper, dig a few centimeters below the surface, do you realize that this is a different culture, with different influences and values. Cricketers to the American football stars. British boy bands that never aired a single song on American air waves but hit it big here. Crappy Australian TV shows to, well, crappy American TV shows. But different crappy TV shows. Except for Two and a Half Men, which is the same crappy TV show playing in both countries.

It's important to appreciated these nuances in culture. It's what makes Australia the amazing country that it is, not the UK or the USA's little brother that it sometimes gets the rep for being. But I guess we're also really lucky, because when it comes to adjusting to a new country, it's nice to know that the biggest differences are, well, still rather trivial.