I'm sure you've heard the saying, "what you don't know, won't kill you", but when you're a newbie in a foreign country, you very quickly learn that oftentimes ignorance is not bliss.
From personal experience, I can tell you that context is everything. But if you need more proof, there's this shameless Reddit thread where u/ThePlantandLentil's asked: "Immigrants/expats: What's the dumbest thing you've done or said out of ignorance once you moved to Australia?"
Here are some of the best self-confessed moments.
1. "Getting my first prescription. I went to pay and was told: 'Oh, you don’t pay here.' She meant I paid at the front counter, but I took it to mean Australia subsidised this medicine and I didn’t need to pay at all, so I walked out of the chemist without paying. Later, I talked about it to my wife, who told me I was a criminal and I went back to next day to clear it up."
2. "'Bring a plate' was not what I expected. We had to contribute a plate of food to the picnic, so bring a full plate of food, not bring an empty plate to eat from!"
3. "Spreading Vegemite as though it's Nutella."
4. "Brought in muffins to work. Got asked what I was wearing and what the muffins were for. Apparently, they had said 'mufti' which means casually clothed and I showed up in my normal suit with a plate of muffins."
5. "I remember I'd only been in Australia for two months when someone asked me 'how'd ya pull up on Sunday?' I said I got the tram there."
6. "I spent a few weeks calling schooners 'shoe-ners'."
7. "Went to the office admin lady and asked if she could give me a stiffy. I'm from South Africa and over there, we used to call 5.25' disks floppies, then the harder 3.5' disks — you guessed it — stiffies. Apparently, not so in Australia."
8. "My dad was constantly approached in shops and asked: 'Y'righ'?' He finally managed to translate that into 'are you alright?' and would answer that he was 'quite well, thank you', although he had not slept all that well the night before and were they alright?"
9. "My boss asked me how was I travelling. I was working from home and said that I wasn't travelling anywhere and was working from home. Then he laughed and said I meant how are you going. I was about to say I wasn't going anywhere, then remembered in the nick of time what he meant!"
10. "When I first moved to Australia, I asked my first roommate what 'Australian cuisine' was and where I could go to get some (thinking how when you go to a new country, you try the dishes that are made famous there). He sent me to Bunnings."
11. "My mother-in-law said she made a 'roast chook' for my first supper here. I had no idea what animal I was about to eat. I also never admitted this for years, but in my first few days, I second guessed myself again and again if Australia had monkeys or not. I didn’t want to look stupid and ask, but to me, the cry of kookaburras sounded like monkeys chattering."
12. "I told my ex-girlfriend from India that I was 'taking the piss' when I was joking with her. After that, whenever she would tease me, she would say, 'don't worry, I’m just taking your piss'."
—u/hunched_monk
13. "Those little dual tomato sauce packs that you squeeze together one handed. Awesome idea, we don't have them in England. I tried to peel the top off in front of my workmates — they watched for far too long before intervening."
14. "I asked a friend how there could be so many VIP lounges in the city (Sydney), when surely there weren’t that many VIPs. I had no idea they were pokie dens."
15. "In the UK, no matter the brand, it was a 'hoover.' It took me a while to get the Aussie vocabulary of calling it a 'vacuum cleaner'."
16. "I innocently told a Melburnian that I like Sydney. The wrath that followed caught me completely by surprise!"
17. And finally: "Someone asked me at train station years ago, 'do you have small change?' I literally took it as meaning he had a five dollar note and needed five $1 coins. Did not end well at all. He took all my dollars."
