Am I a pom?

I was in the butcher shop the other day, ordering up some meat, and the guy behind the counter says to me, "Are you a pom?"

"Pardon me?" I said.

He replied, "Are you a pommie?"

"No," I said, "I'm just a Canadian."

Pommie, as it turns out, is a partly affectionate, partly derogatory term for someone from Britain (think "Yank" for an American, or our use of the term "Limie"). While the origin of the term is still up for debate, it got me thinking about accents. Is it possible for someone to confuse a British accent with a Canadian accent? To me, the British accent is far more similar to the Aussie accent than the Canadian accent, but perhaps that stems from my own personal bias. Then there's the New Zealanders. They have a charming way of pronouncing some of their e's and i's the opposite way we do. So, for example, a kiwi would eat fesh and cheps and write with a pin. It's all quite fascinating.

Some follow up notes to earlier postings:

-I've learned a lot more about Fiji since our trip here on Air Pacific (Fiji's national airline!) and our brief journey through the Fijian countryside with Ham the taxi driver. Fiji is a military dictatorship (bloodless coup in December 2006) that has been turning over land and privilege from the more prosperous Fijian Indians (settled from India by the British in the late 1800's and early 1900's) to native Fijians. The government is also supposedly suppressing freedom of the press and imprisoning political dissidents. Sound familiar? Yet another former colony trying to find its way. While we were in the taxi Laura asked Ham, who is a Fijian Indian himself, about the government situation and he claimed that "the government is good" and they are "putting the right people in the right places." We'll never know if he meant what he said or if he was being guarded about his opinion to the two curious foreigners.

-I made my first trip to Darwin in the northern Territory last week. It is a remote outpost in the heart of Australia's tropics, about 80,000 people, claiming an amazing 52 nationalities. It was bombed by the Japanese in WWII and leveled by a cyclone in 1974. This time of year the temperature is exactly 32 degrees everyday with close to 100% humidity and a thunderstorm every night. It's an interesting place to say the least. You can see what is making the headlines there in the pictures on the right. And yes, I will be doing field work collecting fish from rivers around there in boats that are about the same size as the one in the picture. I had taken some comfort in knowing that we will often have Aboriginal guides (who hunt the crocs) accompanying us in our work, until it occurred to me that there's probably been plenty of Aborigines attacked by crocodiles in their thousands of years of shared time on the continent. As my supervisor put it, they have a long history of mutual predation.

-Finally, my monthly update of Aussie quirks:

Canada/Australia
trunk/boot
run into/prang
pepper/capsicum
maze/rabbit warren
cellphone/mobile
granny panties/nana knickers