Holiday Ramblings #1 - Travelling Innit

When I walk into school in 39 hours and 16 minutes, I will great my friends with a friendly hello, a witty insult, a big hug – no, not a hug. Can’t be publicly displaying that affection can we? – followed by “What’d you get up to?” in which my friends will reply “Travelling innit.” or something of the same sense in their own way. It is a part of international life we have all become so accustomed to. The human traffic (not trafficking) which we all partake in allows us to flow freely between different countries, cultures and communities.

With that in mind, a simple Googling of the word ‘community’ provides you with ‘a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common.’ That being said, it is indubitable that in my travelling to nations Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, England, and Australia in the span of two months has allowed me to infiltrate a plethora of communities (regional and beyond). That which I’d really like to touch on is the wondrous Australia, my home country.

When I was looking up the topics we’d covered in this course in my holiday stupor, I came across an explanation of ‘Language and Communities’, including the statement ‘one could argue that a community is defined by its use of language’, getting me thinking about the strange feeling I got just a few days earlier. I was walking down busy Adelaide streets following a trip to Coles for Australia-exclusive lollies (candy) and was amazed by something so simple: the fact that everyone chit-chatting on benches and bumping shoulders with me whilst talking into their ear whatchamacallit was speaking English. This is something I would’ve considered oh so ordinary three years ago but fascinates me today following my international studies.

Coming back to that statement, this swayed my opinions on the place I live today. I have always told my Aussie mates that the UAE lacks the community that in my experience, other nations have (e.g. Australia), and that it feels like a collection of individuals acting in their own interest as a result of the get-in-get-out nature of the place. Reading that statement, many people would affiliate it with the idea of a community being formed through the collection of people speaking the same language, however following my ‘enlightening’, I viewed the same statement with a different perspective, in that UAE is a special community not made up by people speaking the same language all the time, but rather individual cultures and associated languages coming together (and using the same language) to form a functioning economy and system, thus in my opinion creating a community. It is a community unique to UAE I think; I have never seen a community more intricate, but that is what makes it so beautiful. From now on, I won’t spout rubbish about the lack of a community, but focus on the crazy, crazy beauties of this strange, strange place.