Now someone has been spreading rumours that my people are super offended by aluminium. That’s not…ugh, that’s not even slightly true. We’re a very relaxed people, and oh yeah, I WORK with aluminium, all the time. The amount of times the guys at work have seen me carrying aluminium ladders, or fixing roof racks and bars, or sliding under tray drawers in and out with my bare hands, and they STILL asked me at lunch today if our aluminium aversion was “a religious thing or, like, cultural?”
It’s nothing, really. If you cross the border to our neighbours, you might get a bit of push back. But we don’t have much to do with them besides having a similar country name, and just generally being better in every single way. I’m not being weird here…everyone knows it’s true. My home country has a higher human development index, greater freedoms, way more advanced technological progress and unlike them, we’re not involved in one civil war after another that means no one wants to go there.
Really just telling it like it is, here. And yeah, they don’t like aluminium, which I guess is why all their cities look like they’re stuck in the 14th century. We have high rises. Do people seriously think we got those without one of the most versatile metals on the planet?
The things people will believe are incredible. And fair enough, thinking that I felt a burning in my skin when I touched an aluminium toolbox is perhaps not the worst thing, compared to what I thought Australia was like when I first came here. Actually, an aversion to gas bottle holders is pretty tame, considering. But I learned pretty quickly that ritual kangaroo sacrifice wasn’t a real thing, and that it’d be pretty inefficient to make snags out of the limbs of bird-eating spiders. Whereas I’ve been working here for a while, so them thinking that about me seems a lot more nonsensical.
I don’t know. Cultures are strange like that, and we do have a few traditions that would raise an eyebrow or two here.
–Nnairen