AkBill said:
The people are all secretly racist? I spent a year working in Australia and half the people in our company were from various asian countries, it seemed quite multicultural to me. I never found anything like the racisim you get in Argentina against people from Peru/Bolivia.
In one expensive apartment building I was living in, I brought a girl from Peru home at about 2am - this is a friend of mine, studies at university, works, nice family - but clearly from Peru with dark skin.
By 1pm the next afternoon I had the manager of the building telling me he had recieved several complaints about the 'type of people' I was letting into the building, and I should watch my back because word had got around and my dear neighbours were extremely pissed off at me.
Does this make Argentinians 'hideously backwards' ??? So why are you here?
Let me tell you one thing: Racism that you get in countries like Germany or Holland is to your face, they won't pretend that they like you- generally speaking, you will know when they don't. Australians are extremely friendly, loud and obnoxious at the same time, they hate Poms (English), they hate Yanks (Americans), they obviously don't like Muslims, hate the Asians... yet they still pretend that everything is fine, they are your best mates. Then you try and look for work : Do you have any Aussie work experience? 10 years international whatever experience means nothing there, did you go to school in Australia? They won't tell you but do you speak English with an Aussie accent?- which is, by the way, the most irritating accent ever. Do you have a Western name? Your CV will go straight into the bin if you are a Wing Shong Liu. Or you will be lucky to get a job cleaning toilets or waiting tables with your several masters degrees. You will never know about racism if you come from a Western background, because you won't be discriminated.
Just google it, you will find hundreds of posts on racism there, from people that had enough! I lived in many different countries all my life, never seen anything like in Australia, ever! And I had a good life and a job, was only observing what was going on. I have 3 years of London experience, in the worst economic climate migrants get 10 times better opportunities in London than they ever do in Australia.
I know Australia inside out, it makes me wanna puke when people come out and say it is so wonderful, it makes me even more sick they have such a good reputation abroad. Look at what they do to refugees or Aboriginals, when they are in whatever countries helping whoever to bomb the cr*ap out of whoever.
As for Argentina, there is a lot of ignorance so I have no doubt there is plenty of racism, I am not dealing with people at a deep level nor looking for a job. Not going to defend Portenos now, there is good and bad everywhere. All I can see here is they are so proud of their Italian heritage for who knows why? Chinese-Korean-Japanese = all Chinese; Arab, Armenian, Turkish = all Turco. Some sort of identity crisis.
