5. Cultural Issues
While superficially – in terms of language, day-to-day affability, appearance, and basic manners – Angelenos may appear to be very similar to Australians, after a while the differences become quite striking. The longer I spend here the more alien it becomes.
I’ve added a few little notes that may help you to find your traction a little easier/not make a tit of yourself/be accidentally racist.
TERMINOLOGY
Australian words that mean something different and should be used with caution:
Cracker – it’s not appropriate to say “I’ve had a cracker of a day.” Is a word for a white slave master/neo-nazi.
Dickhead – this pretty much means the same thing to Americans, but doesn’t pass as a term of endearment. If you tell a friendly acquaintance: “Hello dickhead.” They will assume that you are, in fact, describing them as a dickhead.
Bin – try ‘trash.’
Boot – try ‘trunk.’
Thong – keep calling them thongs though, it’s funny.
Chips – More likely to get crisps than fries, and surprisingly a lot of restaurants serve chips of the non hot variety which is honestly just weird.
Entrée – In America the entree is the main dish not the ENTRÉE, Americans call what we call the entrée the “starter,” which clearly makes a mockery of the French word for ENTRY...
Lollies – Candies.
“Couldn't care less” - “Could care less”
Midday – To Americans this is an imprecise time between 11am and 2pm. It doesn’t mean 12 noon. They are a ludicrous people.
Roommate – This means housemate. It doesn’t mean you will actually share a room.
Jail / Prison - These are different places. Prison is a lot more serious. If you get done drink driving in LA you'll spend the night in jail and cop a $10,000 fine (sidenote: RBTs don't exist here, or I've seen about three in five years, but shit is higher consequence if you do get caught). If you accidentally kill someone and get charged and convicted of negligent homicide you'll get a few years in prison.
Light beer - it isn't low alcohol it's low calorie! Like diet coke.
COFFEE
Coffee in LA is almost certainly not as bad as you fear, but is definitely not even close to as good as in Australia. It’s also expensive. With tip, the standard for a good latte in LA is $5.50, and might be as high as $6. I’m a religious cappuccino drinker myself but in ~70% of good coffee places here they will think that a cappuccino and latte are the same thing, just one is in a bigger cup - it’s complete and unadulterated lunacy.
At a diner type place the coffee may well be as bad as you fear. Half and half is half cream half milk (not half milk half skim which I thought for ages), and cream will often mean packets of powdered cream which is something akin to satan’s cocaine (Which would obviously burn the nose without ever getting you high.). Usually you’re best off asking for milk or half and half in those sorts of places. Restaurant coffee is usually completely shit. In most parts of town you will be able to find a decent coffee. Coffee Bean, Starbucks, and Peets are all awful. Groundworks and Blue Bottle are both quite good. If Starbucks is your only option, get a caramel latte or something like that. Their dessert style drinks are a lot more drinkable than their basic coffees which are always scaldingly hot. When in doubt and especially if dealing with an automated coffee machine do a vanilla latte.
TIPPING
This is one of the weirdest things for Aussies. It’s completely outside of our wheelhouse and we tend to be notoriously shit tippers. As a rule, I personally do:
20% for any waiter type restaurant, if the service is great. If the service is whatever, or the bill pretty large, I’ll kind of round towards 20%. So, for example, if the bill was $174, I’d usually tip about $34, if the service was great, I’d tip $36. If it was a $27 bill with kind of nothing service, I’d probably tip $5, if it was good I’d tip $6. You really shouldn't ever go much below about 15% though – it’s possibly the only wage they’re getting, and it’s very insulting. Some people just double the tax. I work off the total.
$1 for coffee.
$1 for beer, wine.
$2-3 for cocktail.
$1 for take out.
$3 to the driver for food delivery (doordash, caviar, uber eats, postmates, etc... this may be too little, I got called out for not giving 20% to the driver. Am canvassing opinions).
Uber/Lyft – I tip a buck or two if they’re great (I might be a shit tipper with this, I asked a few local friends their opinions and got split down the middle - some don’t tip at all, some tip 20% - am still a little unsure on this one, California has just passed some laws against Uber’s classification of drivers as “Independent Contractors“ and the prices have been going up noticeably, so I’m inclined to stick by my original statement, but am open to persuasion otherwise).
Eating: Standard Costs (tax Excluded) - USD $$$
Rice and curry = $17
Burrito = $8
Taco = $3.50
Cocktail = $13
Draft Beer = $6
Burger & Fries = $8-16
Milkshake = $7
Sandwich = $8-14
Ramen = $11
Sushi roll = $9
In most restaurants your:
Starters = $8-18
Entrees/Mains (see terminology above) = $18-35
TAX
Maddeningly (incredibly maddeningly!) tax is almost never counted on a menu. It means that when you factor in tipping you almost never have any fucking clue as to what things actually cost. As an example, you might see a milkshake for $7 at a cafe, but when you get the bill with tax it's now almost $8. Then, think about the server who was really nice, and kinda cute, and who was showing you pictures of her dog Mitzi. Then my friend you are tipping AT LEAST $2 and your casual decision to just skip in for a cheeky midweek milkshake has just cost you $10 USD.
SERVERS
When you enter a cafe or a bar the host will seat you and then “your server” will be your waiter. Aussies always ask the host to get the drinks started and this is always a faux pas: “Ok, I'll tell your server for you.” the host will reply (perhaps frostily). Six times in ten the server will then come across looking a bit harassed. It's a really dumb system but my understanding is that the host will be on a different payment schedule and servers don't usually pool tips. Another thing to be mindful of is if your server comes over and tells you they're clocking off, then you should offer to settle up the bill. Otherwise they're either waiting around for you to finish or they’re not getting your tips. Brutal.
DATING
This is one of the most bewildering (and potentially heartbreaking) of all the cultural shifts for ozzies in LA. Multi-person-dating isn’t frowned upon at all here. Until you have “the talk” and are “exclusive” it’s generally considered to be quite acceptable to be going out and dating/hooking up with other people. “The talk” may very well not happen until six months, or even a year+ in. That isn’t to say that you should discuss other people that you’re dating with the person you’re out with - that would probably be an incredibly bad idea - just that it isn’t really frowned upon (certainly in no way like I think it would be [/used to be] in Australia), and there’s basically a city-wide don’t ask don’t tell policy/tell all your friends, just not the people you’re actually dating.
For guys, dating is very expensive and for girls it’s a huge opportunity to save a lot of dough. Blokes are generally expected to pay for everything and it’s probably only one in every four people you go on a date with where the girl will even pretend to reach for her wallet and offer to split a meal. About two in every five girls will offer to get a single round of drinks at some stage or get an Uber. The rest is on you buddy. (A surprising number of girls will expect for you to pay for all their Ubers too). Occasionally girls insist on splitting a bill, but usually they’re foreigners and/or older and successful. Sometimes after the first date it becomes a bit more egalitarian, but usually you’re looking beyond the third date for that, and I have a lot of friends with long-term girlfriends who still pay for absolutely everything (including rent in more than one case) - even when the girls have decent jobs.
I’ve copped a bit of flak for this, but here’s a quite sincere metric, based on four years of observations:
Reach for wallet on first date (<25%)
Offer to pay for a drink or an uber between bars on the first date (<40%)
Insist on splitting on first date (~10%)
Insist on splitting on second date (~33%)
It’s something worth guys being aware of because there are girls in LA who use dating apps as their regular meal ticket. It’s definitely a minority, but it isn’t exactly rare and I have friends who are open about it. Can be quite funny though and to be fair is a far more wholesome dishonest use of dating apps than using it to exploit the other person into sex...
DUST UPS
Fights in LA are incredibly rare in bars and parties. I’d been in LA for almost four years before I first saw a brawl aside from on the streets (and that was inside a big and moderately rowdy house party). The streets can be fucking dangerous though (as discussed in Geography). After about 11pm you really should Uber everywhere unless you’re in a safe neighbourhood you’re familiar with.
I’m not sure why bars are so much less violent here, but I have a thesis. At my old local there was once a fair old hullabaloo (helicopters and the lot) when there was a shooting. Turned out there had been a scrap in the bar, the bouncers had stepped in and sorted it out, and one of the losers of the fight had come back with a gun and kneecapped the bouncer. Guns and knives aren’t exactly rare here, and you never know who you’re stepping to, so the consequences of a stray punch are potentially much, much more severe. For whatever reason, fights and general animosity are very rare. Even in some pretty thugged out places I’ve never really felt threatened. In Australia I walk into certain bars and immediately feel my shoulders squaring and my jaw clenching as a squirt of testosterone kicks in. Almost without exception that simply doesn’t happen here.
DISTANCES & MEASUREMENTS
The yanks like to use a pretty quaint set of measurement parameters such as inches, degrees fahrenheit, miles, and pounds.
Inch - about 2.5cm.
Pound - about half a kilo.
Degrees farenheit - this is by far the dumbest. 32 is freezing and I've really only learnt the rough equivalence to American temperatures through experience (and I absolutely refuse to use it on my phone). I believe technically you need to subtract 32 and multiply by ⅝ or something preposterous. In summer daytime LA is usually around 90 (which is ~30c), winter is about 70 (which is ~20c). As a really really bad rule of thumb: 100 = fucking hot (like >35c). 90 = hot. 60 = cold. <50 = really cold. 110 = bananas (>40c, how hot palm springs gets in summer). Basically, double the temperature and add 30 if you want Americans to understand what you're talking about. As a sense of what it feels like - to me LA is like a very dry Sydney. It almost never ever rains (I managed to drive a car for two years with one windscreen wiper), hits extreme highs less often than Sydney, but is consistently hotter for longer, and gets a few degrees colder in the winter.
Yard - about a metre (3 feet).
Miles. I'm going to be controversial on this one - I love miles. I much prefer them to kilometers. I never had an especially good feel for a km. A mile feels really intuitive. A half a mile is about a 10 minute walk for me. A quarter mile is like your ideal stumble distance to a take away or a coffee. Technically a mile is 1.6 km so a km is 0.6 miles.
BUGS / INSECTS
You don't get them. It's weird.
DRESS CODE
The dress code in LA is extremely casual and absolutely ruthless. When I first moved here, I was told by a girl that the dress code for the city is “sexy caj”, as in sexy casual. To this day that remains the best description I’ve heard. Other people describe slutty boho (slo-ho), and that’s certainly very accurate of Venice, but a little less accurate of LA generally.
There is almost nowhere you won’t get in with shredded jeans and a t-shirt on, so long as the t-shirt is very cool and the jeans are very cool. Open toed shoes/sandals for blokes and shorts for blokes are the few sins of attire where doormen will regularly draw the line (but during summer shorts aren’t necessarily a deal breaker in a surprising number of places). There are a few venues where theoretically men are supposed to wear a collar, but I’ve never once seen it enforced, even in reasonably stuffy places in Beverly Hills. Even in business, you almost never see men in suits, and in most meetings guys are wearing either t-shirts or collared shirts loosely buttoned. Sneakers are fine everywhere, but they need to be cool. But courtesy of Balenciaga, cool can now mean shoes your grandfather wouldn’t be caught dead in.
For guys doormen are ruthless in a lot of places. If there’s more than one of you, you generally need to have at least one girl present. It’s a known curiosity here that Aussie men tend to roll in packs - a lot of Angelenos find it distasteful. Unless you know the doorman, if there’s three or more of you and no girls, you’re probably not getting into anywhere chic no matter what you’re wearing, or best case scenario you’re queuing for quite a while (and queuing in LA is an incredible faux pas), or buying a table.
For girls it’s a little less tricky. Aside from a relatively small number of places (mostly bottle service clubs) girls rarely need to be wearing cocktail attire and super glam dresses. But they certainly can. I have female friends who rarely don a party frock, and are almost always dressed very casually (think jeans, t-shirts) and never have a problem. I have other gal friends who won’t leave the house unless they’re done to the nines, but usually it’ll be cool nines - matching vintage looks and that sort of thing. Outside of some bits of Beverly Hills and some of the bottle service clubs (like Avenue say) it’s fairly unusual/rare and perhaps even mildly frowned upon (or at least considered uncool) for girls to be super overcooked in LA. As I understand it, it kind of suggests they come from the OC.
The whole athleisure thing has really complicated everything too. A lot of girls almost exclusively wear clothes that kind of look like they’re dressed for a yoga class. Interestingly though they’ll sometimes match it up, so in the chicest of nightclubs you’ll get things like track pants/sweat pants (but fashiony ones) matched with pretty glam and revealing tops and heels. When in doubt, panic. But don’t stress too much. LA is more about who you know than what you’re wearing.
For blokes, when in doubt, always choose a rock and roll look over a dress shirt that your aunt might buy you (eg. choose a plain white t-shirt and a denim or leather jacket if you’ve got one, or in my case a very loud patterned shirt, jeans, and sneakers - but try and make your colours match). For girls, unless you’re explicitly heading to Weho and somewhere glam like Delilah (where all bets are off - go as glam as you can and have fun with it - fur, silk, chainmail - make it count), I’d generally advise you to just go for something like denim shorts, cool sneakers, and a tee in the day, and either jeans and a chic top, or a cute fun dress in the evening. Think sexy caj. It’ll get you in everywhere.