Until I moved to Europe, I assumed that people randomly chose the direction they moved to avoid oncoming pedestrians. In Belgium, I found myself stepping to the same side of the footpath as my counterpart almost every time. It didn’t take me long to realise that I always stepped to my left while they stepped to their right, and that both of us stepped to the side that we drive on in our home countries (right in Africa, Europe and the Americas, left in Japan, India and the UK).
Looking back, I’d rarely had the problem while in Australia and almost never in Japan, where people also drive on the left. Foreigners were rare in Japan and most foreigners in Australia were immigrants who’d lived in Australia much of their lives. The further I travelled, the more my findings were reinforced.
When I returned to Australia, I began to get annoyed at the number of people who hadn’t worked all this out and persisted in stepping to the right, and even in standing to the right on escalators. I’m only just beginning to realise that Australia is much more multicultural now than it was even 15 years ago when I left.
Rather than keeping to a single suburb, immigrants from each culture are settling wherever they can, and I’m likely to hear Japanese being spoken in almost any Sydney suburb. The same is probably true for other languages that I don’t recognise so quickly. With so many people stepping to the right, most people have no reason to know that we traditionally stepped to the left. I’m just starting to realise that’s a good thing – even if it does take me slightly longer to get where I’m going.