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American mum living in Brisbane causes online controversy after revealing bizarre list of things she hates about Australia

Sky News AU

an hour ago

Sky News AU

American mum living in Brisbane causes online controversy after revealing bizarre list of things she hates about Australia

An American expat residing in Brisbane has sparked a lively online debate after listing her top grievances about Australia, including difficult shopping trolleys and a puzzling highway system. Lex, a social media content creator whose account provides an American perspective on integrating into Australian culture, posted the video to TikTok and listed her five top issues with her adopted homeland. Number one on the list was that Australian shops close their doors far earlier than those in America, with the former Houston-based mum admitting 'it was a little strange at first'. 'The shops close early here, I'm used to it, I've been here nine months, but it was a little strange at first, but I understand it, because there can be a duality with things like that'. An American expat residing in Australia has sparked a lively online debate after listing her top grievances about life down under. Picture: NewsWire /John Appleyard. The popular user then claimed in the US 'supermarkets are pretty much open all of the time'. However one user questioned, 'the shops close early where you are? Come to Victoria, the shops are open very late here'. The Brisbane mum's second bugbear was that Australian shopping trolleys are 'challenging to steer'. 'Shockingly 90 per cent of Aussies are in agreement with me on this," wrote Lex, adding she was "challenged with this nine months in'. The Brisbane mum was more confidant about her second bugbear, that being the unruly nature of Australian shopping trolleys. Picture: Bev Lacey/NCA. She conceded, 'you really have to put you body into it', with a raft of Australians taking to the comment section to encourage Coles and Woolworths to apply a generous portion of WD-40 to the aging fleet. 'You don't push a trolly here, you manage it' one person said. However another user claimed US trollies were far worse, writing "I HATE American trollys I go to Costco and it's infuriating." However, a more contentious compliant from the women was that 'Mexican food is pretty bad here' and was far inferior to that served in Texas. 'The Mexican food is not great, and I don't expect it to be great, it's just hard because in Texas the Tex-Mex is so good, I crave it'. One person said, 'the Mexican thing is true, but we're about as far from Mexico as you can get', whilst another disgruntled user asked, 'do you have a Guzman y Gomez in Brissie because that's pretty good?' "In Melbourne we have fabulous Mexican restaurants," shot back another commenter. However, a more contentious compliant from the women was that 'Mexican food is pretty bad here'. Picture: Guzman y Gomez via NCA NewsWire. The expat also unloaded on Australian motorways, and that they were almost impossible to understand. Picture: Nigel Hallett/NCA/ The expat also unloaded on Australian motorways, claiming they are almost impossible to navigate as opposed to the gigantic American interstate highway system. 'The highways here are a bit of a challenge, and I don't exactly know why, we turn around easily and take the wrong exit, and I can't figure out if it's the signage, the signage is different for sure,' the women said. 'The name of the highways aren't as prominent as Houston, the name of the highways are blatantly big in Texas and so that took me a minute. I had to get used to searching for the name of the highway which is what I was used to'. One user pointed out that 'the moment you use a tunnel in Brisbane [Google] maps no longer works', with another bemoaning that 'if you get off on the wrong exit, so often you can't just get back on! You're stuck!' Whilst admitting her last irk was 'so petty' the women was shocked that Australian restaurants and cafes make customers pay for condiments and sauces and stated this was the biggest culture shock of all. 'You have to pay for condiments here, in the states if you want 50 sauces then that's that, it goes to the other direction where it's wasteful, but yeah you have to pay for condiments here so that was an adjustment." However one follower fired back: "Surely you now need to expose how GREAT our sauce packets are? Squeeze to dispense - no ripping a packet - use again later in the meal - the best!"

She's seen the chaos of life and the quiet of death. Gordi won't stand still

The Age

an hour ago

The Age

She's seen the chaos of life and the quiet of death. Gordi won't stand still

Jet-lagged but beaming, Gordi is riding high on love for her latest release. But first we need to talk about Ginger and the goat. When we meet in a light-flooded warehouse conversion cafe in Melbourne's inner north, her song Peripheral Lover has just come out. It's only a few days since Gordi was stuck in a blizzard on the tarmac at Dallas in the US – the same city where she filmed the music video for the queer bop almost three years ago. Gordi, restless with boredom, kept herself busy during the three-hour stranding by reading the absurd text exchange of a woman sitting in front. 'She had the most enormous phone, and she was trying to text this person named Ginger who'd obviously given her some flowers,' Gordi tells me, laughing. 'She was trying to say to Ginger, 'Instead of paying you with cash, would you accept a baby goat?' And Ginger said, 'Yes.' 'That's kind of a look at the last two weeks.' The unexpected tends to follow globe-trotting musicians, but especially ones who, like Gordi, find it hard to settle for just one job. Chaos, Chris Martin and impostor syndrome In choosing music – alongside change-making and medicine – Gordi chose chaos. It has led the 32-year-old, real name Sophie Payten, to three studio albums (the third is due for release in August), life-altering work in hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic, a seat on the board of the Music Australia council and, more recently, an emotional encounter with fellow singer-songwriter Chris Martin. The Coldplay frontman was touring Australia when Payten was invited to join local artists hanging out with him. He singled her out, saying he listened to her music. 'I ended up playing [ Lunch at Dune ] from the [new] record for him, and we had this beautiful exchange where he loved the song; he was moved to tears by it,' Payten says. 'I only discovered [that] when I opened my eyes at the end of playing it.' She had closed her eyes because she was so nervous. 'It was amazing – and no one in the room thought to get their phone out to film it.' Payten spent a few hours wrestling with what she saw as the potential cringe factor of sharing the story online, but friends convinced her to post a Reel about it on Instagram. The video has since been viewed more than 2 million times. The hesitation seems typical of Payten, who is grateful and a tad bashful in the face of her success. Our lunch at CIBI, a Collingwood favourite of Payten's, is our fourth meeting. I've previously interviewed her about the grassroots live music initiative she set up with partner and musician Alex Lahey, Over Our Dead Body, and have gone along to a couple of their gigs. Loading Today, she pulls me into a hug, asking how I've been and saying, 'I didn't know it was you.' Later, as I'm getting stuck into a soba noodle salad, I say I've heard Payten is about to appear on a billboard in Times Square in New York. 'Oh, yeah, so there's actually going to be two billboards in Times Square – one for Spotify and one for Amazon Music,' she says with a shrug, smiling as I interrupt her attempts at eating CIBI's special lunch plate. '[It's] cool.' Payten breaks into a grin when I mention Peripheral Lover. Fans are loving the song, even if it is a departure from the deep, reverberating and ethereal sound they've come to expect from Gordi. Payten initially thought she would give it away, but it finally felt right after she reworked the chords. 'Right up until its release, there was a part of me which felt like, 'Are people going to think this is not me?' I had some weird impostor syndrome,' she says. Payten explains how, in high school, she would scrawl illegible song lyrics on the tiniest notepad she could find, out of fear her classmates might discover them and stick them up around her boarding house. When it came to performing at Sunday night chapel, she would pretend her own songs were written by obscure artists. 'I didn't want the kind of judgment that would come from people knowing that it was mine,' she says. 'I wanted to hear their feedback but from a more objective [viewpoint].' Payten grew up on a farm in the NSW town of Canowindra, near Orange, but went to boarding school and university in Sydney. The city is still close to her heart, as is Melbourne, where she moved for love in 2020. She now spends her time between Brunswick in Melbourne's inner north and Los Angeles. 'Brunswick actually has the highest number of registered songwriters in Australia for any suburb,' she says. '[My parents] still work the farm. I call them in the middle of the day, and they're moving pipes, or chipping burrs, or moving a mob of sheep or whatever. I feel like you'd be hard-pressed to find two other people who are closing in on 70 who work as physically hard as they do. 'I try to get home every few months, which is good because it is such an important place to me.' Payten thought music was not a viable career option until, halfway through her university studies at age 21, one of her songs – Nothing's as It Seems – was first played on Triple J. Six years later, having qualified as a doctor, she quit her job as a junior medical officer, planning to take a hiatus from medicine and tour the world again after recording her second album, Our Two Skins. But the pandemic beckoned her back home after just a few weeks, and she signed up to join the COVID-19 emergency 'surge' workforce. The time that followed became a core inspiration for her latest album, Like Plasticine. Payten says albums are a beacon of what a person's life looked like. 'It's like looking at old photographs of yourself,' she says. One picture is clear – Payten, standing alone in a room with a man, and telling him he was dying. First, a wall – then the dam burst In her final year as a medical student, Payten learnt how to certify death. For one person after another, she listened for the absence of a heartbeat, the absence of breath, and tested for responses and reflexes. She was most struck by the waxy quality skin takes on after people die. 'Throughout our lives, we constantly morph and change, and twist into all sorts of shapes,' Payten says. 'Then, at the very end, we're set in place.' The experience inspired the title of her new album, and taught her about the fragility and transience of life. It is a lesson she feels acutely now going home to the farm, when nostalgia, which she describes as 'the sorrow of homecoming', washes over her. Goddamn, the last song she wrote for Like Plasticine, explores that feeling. Payten has wound back her work as a doctor, but still does 'bits and pieces' when she can. 'Music, in a sense, gives you eternal youth in that your life is always chaos, and you never really know where you're going to be two months in advance,' Payten says. 'That is becoming more and more like a stark contrast to the people around me.' Through COVID, the gravity of dealing with life and death daily meant the songwriting 'tap' turned off for Payten. Her first instinct was to worry. 'Trying to write songs about personal stories in the face of a global tragedy is very challenging because it makes you feel self-absorbed,' she says. 'It wasn't until well into the second year of the pandemic that I took some time away from the hospital … and it just absolutely came out. I wrote eight songs in eight days for this record, having not written a song really for 18 months.' Automatic, one of 12 tracks on the record, interrogates the dissociation it takes to deliver people terrible news. PVC Divide looks at the cracks that can sometimes appear in this – in Payten's case, with a brain cancer patient she had befriended. The man was in recovery when a progress scan showed his cancer had multiplied to an inoperable point, Payten says. 'It happened so quickly and unexpectedly that when I went in to tell him, I really struggled,' she says. 'When I told him the news, he said, 'This is what was written for me.'' When a queer make-out session meets Texas farmers Despite all the morbidity, Payten still places herself as a firmly optimistic and positive person – but she's also a realist, she says. Our conversation turns back to Dallas, and to the story behind the Peripheral Lover music video. Payten was hauling around a kissing booth for the shoot in 45-degree heat in July 2022, and the clip called for queer extras who were happy to make out with each other. Loading A bunch of people showed up to take part, she says, before her team realised they had set up next to the Future Farmers of America Convention. 'We were just like, 'You know what? This is a good life experience for them that they probably don't get in Dallas, Texas, enough,'' Payten says with a laugh. She concedes she probably wouldn't spend as much time in the US if it weren't for work, given the 'wave of hate' from the country's government. Her two home cities of Melbourne and Los Angeles are 'beautiful bubbles' where she can hold hands with her partner without thinking twice, she says. But she feels deeply for other people in her queer community. 'This small community of trans people who are only asking to just exist … [are] being denied, and by the most powerful billionaires in the world. It's really quite apocalyptic,' Payten says. 'But when I feel very bleak about it … you go small, you go back to your community, and you find real connections, and you find people who value you.' The most beautiful thing about the Peripheral Lover shoot was that at the end of the day, all the extras who barely knew each other went out for drinks, she says. They created a sense of community within hours. 'I was like, 'Hell yeah.' That's the best thing about this whole process.'

Sydney Morning Herald

an hour ago

Sydney Morning Herald

She's seen the chaos of life and the quiet of death. Gordi won't stand still

Jet-lagged but beaming, Gordi is riding high on love for her latest release. But first we need to talk about Ginger and the goat. When we meet in a light-flooded warehouse conversion cafe in Melbourne's inner north, her song Peripheral Lover has just come out. It's only a few days since Gordi was stuck in a blizzard on the tarmac at Dallas in the US – the same city where she filmed the music video for the queer bop almost three years ago. Gordi, restless with boredom, kept herself busy during the three-hour stranding by reading the absurd text exchange of a woman sitting in front. 'She had the most enormous phone, and she was trying to text this person named Ginger who'd obviously given her some flowers,' Gordi tells me, laughing. 'She was trying to say to Ginger, 'Instead of paying you with cash, would you accept a baby goat?' And Ginger said, 'Yes.' 'That's kind of a look at the last two weeks.' The unexpected tends to follow globe-trotting musicians, but especially ones who, like Gordi, find it hard to settle for just one job. Chaos, Chris Martin and impostor syndrome In choosing music – alongside change-making and medicine – Gordi chose chaos. It has led the 32-year-old, real name Sophie Payten, to three studio albums (the third is due for release in August), life-altering work in hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic, a seat on the board of the Music Australia council and, more recently, an emotional encounter with fellow singer-songwriter Chris Martin. The Coldplay frontman was touring Australia when Payten was invited to join local artists hanging out with him. He singled her out, saying he listened to her music. 'I ended up playing [ Lunch at Dune ] from the [new] record for him, and we had this beautiful exchange where he loved the song; he was moved to tears by it,' Payten says. 'I only discovered [that] when I opened my eyes at the end of playing it.' She had closed her eyes because she was so nervous. 'It was amazing – and no one in the room thought to get their phone out to film it.' Payten spent a few hours wrestling with what she saw as the potential cringe factor of sharing the story online, but friends convinced her to post a Reel about it on Instagram. The video has since been viewed more than 2 million times. The hesitation seems typical of Payten, who is grateful and a tad bashful in the face of her success. Our lunch at CIBI, a Collingwood favourite of Payten's, is our fourth meeting. I've previously interviewed her about the grassroots live music initiative she set up with partner and musician Alex Lahey, Over Our Dead Body, and have gone along to a couple of their gigs. Loading Today, she pulls me into a hug, asking how I've been and saying, 'I didn't know it was you.' Later, as I'm getting stuck into a soba noodle salad, I say I've heard Payten is about to appear on a billboard in Times Square in New York. 'Oh, yeah, so there's actually going to be two billboards in Times Square – one for Spotify and one for Amazon Music,' she says with a shrug, smiling as I interrupt her attempts at eating CIBI's special lunch plate. '[It's] cool.' Payten breaks into a grin when I mention Peripheral Lover. Fans are loving the song, even if it is a departure from the deep, reverberating and ethereal sound they've come to expect from Gordi. Payten initially thought she would give it away, but it finally felt right after she reworked the chords. 'Right up until its release, there was a part of me which felt like, 'Are people going to think this is not me?' I had some weird impostor syndrome,' she says. Payten explains how, in high school, she would scrawl illegible song lyrics on the tiniest notepad she could find, out of fear her classmates might discover them and stick them up around her boarding house. When it came to performing at Sunday night chapel, she would pretend her own songs were written by obscure artists. 'I didn't want the kind of judgment that would come from people knowing that it was mine,' she says. 'I wanted to hear their feedback but from a more objective [viewpoint].' Payten grew up on a farm in the NSW town of Canowindra, near Orange, but went to boarding school and university in Sydney. The city is still close to her heart, as is Melbourne, where she moved for love in 2020. She now spends her time between Brunswick in Melbourne's inner north and Los Angeles. 'Brunswick actually has the highest number of registered songwriters in Australia for any suburb,' she says. '[My parents] still work the farm. I call them in the middle of the day, and they're moving pipes, or chipping burrs, or moving a mob of sheep or whatever. I feel like you'd be hard-pressed to find two other people who are closing in on 70 who work as physically hard as they do. 'I try to get home every few months, which is good because it is such an important place to me.' Payten thought music was not a viable career option until, halfway through her university studies at age 21, one of her songs – Nothing's as It Seems – was first played on Triple J. Six years later, having qualified as a doctor, she quit her job as a junior medical officer, planning to take a hiatus from medicine and tour the world again after recording her second album, Our Two Skins. But the pandemic beckoned her back home after just a few weeks, and she signed up to join the COVID-19 emergency 'surge' workforce. The time that followed became a core inspiration for her latest album, Like Plasticine. Payten says albums are a beacon of what a person's life looked like. 'It's like looking at old photographs of yourself,' she says. One picture is clear – Payten, standing alone in a room with a man, and telling him he was dying. First, a wall – then the dam burst In her final year as a medical student, Payten learnt how to certify death. For one person after another, she listened for the absence of a heartbeat, the absence of breath, and tested for responses and reflexes. She was most struck by the waxy quality skin takes on after people die. 'Throughout our lives, we constantly morph and change, and twist into all sorts of shapes,' Payten says. 'Then, at the very end, we're set in place.' The experience inspired the title of her new album, and taught her about the fragility and transience of life. It is a lesson she feels acutely now going home to the farm, when nostalgia, which she describes as 'the sorrow of homecoming', washes over her. Goddamn, the last song she wrote for Like Plasticine, explores that feeling. Payten has wound back her work as a doctor, but still does 'bits and pieces' when she can. 'Music, in a sense, gives you eternal youth in that your life is always chaos, and you never really know where you're going to be two months in advance,' Payten says. 'That is becoming more and more like a stark contrast to the people around me.' Through COVID, the gravity of dealing with life and death daily meant the songwriting 'tap' turned off for Payten. Her first instinct was to worry. 'Trying to write songs about personal stories in the face of a global tragedy is very challenging because it makes you feel self-absorbed,' she says. 'It wasn't until well into the second year of the pandemic that I took some time away from the hospital … and it just absolutely came out. I wrote eight songs in eight days for this record, having not written a song really for 18 months.' Automatic, one of 12 tracks on the record, interrogates the dissociation it takes to deliver people terrible news. PVC Divide looks at the cracks that can sometimes appear in this – in Payten's case, with a brain cancer patient she had befriended. The man was in recovery when a progress scan showed his cancer had multiplied to an inoperable point, Payten says. 'It happened so quickly and unexpectedly that when I went in to tell him, I really struggled,' she says. 'When I told him the news, he said, 'This is what was written for me.'' When a queer make-out session meets Texas farmers Despite all the morbidity, Payten still places herself as a firmly optimistic and positive person – but she's also a realist, she says. Our conversation turns back to Dallas, and to the story behind the Peripheral Lover music video. Payten was hauling around a kissing booth for the shoot in 45-degree heat in July 2022, and the clip called for queer extras who were happy to make out with each other. Loading A bunch of people showed up to take part, she says, before her team realised they had set up next to the Future Farmers of America Convention. 'We were just like, 'You know what? This is a good life experience for them that they probably don't get in Dallas, Texas, enough,'' Payten says with a laugh. She concedes she probably wouldn't spend as much time in the US if it weren't for work, given the 'wave of hate' from the country's government. Her two home cities of Melbourne and Los Angeles are 'beautiful bubbles' where she can hold hands with her partner without thinking twice, she says. But she feels deeply for other people in her queer community. 'This small community of trans people who are only asking to just exist … [are] being denied, and by the most powerful billionaires in the world. It's really quite apocalyptic,' Payten says. 'But when I feel very bleak about it … you go small, you go back to your community, and you find real connections, and you find people who value you.' The most beautiful thing about the Peripheral Lover shoot was that at the end of the day, all the extras who barely knew each other went out for drinks, she says. They created a sense of community within hours. 'I was like, 'Hell yeah.' That's the best thing about this whole process.'

Steph Claire Smith: Fitness influencer gives birth to daughter, reveals adorable name

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American mum living in Brisbane causes online controversy after revealing bizarre list of things she hates about Australia

She's seen the chaos of life and the quiet of death. Gordi won't stand still

She's seen the chaos of life and the quiet of death. Gordi won't stand still

Steph Claire Smith: Fitness influencer gives birth to daughter, reveals adorable name

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American mum living in Brisbane causes online controversy after revealing bizarre list of things she hates about Australia

She's seen the chaos of life and the quiet of death. Gordi won't stand still

She's seen the chaos of life and the quiet of death. Gordi won't stand still

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