what i learnt about Australia!!!

Where we were anyway! other parts may be different!

 

- Australians are a lot like us! more like us than Americans! and some of them are very loud!!!

 

- Its a very tidy place, all the grass is immaculate and trimmed perfectly against the edges of the pavement! but then they dont get all the rain we do which makes our go wild!

 

- Didnt see any tramps until we got to Sydney!

 

- They love their big noisy cars! and their Utes! they especially like Jap stuff! and their cars are really nice colours that i havent seen before!! 

 

- They have massive bats in the trees! and instead of boring black birds they have lorikeets! and Ibis! The sounds the birds make in the trees, particularly in the rainforest is amazing!

 

- It reminded me of America so much, crazy little towns up the mountains that are stuck back in time and big wide roads and boards on the side of the road showing which shops or fast food joints are there!

 

- They dont have a 1 or 2 cent so when you buy stuff, it is rounded up! so why the hell they sell stuff for 99 cents i dont know!! coz you dont get your change back!

 

- It is cheaper than England especially housing and petrol! petrol is half the price and the type of house you can get their compared to here is amazing! but then the exchange rate is good so it is cheap if you are converting your pounds to dollars but not especially cheap if you are australian and earning dollars!

 

- They have Cadburys chocolate!!!! yes!! and they do a real nice bar called rocky road with marshmallow and jelly bits in!!! yum!

 

-  It gets light about 5.30 and dark about 6.30 so people get up early to make the most of the day! it was wierd being in summer like conditions but having it go dark so early! it is Autumn for them at the moment though but even in the middle of summer it still gets dark around 8! 

 

- No matter how small the house, it always has a garage!! and that is quite often all you can see from the road, and then the house goes far back behind it! and if their isnt a garage, they have a car port because otherwise you would melt when you got in the car (bad enough in the summer here!), burn yourself on evrything in the car and the paint would probably start to fall off!!

 

- You can only buy alcohol in special shops, not in supermarkets!

 

- You dont really see any other nationalities, only lots of chinese in the cities! Coz its so bloody hard to get into the country!

 

- They love their BBQs!!! they BBQ everything and there are communal BBQs at the top of every beach and in every park and holiday complex! they are electric plates and you go and use them, pour water over them when you are finished and then i think they are maintained by the council! wish we had weather to do that!

 

- Their are skin cancer clinics everywhere on the gold coast! the people are sooooo brown! Skin cancer is very common in Queensland but then there isnt much ozone layer over Oz!

 

-  Everyone walks around with bare feet!

 

- Their are loads of mozzies in the rainforests! i should know, i got bitten 10 times during the holiday! little buggers!

 

- We watched Neighbours!! and i know everything that is going to happen and it is shocking!!! me and mum were just going "Oh my god" all the time!! and dad was really annoyed that he had to watch it on holiday as well as at home! i reckon he enjoyed it really!!

 

- Australian TV is rubbish! apart from Neighbours of course! they have lots of english and american progs because theirs are so bad!

 

- Lots of the cars are 4 speed??? dont know why!!

 

- It was a lot greener than i expected and i didnt think their were so many mountains! you imagine Australia to be roads like Neighbours and sandy outback! but there is so much variety there. 

 

- They have Strangler Figs - they wrap their branches around a host tree and take hundreds of years to kill it! and it leaves it hollow inside! thats mean!

 

- Every beach along the Gold coast is stunning! No duff ones! but it can sometimes get very windy on the beaches and it hurts! and if you lay their too long you would disappear!

 

- Everything is free!!! museum entry, parking at beach! even parking in the cities in some areas!!

 

- When we were lay on beaches facing the sea, the sun was always to the left! so i am browner on the left side of my body!!

 

- The fish is amazing!! (to eat! although i did find a beautiful tropical fish washed up on the beach. i went for a closer look and saw he was still breathing so i took him in my hands and ran 'baywatch' like into the sea and let him go..............................and he got washed back!! think it was too late for him :(  he did feel hot when i picked him up though, partially cooked i think, i just hoped he wasnt a Barramundi because i ate alot of that and it tasted so good and that would have made me feel bad)

 

- You waste half your holiday trying to cross the road because the crossings take a year to change, and then they wonder why people risk it and get run over!!

 

- However, they are very road safety obsessed!! posters everywhere, signs on road, stop off place to get a free coffee and have a break and a woman shouted at us for crossing in the wrong place! but we were going from the beach straight to our hotel and would have had to walk ages up the road to a pedestrian corssing that wouldnt change to green anyway!! she told us "people die every day" but i am old enough to cross a road now without being stupid enough to do it in front of a car!