Australian is funny - Part 8.

What? I haven't blogged in 5 months?!? That's normal, right?

So I probably have a lot to catch up on with the blog --- a month long trip back to the States, Josh's parents' visit to our great home, scuba diving on the Great Barrier, Christmas in 98 degree weather, a week in Fiji (*sigh*) --- but in order to ease myself back into the blogging world, today I only have a simple picture from Surfers Paradise to illustrate that regardless of how long you spend in the land down under, you're never really going to understand it.

After wikipedia'ing it, I found out that it basically means no soliciting or panhandling , but I think that I prefer the much more exotic-sounding ‘touting’ and ‘busking’.

Which way does the water flow?

My future brother-in-law, Matt, asked and so I obliged. My best guess as to why he asked is because he wanted to know how the water drained. Well, I've done some research (both hands-on and via Google). There's a theory that the Coriolis effect means that the water drains counter-clockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern hemisphere. But apparently this is just a myth - the Coriolis effect doesn't have an effect on that small of bodies of water.

Also, here in Australia, the toilets flush with such force that the water just goes straight down.

Note the "big flush" and "little flush" buttons on top of the toilet. It's on all of them. They are serious about saving water - did I mention the drought that Australia is in?

Also, when you need to find the nearest lavatory, then you need to ask 'Where is the toilet?' and not 'Where is the restroom?'.

I did also take a video of the bathtub draining and you can see (after I disturb it a little bit) that the water does indeed drain clockwise.



If you want to take this as scientific evidence of the Coriolis effect in action, then feel free to. I'm going to trust the info I got on the internet though.

let's talk about driving

Australians, as they are about a lot of things, are very casual about driving. Here is the road that leads down to our house (Orpen). Notice that there are no lines down the middle or the side. Almost all the roads around here are like that with the exception of a few main roads.

I think that the idea is that you can drive wherever you want until another car meets up with you and tnen you just move to your left.


In Dalby, there are 5 stoplights (3 on the main highway, 2 on the road that parallels the main highway) and there are no stop signs. Instead, all over the place are 'Give Way' signs which means 'Yield' in American.


So you come to a road crossing and if you have the 'Give Way' sign, then you just have to slow down, look to your right first (always to the right first) and left and then go. If nothing's coming, then you don't even have to stop. It's so much more efficient. But knowing how traffic works in Atlanta, these signs would be terrible.

If there is a road crossing where one road is perhaps not bigger than another road and they don't want to handle traffic with 'Give Way' signs, then they stick a roundabout in the middle of the road. Here's the sign warning you that you have a roundabout coming up.


And here's the roundabout.


This is the one in our neighborhood - only one lane. Remember on some of the ones from our trip last weekend, there were 3 lanes! The general rule is that you yield to your right. So you approach that dotted line and slow down. If nothing is coming from the right, then you keep going. It's scary when you are the car with the right away and something pulls up from your left and you aren't really sure if they're going to stop or not.

Also, Josh constantly trys to claim that I don't look to my right on this roundabout. But I do. Every time. Also, he says that I get really close to the outside curb when going around. And well, okay - that statement might be true.

And don't forget - we're learning all of this with the steering wheel on the wrong side of the car.

There are a few things that we've had to get use to -
1. not hugging the left side of the road and scaring the passenger,
2. not turning on the windshield wipers when we really want a turn signal (signals on the right)
3. not going to the other side of the car to get in when you're driving (I've done it 3 times in the past 5 days - it's embarrassing)

Just as a note, I'm the driver in the family over here, but these pictures were taken one our trip to Toowoomba a few weeks ago. Josh drove so that he could get some experience behind the wheel, but I think that he can count on one hand the number of times that he's driven over here.
I was a happy passenger though.

Australian is Funny - Part 4

Mmm - extra tasty. What's really funny is that right next to this in the cheese aisle was 'tasty' cheddar cheese. Why on earth would I just get the tasty cheddar cheese when I could have the extra tasty cheddar cheese?

My only reasoning is that Australian for sharp must be tasty, but then why on earth would they need an additional sticker telling you that there is extra bite in this cheese? It all just doesn't make sense to me.


On a semi-related, fairly interesting note - there is no orange cheese in Australia. It is all the white/yellow color that you see above. ALL of it - Colby, Cheddar, they don't have American but I'm sure it would be yellow too. It's very odd to go to the cheese section and only have yellow lying in front of you. I think that it all has to do with the anti-processing of food that they have going on in this country. But we haven't been able to find a single cheese that we really like (we use the stuff above mainly grated on our salads). It's going to be a long year.

04.05.2009

My camera battery has died without me realizing it and so I can't pull any pictures off until I get it recharged. I'll do it first thing in the morning.

So you just get an update of the weekend without any pictures. Saturday, we drove to Toowoomba to see the X:Men: Origins movie. I had found where there was a cinema in this grand central shopping center which turned out to be kind of like a mall, but there was a grocery store and Target at one end. So you would be walking through the mall, but some people would be trying to get through with shopping carts full of groceries. It was very odd. Also, it was the first place that we have really been crowded in an Australia. I've done a little bit of research and I'm about 3/4 of the way through 'In a Sunburned Country', but there are about 20 million people in all of Australia. The land area of Australia is approximately 2.9 million square miles which is almost as large as the US (whose land area is 3.5 million square miles). Apparently that means that the population density of Australia is 6.4 people/sq mile....compared to the US's population density of 84 people/sq mile. So we had heard that there is plenty of space for everyone. However, about 2000 people decided to increase the population density of Toowoomba Saturday afternoon.

The movie was good (Josh could go into more detail on how they took extreme liberties with Deadpool's character in the 2nd half, but I enjoyed the movied regardless) and we walked around some and looked at the stores before heading back to Dalby for the night.

Sunday we woke up and goofed around a bit and then I made Josh go on a walk with me to town and back. He always agrees to it and almost seems excited about it (I think that it has something to do with that dumb bat tree), but once we get to Brumby's, get our bread and are on our way back, he starts complaining about how far it is and how long it has taken us (it's a little over a 3.1 mile walk round-trip). Luckily, we both made it back in one piece and we spent the rest of the day just chilling in the house. I had thought that maybe we would go to the Bunya Mountains yesterday, but we decided to save that for another "in-Dalby weekend".

Today I had to work so that's pretty much all I did all day. We did manage to talk to several of our family and friends this morning so that was pretty cool. It was Labour Day and so Josh was off and he spent the entire day just relaxing (though he did pull out the vacumn late in the afternoon). Just as a note on how public holidays are handled around here - I got up at 6:45 and turned on the hot water and the space heater and logged onto work. Around 7:15, I notice a few cars pulling up into the driveway across the street. And the guys had beer cans in their hands! They spent most of the day in the garage just sitting around listening/watching football(?). I'm not sure how long they made it though after starting that early in the morning.

Pictures of the drive to/from Toowoomba tomorrow!

Australian is funny - Part 3

Brekky starts at 6AM okay?

And I hope that world-wide symbolism ensures that all readers can easily tell what Hungry Jack's REALLY is.

Australian is Funny - Part 2

As seen on the top of our rubbish bin.

Sorry for the no-post yesterday (and the lame one today). By 8:00 last night, I still had some work to be done and all I was thinking about was crawling into bed. Luckily, we got to sleep in until 6:30 (!) today. We went for a walk so I'll post some pics from that tomorrow (when Josh is back at work) and we drove out to the power station so that I would know how to get there in case of emergency and so I could have my first roo sighting. I'll have an update on that tomorrow as well.