Goodness, I think I have a problem with always having too much to say even when nothing is really going on! Oh well, I’m not forcing you to read! There has been a lot more talk of differences in cultures and slang words lately. And I’ve done a few exciting things I guess. Everyday in Australia is exciting, who am I kidding. I have to keep reminding myself I’m actually in Australia living my dream! I’m really doing something I’ve wanted to my whole life, I did it, that’s pretty cool. It also makes me extremely lucky and blessed that I’m able to do this. There is no way I could ever in my life come close to regretting this experience in any way whatsoever, even on the hardest days - and that’s an awesome thing. Anyway, my observations and adventures!
One thing I have sort of noticed but never said anything about until a couple nights ago was that most Australians use their knife when eating a lot more than we do. It almost seems like it’s used like we use bread, to help get things on your fork. They are always holding it, too, not just when they cut, it’s a utensil used for everything during the whole meal. When I pointed this out to some of my Aussie friends, we had a fairly in depth conversation about it. I then realized something more. They hold their knife in their dominant hand, just like we cut with our dominant hand. But as I said, they are always holding their knives, so they are always eating, with their fork, with their non-dominant hand. That’s right. It’s strange, huh? Think about it, we always cut up a few pieces of our food, (or all of it, whatever your preference) at one time, then set our knife down, switch the fork back to your dominant hand and eat the pieces. They just keep the knife and use the other hand to eat. Further, they hold the fork prongs facing down, like what we would think to be upside down. They say the fork is the stabber, your spoon is used to scoop, so it makes sense to hold it prongs down to stab the food. I don’t know about this. It was very strange the more I observed. I tried to eat like them and it was very difficult. They said we just waste energy switching hands so much (and they call us the lazy ones). I don’t know. That’s their manners though, that’s the proper way to eat they said. To me it looks almost “barbaric” except not that harsh of a word, I can’t think of what else to say though. It’s crazy. Very interesting difference there. Let’s see. They say they “hire” a car, not rent one, some even use it to say they hired a movie, although some still say rent a movie, like the bigger the object is, the more you say hire instead of rent. They have quilts and quilt covers, not comforters, and they call them doonas sometimes. They have weird rhyming slang like hit the frog and toad is to hit the road. Strange how they shorten just about everything except a few phrases that are actually a lot longer. They shorten emo to just mo, which I think is really lazy seeing as emo is already shortened from emotional! That’s a bit ironic as well, Americans are supposedly lazy, but the Aussies are the ones who can’t even say full words or switch hands to eat! They even say ta instead of thank you, how much work is it really to say thank you? It’s funny. There are a lot of differences in pronunciation as well, but those are a bit difficult to demonstrate just with written words. Basil and oregano are both weird ones. Basil is like bahh like a sheep, then sil. Oregano is oreg like you’re saying Oregon, then ano like ah-no. Does that make sense? They think it’s hilarious how we say it. Melbourne is said without the r and Canberra, the capital, sounds like Cambra. Cairns is cans. They laugh every time we say Kansas, too, like we say it really hick-like. They say feral a lot as well, like “he’s really feral“, he’s gross, disgusting, dirty you know. A weird one is “hot as” or “soft as”, they say “as” after some word as if they were going to make a simile, but they don’t finish it. It’s funny. I think they say “yep” a whole lot, like when talking in conversation, as if it’s a head nod, or I guess we say yeah it just doesn’t seem as obvious or something, I don’t know. Oh and spew seems to be a favorite term for throwing up, although there are many, many terms. They do say bloody quite a bit, though they can’t really say what it means, it’s just more like a less harsh word for other curse words. Jumpers are sweatshirts. Avo is afternoon. Cookies are called biscuits. I think I already said cell phones are mobiles. There are a million different phrases for being drunk. I’m trying to think of all of them and write them all down so I don’t forget. Oh, Sheila is a girl. Mates are friends, but I’m sure you already knew that one. They don’t have Neosporin. The pain reliever here is about a fourth less strong than our Tylenol I think, so it doesn’t do anything for us, they think they’d die if they took as much as we do, though. I can’t find anything like Purell or even Lysol wipes. They don’t have graham crackers. I’m not sure if people know this or not, but they use A4 size paper here, it’s bigger and weird to get used to since I brought a notebook from home and it seems super small and won’t hold any of my handouts! I don’t like the tap water here, it’s fine health wise, just my preference. Bread goes moldy in a week or less, they don’t have as many preservatives in anything here as we do. Oh, napkins are called serviettes. I think I’ve said nappies are diapers, that was a funny one to see. They call silverware cutlery, because silverware is really their nice china, cutlery is their everyday eating utensils. That’s about all I can remember at the moment. As I said, there are so so many little differences to get used to even though it’s another English speaking country and we were both settled by the British and have seemingly similar cultures. It’s quite interesting. As with many things in life, in cultures, the little things can mean the most, or make the most difference.
Now what’s been happening for the past week? A fair amount, although it didn’t start out that way. Monday was about the laziest day I’ve had here, although quite wonderful honestly. I stayed in my room and in my pjs til about 3 in the afternoon. I don’t have class, so I never do much, but this was extreme. I finally took a shower then and continued to not do much. I caught up on some emails and such and did some of my homework as well, so I was a little productive. My favorite part was reading my Harry Potter and actually taking a short nap as well!! It was amazing. I am still waking up pretty early and haven’t slept too well and can never seem to nap. So it was nice. Plus I haven’t been reading much and I love that book, I’m on the 6th one. I’ve read a lot of this week actually. That night I played Halo on the Xbox, one of the guys in Loretta’s unit had it. I have never played that game, despite how much I’ve watched all my friends play it back home. So it was interesting, fun to a play video game actually. And Jared was pretty impressed with me, said I did a good job, yeah, I’m awesome. I took a few walks this week, I usually go at sunset over to the lakes and just watch the sun go down, it’s quite nice. I went to class, although I didn’t always want to. I went to caf, it was pretty good this week. The weather was surprisingly dreary the first half of the week, and then Thursday and Friday were surprisingly hot and sunny. I’m pretty sure it got to 100F both days!! And it was also a hot, strong wind, it was a bit miserable really. I’ve had really strange dreams lately, and a lot of them. I can’t really remember any when I wake up but I know they were weird ones. I called my friend Kyle this week and that was spectacular! I miss him lots and he’s awesome. My classes were very frustrating this week for some reason. My bus. comm. teacher still doesn’t seem to like America and that is difficult to keep quiet. My econ teacher is okay, she just can’t truly “teach” well. I feel like we have to teach ourselves a lot more here anyway, it almost seems like what’s the point in having teachers? Australia Today should be a really excellent class, and I thought it would be, but the way they have it set up doesn’t work as well as it could I don’t think. They basically have us teaching the tute, but that doesn’t work seeing as we don’t know things about Australia, that’s what we’re in the class for! We can read things anywhere. Finance is okay, but this week we went over time value of money which I already know like the back of my hand from Accounting. It’s so easy and we spent so much time on it. He even taught it a little differently, using different words and such, and it took me about one second to comprehend what that word was from the way I know it. So they were long lectures for me. But I went!
Wednesday was pretty big. The day was boring and normal, but then that night was the Bomb Squad. Now if you don’t want to know about any parties or anything, skip to the next paragraph now! But you must remember I am legal, and this is all part of my experience! So a club on campus set up this event at Room 99, a club downtown. They were trying to break the world record for the longest line of Jagerbombs. I don’t know if someone was there from the Book of World Records or if they can turn it in or what, but we did it. There were 405 of us there and the previous record was around 100. So that’s pretty cool, huh?! I’m part of a world record!! Even if it is that. They did it like a domino effect and we were all lined up zig zag across the dance floor upstairs, then in front of the bar, and down the stairs and the same way down there as well. It was crazy. They provided busses down there for us which was nice. We got there about 8, it was early. So a fair amount of people left early, Loretta, Jenny and I left around midnight, that was a long night! Basically three straight hours of dancing gets exhausting! It was so much fun though. The place was only open to Uni students until 11 which I thought was pretty cool. They did the jagerbomb line fairly quickly after everyone got there. My feet were killing me by the end if the night since I was stupid and wore heels, I had to look good though! That was really the first time I’d been out since O-Week so it was a good time, I needed that. Even if Thursday I woke up very tired with aching feet!
Yesterday was another exciting day! We had just planned to go into town for the day and do some shopping and whatnot, but we came up with a much more interesting plan. We went to Ballarat for the day, (me, Loretta, and Val (another K-stater)) it’s about an hour and a half bus ride north-ish of here. We went with the intention of seeing the Wildlife Park and going to this place called Sovereign Hill. We didn’t end up having time to go to Sovereign Hill. It is this place they have set up like an old gold-mining town with actors and everything and you can pan for gold, but I’ve already down that up in South Dakota, so it was okay to not go. I’ve heard mixed reviews of it from the Aussies anyway. We had to leave here at 8 and take a taxi into town to catch the bus, that’s the bad thing about public transportation, it takes so much longer and you always have to sit around and wait, but whatever. It was neat countryside on the way there, it’s always exciting to see different parts of the country, it’s so diverse here. You don’t have to drive very far to see something different. I thought it was a small town, but it was a decent size really, it was cool I thought. I liked all the architecture and old buildings. Most of the streets downtown looked kind of like the old main streets, how all the buildings are connected the whole length of the street and they’re all old and a couple stories high. I liked it. We had to wait to catch the bus to the park so we went to get some “brunch” at a café, it was good, nice to get warm cappuccino! It wasn’t the best day to go do something as it was rainy and cold the entire day. We were freezing because we were expecting it to get a little warmer, but I think it hovered in the 60s, maybe even 50s all day. The clouds stayed most of the day, just a few small patches of sun, and the rain came and went all day long. It was still good though, definitely better than sitting here doing nothing! The Wildlife Park was really interesting. From where the bus let us off we had to climb over the fence to get in to the park, that was interesting, we were a bit skeptical! The best part was all the kangaroos that just hopped around everywhere, they were loose in the park! So we could go up to them and pet them and whatever. They would hop over towards us as well. It was so cool. I have only seen kangaroos from a very long distance, so this was awesome. I wanted to take one home, they were pretty cute. They were “tame” though, used to people, so that’s the only reason they weren’t trying to fight us, they can be very aggressive. Although Val did have one of them try and bite off her big toe! There were some big ones, too, I’d be scared. There were some little joeys there as well and they were cute. I took my video camera so I got them all on camera. They were so funny, it was a really awesome experience. We also saw koalas and I got my picture right next to one. It is only legal to hold one up in Queensland, but at least I got to pet one and be right next to him. We went to the Koala show and learned a lot about them and a couple of them were awake and the one jumped over to the lady to cuddle with her, it was pretty adorable. I got a bunch of that on video as well. We also saw a vulture and some emus, they looked a little scary! There was a reptile house with lots of snakes and crocodiles and such, it was pretty interesting. We watched the snake show as well and got to pat a non-venomous snake and watch a venomous one eat a couple mice, yikes! The kangaroos were interested in the snakes so they had to be lured away with food. There were some goanna’s there, I think they are iguanas, I’m not sure if it’s different or what. Oh, and we saw a Tasmanian Devil!! It was pretty cool, he ran funny. I think that was it. There were some ducks and a million pigeons there as well. Oh, there were wombats, but there weren’t out, I saw the backside of one of them in his shelter thing through the window. We had to take another taxi back into town since there were no busses after about noon. We stopped at another café for a snack before we caught the last bus back to Geelong at 3:45. There were these two ladies on the bus both ways that were drunk both in the morning and even worse on the way back, it was a little annoying, although quite entertaining. It was a great day, wonderful to get out. We got back about 6 and were exhausted. I stayed in my room and caught up on emails and such and did a bit of homework and called it an early night! Last night was the most I’ve slept almost since I’ve been here which is a wonderful thing seeing as I haven’t been able to sleep for awhile. I guess it just caught up with me that much. I have to go to bed early tonight as well since I have to get up super early tomorrow to go into Melbourne to meet Mom!! I’m sooooo excited about it though so it won’t be bad.
I just realized that we “fell back” an hour last night. I guess I didn’t technically get that much sleep, oh great, that’s great. My room phone automatically adjusted it self but nothing else did. I didn’t know that was happening, so I was very confused. But yeah, we’re not on daylight savings anymore so that sucks. My timing here is all off anyway though. It feels like time is flying by and I don’t have much time left here, but at the same time the days sometimes seem to go by very slowly. And when I compare mine to home I feel like I go through two days to one of yours, I guess just with the time difference and when I sleep compared to when you do. I don’t know, it’s strange. I’m all confused by time and how long things seem. Anyway, that’s my last week. Hope yours was fabulous. I miss you all and think about you often, I hope I’m not forgotten yet either! Give yourselves a hug from me and let me know how you’re doing. Have a great upcoming week!
Oh, and here, the first two are from my daily devotional:
“The way in which we think of ourselves has everything to do with how our world sees us.” ~Arlene Raven
“If you have made mistakes, even serious ones, there is always another chance for you. What we call failure is not the falling down, but the staying down.” ~Mary Pickford
“Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.” ~Zora Neale Hurston (it's true)
Love, Alissa
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