Post 2: Arrival

We arrived in Newcastle, Australia two days ago. The flights were long, but actually not that bad. I was expecting something much more arduous. Air travel is absolutely amazing, if you stop to think about it. Australia is about as far from the US as any country on the planet, and you can still travel between them in a little over half a day.

The culture shock so far has been pretty minimal.* They say “no worries” here instead of “your welcome”, and use weird words that I only know from crossword puzzles like “alight” and “fortnight”. Also, a lot of the men’s rooms have urinals that are long sunken troughs that I don’t like using because I feel like pee is splattering on my shoes.** Lots of little differences, but the only thing major so far is the driving on the wrong side of the road. That is going to take some getting used to, and I’m not even driving. I’m just a pedestrian. There are a few other things – public transportation is not very good and Internet is mostly slow and expensive – but I think those are things specific to Newcastle (it’s a very industrial city) not to Australia. If I lived in Sydney, I’m sure it would be a different story.

S and I went to dinner last night with some people I work with from the Uni (I’m picking up the slang). It was fun. I think I’m going to enjoy their company, which is good. It’s definitely a positive to like the people you have to spend everyday with. I inquired a bit about rugby, because I’m half-interested in learning the rules and the leagues and all that. I learned that there are actually two forms of rugby – rugby union and rugby league – and they play by different rules. The latter apparently is much less free flowing and more like football, in that you have a fixed number of tries (downs) to score. Then there is also the rugby-like sport Australian rules football (or “footy” as I hilariously saw it referred as). I don’t know anything about the play of the game, but I was told it has a very fanatical following. Apparently, a lot of suburbs have their own teams and they draw upwards of 80,000 people a game. It sounds a bit like the college football following in the US.

Anyway, jetlag is setting in, so I’m going to shutdown my computer and go to sleep. I’ll probably post this tomorrow morning. My connection is too slow to do it right now.


*I accidentally walked into a long, awkward conversation with an American in the store, and he said that I was in for a big shock, but the only reasons he gave me were that pickup trucks are more expensive, Volvos are disliked, and bacon and steaks taste different. His sense of culture seemed pretty limited to cars and meats.

**On a related note, you don’t see any sort of trough-like urinals in the US anymore, do you? Even in places like arenas and stadiums it seems like they are being phased out. Progress, I guess.