If you asked me four months ago if I would ever find myself back in Australia within a year I would have said something to the tune of “you’d have to tie me down and drag me over kicking and screaming.” No disrespect, but I had reached the limit of my comfort zone paying $9 for a pint of beer, $5 for a half gallon of milk, and being oh-so-close to the beach yet oh-so-far in season from swimming. I needed a healthy break from Australia in other words. And so I went off to the Netherlands and had a merry old time. Alas, life has thrown me a curveball and I now find myself back in Oz. East coast this time. And the second verse is indeed a lot more summer than the first. Oh hell yes, summer! Bona fide, legit, summer beach time weather. The beers are still $9 per pint (and depending on the bar, could be $9 per BOTTLE – holy $h!t) but the weather is 95 degrees and sunny on those Saturday afternoons on Bondi Beach. Or as they say in Australian speak: “35 degrees.” So yes, everyone here is decked out in their “swimmies” (bathing suit) and “sunnies” (shades) looking real pretty in their “thongs” (flip flops). Oh Australia….it’s a love hate I have with this place. But right now with the summer weather, sunny skies, and upbeat energy that was lacking my entire 5 months in Perth last year is definitely leaning more towards love right now.
The lingo here never ceases to amuse me. Australian English is not at inundated with slang and local phrases, in my opinion, as British English. But the randomness of things you don’t expect to hear gives me a kick. For example, they love to say “whilst” here; not as a derivative of “while” but as a means to contrast things. “Whilst it’s a really great beach day, we decided to go hiking in the mountains.” Sounds super formal right? Another one of my favorites is “stands me in good stead.” Translation: “put me in a good position.” Ex: “I think this job would be a great opportunity…it will stand me in good stead for my future career.” But perhaps my most interesting clash with the local language to date was trying to order lemonade at a bar.
Me: “Hi, can I please have a lemonade?”
Bartender: “Sure.”
Bartender serves me a drink.
Me: “This is a lemonade?”
Bartender: “Yes.”
Me: “Hhhhmm, it looks awfully bubbly and clear to be a lemonade.”
Bartender: “It’s a lemonade.”
I taste it.
Me: “This is Sprite.”
Bartender: “Yes, it’s lemonade.”
Me: “No, this is Sprite. A carbonated soft drink. I asked for a lemonade.”
Bartender: “Mate, that’s what lemonade is.”
The scene ends with me not leaving a tip.
Australia Part 2 has been full of those quirky little experiences, and a lot of moving around. I am currently in Melbourne (pronounced Mel-BURN…don’t make the horrendous American mistake of pronouncing it Mel-BORN) after spending most of January in Sydney. Sydney was great. As stated, it’s the dead of summer and every weekend for me was a merry-go-round of bumming around on Sydney’s three main beaches – Bondi, Coogee, and Manly. I had a great time.
Melbourne, however, is quickly creeping up on my list of favorite cities. It is almost the complete opposite of Sydney in its make and mold. The analogy that I often use is that Sydney is to Melbourne as LA is to San Francisco. Both LA and Sydney revolve around the beach. There is stuff going on downtown, in the city itself, but the main happenings are in the network of beach communities up and down the coasts. Melbourne and San Fran are both in a bay; so the beach life doesn’t dominate. Instead, life here is all about the cosmopolitan, artsy scene of the city. Melbourne has a very European feel to it with its outdoors cafes tucked in little alleys. It is also much thicker and wider in its ethnic diversity than Sydney. Sydney is very multinational, but mainly a hodge-podge of Asian cultures. Melbourne covers a much wider range of ethnicities. For example, outside of Athens and Thessaloniki, Melbourne has the largest Greek speaking population in the world….I never would have guessed. There is also a dominant presence of Turks, Middle Easterners, Italians, and East Africans here that I never came across in Sydney. I really appreciate the richness of diversity here. But of course, the Asian presence here is enormous, which I love since it has totally fulfilled my large craving and appetite for Asian food!
Victoria, the state which Melbourne is the capital of, has a lot of nicknames for it. They say you experience four seasons in one day (freakish weather patterns probably coming from the Southern Ocean) and that Victoria is the sports capital of Australia. Australian Rules Football (“footy”) originated in Victoria and every January the Australian Open is played in Melbourne. My very first night in Melbourne was the same night as the men’s final of the Australian Open. Huge crowds converged in Federal Park in the city center just a stone’s throw from the stadium to watch Djokovic vs. Murray.
I’m real excited to be here and am brainstorming the right way to balance getting to know Melbourne as a city with all the plentiful trips along the coast. I head up to Brisbane next week for several meetings for work. Brisbane and the state of Queensland, as you might have heard in the news, has been pounded by devastating weather over the past month. While the Northeast of the US is getting buried with snow, Queensland has been hit hard with floods and cyclones. While the recent Category 5 cyclone that hit Australia was much further north (near the Great Barrier Reef), Brisbane itself was devastated with flooding in early January. It should be an interesting experience to visit the city in its aftermath, which I’ll follow up with next week.
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