I’m Back!
I’m back! (Actually, I have been for almost a week!) I have so much to blog about from my trip but I’m afraid I won’t be able to get to the big blog postings for a while as I’m teaching a new course this semester so that is going to take up most of my outside of work time. But I figured I could jot down a few quick thoughts on my Skytrain ride to work1 so that you at least know that I made it home in one piece. (And then I haven’t gotten around to actually taking this posting off my phone and putting it on my blog until now!)
Some things they don’t believe in in Australia:
- Coffee makers in hotels or AirBnBs. None of the three places we stayed at in Australia2 had a coffee maker3. It’s not like they don’t drink coffee there – several of the Aussies that I met described themselves as very proud of the high quality coffee in Australia and how it is so much better than North American coffee. I guess they figure that coffee making is best left to the professionals.
- Diet pop. Especially Diet Pepsi. A few times when I ordered a Diet Coke, I was asked “Is Coke Zero OK?” (No. No it is not.) And a couple of times I got “We are all out of that.” Given that an individual size bottle of pop cost $4, I guess it’s not that bad that I didn’t drink very much of it there.
Some things that surprised me in Australia:
- I only saw one kangaroo (and even that was just a glimpse of one hopping along the side of the road as the bus I was on whizzed by). I also saw zero crocodiles, koala bears, and venomous snakes. Apparently movies have lied to me that such creatures are all over Australia! (Mercifully, I didn’t see any truly enormous Aussie spiders – I saw one rather large one on the ceiling in a restaurant on our last night in Sydney, but it wasn’t bigger than ones I’ve seen here). So I’ve official seen as many kangaroos in Toronto as I saw in Australia!
- It was freaking cold in Perth. I mean, I knew it was technically still winter when we arrived (we were there for the first day of spring), but I wasn’t expecting it to get down to just 4 degrees overnight! Everyone there did say it was unseasonably cold, but it’s not like it’s usually 30 degrees there in the winter. I guess I had thought of Australia as just being hot all the time – as silly as people thinking it snows all year round in Canada, now that I think of it!
- The toilets did not flush clockwise as taught to us all by Lisa on the Simpsons. In fact, all the toilets seemed to flush in a random chaotic pattern, not clockwise or counterclockwise. I can’t believe an animated TV show led me astray!
Anyhoo, there will be more to come on my epic trip, but I make no promises about the timeliness of such postings!
- Because I’m all about efficiency and also there no cell phone service on parts of the track which means I can’t play Pokémon. [↩]
- Nor the place we stayed at in Hong Kong! [↩]
- One place did had a French press, so at least there was that. [↩]
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