After six weeks in Asia, there are a
number of things we find amazingly refreshing about Australia:
- The
ability to express affection in public. Every once in a while we’ll engage
in a liplock in the middle of a busy street or store…because we can.
- The
odds are in your favour that when you go to the toilet (called a “toilet”
in Oz, not “bathroom” or “washroom”), there’s probably going to be toilet
paper.
- The
odds are in your favour that when you go to the toilet, there won’t be
footprints on the toilet seat from somebody who decided to squat over the
toilet seat instead of sit on it.
- Most
people who walk down the street won’t hassle you for a taxi ride
somewhere. In fact, you have to work pretty hard to find a taxi at all.
- The
price is the price. Usually.
- You
won’t likely be bombarded with smells of delicious street food, followed
uncomfortably closely by smells of rotting food or sewage.
And of course, we also made some decisions in our travels
over the last few months that seemed brilliant at the time, but proved to be
not so brilliant in practice:
- Spending
four days straight on a train from northern Thailand
to Singapore.
“It’ll be fun, and relaxing,” I remember thinking. And although it wasn’t
hell, and although we didn’t have much choice in the matter (due to the
Dengue Fever episode holding us up and all), it wasn’t exactly as great as
an idea as we may have originally thought. Ah well – it was still better
than the bus, I’m guessing.
- Planning
a five hour layover between flights overnight, between 12am and 5am.
“We’ll sleep in the airport,” I remember thinking. Nope. 40 hours without
any sleep made for a shaky start to our Aussie adventures, to be sure.
Although we are on the other side of the world from our home country (Canada), we are feeling more "at home" in Australia than we have felt since we left - oh so long ago. We see lots of similarities between Canada and Australia....ah but we'll leave that for another article.
