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Subject: Foreigner's Guide to Australia
Australia's a bit of a weird place. Here are some things you might want to know:
- - An astonishing number of people will pluralize 'you'. When your waitress comes to your table, she'll ask "Are yous ready to order?"
- - Tipping is not done here, so that same waitress does not give a shit if you get the food you asked for, or if it's any good. She'll drop it off and beat a hasty retreat, never to be seen again. No "Can I get you another drink?" or "Is everything OK?" You ordered, you got your food, you're on your own.
- - Many restaurants make you order your food and drink at different places. You might be able to order your food at the table, or not, but you'll be ordering your drinks from a counter somewhere else.
- - Australia has a small consumer population, and very few shops here make any sort of effort to stock anything but the cheapest, most easily sourced stuff. Every single cheap Chinese discount store here has the same shit in it. Every discount warehouse store has the same shit as the department stores as the mom and pop shops. It's as if there's one boat from China and everyone gets their share from the crates it brought here, and that's good enough. If you can't get what you want from one shop, you might as well give up, go home, and get it online.
- - Prices here are insane. Everything costs more than it does in the middle of Tokyo, for fuck's sake. I've have talked to Japanese tourists who complain about the prices. Visitors from most other countries are too stunned to speak.
- - The prices are high, but the quality isn't. Discount shops in Japan charge less for better quality stuff. Australians will buy any fucking thing and not complain about it, so everything you buy is the cheapest, crappiest stuff and it costs triple what it would in your home country.
- - Gas stations jack up the prices on Wednesday nights in anticipation of the weekend, and drop it again Monday morning. They do the same for holidays too.
- - The Australian sun is not the same as the one you're used to. You will, no exaggeration, get a sunburn in 20 minutes in the summer. An hour in the sun will cause such a bad burn you'll regret being born.
- - Hooking up phone service takes a few minutes if the wires already exist, or forever if they don't. Maybe. It's sort of based on a complex set of rules that result in interminable limbo. I've had phone installers lie about coming to my house, a power company transfer my account to a new house, fail to stop billing me for the old one, and send bills for the new one to the old house. Internet services are improving rapidly, but they're still appalling, with dropouts, slowdowns, and no accountability. The guy who reads your meter will stop and read the flyers in your mailbox.
- - Drivers know they should stop for pedestrians at crosswalks (called Zebra Crossings), but they hate doing it and rarely will if there's any chance they can rationalize speeding past you in their tiny pea-brains. "Oh, you paused, I thought I could go" or "You looked OVER my car, not AT my car, I thought you were debating to cross..."
- - Australians love to say "cunt" and will use it when they're angry, confused, happy or just talking to their mothers.
- - You can ship stuff in to Australia, but not out. Surface mail (by sea) comes from everywhere, but the majority of countries cannot receive surface mail from Australia. The boats only come one way, when they arrive here they're sunk to create reefs. And international postage is hellishly expensive. There's no small-packet rate, no book rate.
- - Plane tickets are the same: It's cheap to come to Australia, but it costs a fortune to leave. It's a one-way border.
- - Everything is venomous here, including the people. Probably. Douglas Adams said " It is true that of the 10 most poisonous arachnids on the planet, Australia has 9 of them. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that of the 9 most poisonous arachnids, Australia has all of them. However, there are curiously few snakes, possibly because the spiders have killed them all." It's worth noting however that the snakes will kill you too, and fast. If it slithers, run the fuck away, is my advice.
- - Australian companies are big on overseas call centers. It is utterly impossible to get anything done with any company larger than about six people, 'cause their phone staff in Bumfuck India don't understand Australian accents and can't find "cunt" in their scriptbook.
BLEARGH
This post was edited on 2012-02-08, 10:18 by