Australia: First Impressions
We lost an entire day last week. Thursday, August 22nd, never happened in our world. Gone. My Wordle streak ended, but oddly not my New York Times Crossword streak. We jumped from Wednesday to Friday like a Mr. Peabody & Sherman episode. Sherry and I left Jacksonville, Florida, without our travel buddies but with a cat in a crate. We bounced through Dallas, sweated through LA, and landed in Melbourne. Our son Russ and his partner Jhett picked us up from the airport, and we’ve spent a little over a week trying to catch up to the Thursday we lost. Here are some initial impressions of Australia.
“No” Is a Complete Sentence That Ends in “R”
When Australians answer a question in the negative, they say, “No.” No surprise. They don’t clip this word short, but let it hang out there a bit, giving everyone a chance to hear it, I guess. What’s more, they hang an “R” at the end. “No” becomes “Nor.” This isn’t a pirate “R,” hard, aggressive, and rolling: “Norrrrr.” Instead, it’s soft and fleeting, coming from deep in the throat, almost as if a cat were pronouncing it: “Nooorh.” I tried practicing it on the train one day, tricking my wife into asking me yes/no questions just so I could answer, “Nooorh.” She cringed each time I said it, thinking I was mocking the Australians around us and that they’d be offended. I wasn’t and they weren’t. I was practicing. She asked me if I was eight years old. I said, “Nooorh.”
Australia Eats Baked Goods
Low-carb diets must not have reached Australia yet. Every third store front, it seems, sells meat pies, croissants, and donuts. Their display cases glitter like jewels with frostings, creams, and jams. I haven’t yet eaten one of their famous meat pies, but I’ve had a few donuts. We’ve even found a place that specializes in gluten-free donuts, so Sherry hasn’t felt left out. These pictures don’t really do them justice, but here’s a sampling:
I refuse to leave Australia without devouring a meat pie!
Sculptures Sprout Like Mushrooms
We see art everywhere: shopping centers, sidewalks, roadsides. Australia knows how to dress up a landscape. We even found a place called “Graffiti Lane” near the Flinders train station where citizens have taken art into their own hands, or at least their own spray cans. Here are a few pictures of the sculptures and art we’ve seen:
So. Many. Birds.
They have so many birds here! Some we never see in the United States, and others we see only in pet stores. We’ve seen Cockatoos, Galahs, and Rainbow Lorikeets. We also saw some green-headed parrots with flashes of orange on their bellies that looked like Orange-bellied parrots, but we read that only 50 exist in the wild so we don’t know what they were. Birds are everywhere, squawking, screeching, and chattering. Magpies stare at us warily. Fairy wrens bounce around with their tails erect like exclamation points. Swamphens strut awkwardly in lines like teenagers yet to grow into their bodies. Our favorite fliers, however, were the flying foxes we came across on the grounds of Werribee Park Mansion. They hung from the trees like large cocoons, wings wrapped around them like capes. It felt like we’d found a flying fox orchard. Taking good pictures of birds proved too difficult for us — getting close enough with our iPhones shooed them away — but here are some pictures of the flying foxes:
