Some Good reasons to visit Australia.

Are you looking for an adventure?!


Are you looking for excitement?!


Do you have a really good insurance policy!??!


Well why not visit Good old DownUnder!!


Here in Australia we have many delightful activities, such as..



1> Mud wrestling ..



(Some big snake vs a freash water croc..)


2> Extreme Jump rope..



3> Cuddly wild life




4> An excellent postal service...






5>Friendly locals..




6> Nice beaches ..



7> No volcanoes.... No seriously we don't..











https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=iZPuu_GUqHM

 

0.3x the population of the UK, 31x the land area.

 

If I had the chance, I'd move.

 

I know I have a sample size of only like 4 or 5. But the Australian girls I met have been easy on the eyes... and could kick my ass.

 

Did they look like this hahahaha (Aussies will get it haha)

 

if i had the chance id move

 

Haha, that about sums it up mate. I certainly kicked and wiped the floor with my partner's arse when I met him. Is it an American thing or what? I'm seriously curious. But I wouldn't recommend telling one of us "Come at me bro" (or here it would be "Come at me cus") because you could end up with something broken!

(For the record, my partner made a crack that I couldn't kick his arse. Ahahaha. How wrong he was).

And... Damn it LeHaM! You had to post the bloody freaking spider! I'm used to the snakes and stuff but the spiders ALWAYS get me. Ugh. Ick. Not sure if it was due to living in a house near a national park so there were constantly Huntsmen and Funnelwebs in the house when I was little in Sydney or the old house in Melbourne where a bunch of Golden Bird Eating spiders decided they wanted to take over the lounge room and fireplace.

To the extent of it, anyone that's played Resident Evil 1/REmake... The larger spiders coming down the walls? Yeah kinda like that and then smaller ones coming through old air vents through the walls. EVERYWHERE.

Thankfully our dog used to eat them one leg at a time but he'd let them scurry up the walls in-between doing so, so you had to constantly check the walls and ceilings throughout the house for these big, hairy, fucking spiders (one of Dad's friends worked at the Reptile Park and kept collecting them because they had never seen such large specimens or in such numbers as this place) suddenly falling down constantly. Plus my Mum seems to be a champion of long-distant phonebook throwing to be able to smash one of them dead-on.

That house's backyard was nothing but NOPE. Spider holes all over the backyard, pine trees and other stuff from the national park surrounding the house leading to so many of our unwelcome visitors. I saw less when we went rock climbing in the national parks on the central coast!

Though should any Americans on here visit Australia - I recommend on stocking up on Aeroguard. It seems that our mozzies can't get enough of your sweet American blood and unless you want multiple, golf-ball sized horribly inflamed bug bites... Then I'd buy the bug spray.

 

I don't like it, no no never did.

 

Though you guys know that someone is bound to go "Please explain?" about that one.

 

hhahahahhahahhhahahaaaa

 

"Then the fat wog said to the skinny wog...'Oi bru, yu slep wif ma cuzn ay?' "

 

Spent 10 months there.

Pro's - Never once came across anything dangerous/Nice climate/Mostly nice people/good standard of living.

Con's - Too much casual racism/national obsession with sport.

 

Which part did you stay or visit out of curiosity?

Part of the casual racism is just part of our humour if you've seen some of our comedy shows (not Home and Away or Neighbors, both are pretty crap) it's typically over stereotyping stuff. Though some of it is also due to a bit of a disgruntled workforce with a few things like people coming from certain countries to save up money with a higher pay rate here and go home more or less to be considered rich.

Not all of us are obsessed with sport! Can't stand cricket. Super boring, only interesting match I know of is when that Pakistan or West Indies (can't remember) player ran backwards and impaled himself on the picket fencing!

Honestly put - I watch AFL, not NRL (I also prefer playing AFL over NRL), I also watch American baseball and I watch hockey.

Though my main sport is football/soccer. Harry Kewell is a good bloke, just seems to have shit luck a decent amount of the time.

 

I really don't like anything that a "typical" Australian would. Hate our sport, hate our food, hate our cars etc etc.

Many have told me US isn't any better, but come on, they have Halloween!

 

Queensland and New South Wales mostly. Obviously not every person in Australia is the same, but it kinda felt like I was living in what I imagine 1950's Britain to be like in terms of cultural attitudes and political correctness. I'm not a sensitive PC junkie and coming from a northern family here I'm not unfamiliar with "light hearted" racist terms etc however I just came across a few two many awkward moments for my tastes in day to day life. I can take a joke just as well as everyone else however some of it was definitely not "part of your humour".

Also you guys tend to be super competitive about stuff as well, I haven't a competitive bone in my body and I found that jarring. Like I said, I'm generalising. I realise not everyone is like that and also should an Australian spend the same amount of time in the UK they'd no doubt have their own criticisms of our culture. We're all different in our ways.

Ultimately I would like to go back one day, so much I didn't get to see and it's generally a much happier country than here.

 

America has its up and downs. More downs recently it seems. So I met someone from Australia a bit ago and picked his brain. He claimed that Australians tended to be more crude and vulgar than Americans, if that's at all possible. For example, and excuse my language, he claimed a conversation between he and his father would start with, "What's going on, ya cunt?" Any credence to this? Wasn't sure if it was regional, nationwide, or just an isolated example.

 

Can also depend on the area too, I don't deny that I've said quite a lot of stuff in my own time (and most people may have had a moment of "go back to your own country" when dealing with a particularly bad example of a person from anywhere else) but honestly put - quite a lot of people can be absolute fucking morons here, with or without drugs which is really what gets me.

There's other things like how we're too lazy to say Lebanese properly so you end up hearing stuff like "Lebbo" or insults like "wog" and the like but quite a few of those phrases have been accepted in the initially insulted demographics in the same manner of in America with some people being all "My nigger!" to a friend.

Calling Kiwi's "sheepshaggers" or calling you guys "Poms" or any of the many other names we have for either lots under the sun is the usual stuff, so if you heard that going on then there may have either been some heavy-handed jokes or trolling going on as it's fairly common to just heckle people as a joke.

But stuff like "tea-towel head" is still an insult here as well as a few other things.

May just be me as I was more or less raised with the ideal of treat people as you want to be treated but you can hate everyone equally at the same time to yourself.

Yes, that can happen though you could use pretty much any other curse to start off with and you'd get the same conversation. A Russian/Australian guy at my work starts every conversation similarly like "What's up asswipes! Hey bitch, how's it goin'? The fuck you wankers doing?"

Essentially we can get away with nudity and swearing on television for the most part but god-forbid there's drug use, gore or that the nudity or sex scene stars a woman with small breasts in the show or film! Particular groups prefer the more conservative look of some US television but it's kinda half/half here to the point it can get to utterly ridiculous points every now and again.

... I can't imagine watching Hell's Kitchen in America and hearing constant cursing bleeps compared to here. But I'd like to be able to play what games I want as a legal adult instead of being unable to purchase/import it or having a watered down version because "somebody think of the children!!!" still.

 

I've spent a few years over in Australia (have a brother who emigrated) and all in all, it's not a bad place to live. Spent most of my time in Melbourne (excellent place) but did road trips up to Brisbane and over to Adelaide, so I got around a bit.

I do like the Australian friendliness, case in point, I had to readjust to not having full on conversations with checkout workers when I got back to the UK. It's pretty much considered rude over there to not be a little bit chatty. Takes me 20 seconds to buy a pack of cigerettes in the UK, takes 2 minutes over there:

In the UK, at the Supermarket tobacco desk:

In Australia, at the DRIVE THROUGH OFF LICENSE (these exist):

The other thing I found interesting was although they have massive anti-drink & driving campaigns, in the state of Victoria it's perfectly legal to drink a beer in the car on your way home from work, colloquially called 'The Traveller'. Most of the other states have banned it but Victoria fought to keep the law like it is, so builders/plumbers ('tradies') can hit the booze as soon as they finish work. When I was working at peoples houses doing onsite repair, it was fairly common to be offered a beer to drink on your way home in the van.

I have to agree with this, the casual racism got on my nerves. Their attitude towards other races/creeds is still stuck in the 70s/80s. This is the bit I can't work out as they pride themselves on the Aussie 'fair go' (which is essentially "don't be a dick") and is even pointed out in the tourism material, yet they still think it's ok to use particular words that we phased out years ago.

Case in point, my boss out there was Macedonian (there's quite a few in Melbourne) and would refer to himself and his friends as "Wog's", which he felt comfortable self identifying with much in the same vein as a black american might refer to himself and his friends as Nigger. I had to explain to him not to use that word around me as it made me feel uncomfortable, even though it wasn't being used a derogatory term.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, video games are ridiculously expensive over there for some reason. Most new releases are around the $100 AUD mark (£55/$90 USD)

EDIT2: Oh and I forgot to mention drugs. If you can't produce it locally (so, cannabis/methamphetamines/LSD) then it's ridiculously expensive and normally shit. After growing up in the UK in the 90's and seeing the shift away from booze to drugs like MDMA at parties/raves, it was really weird going to 'raves' that entirely consisted of people pissed out of their face.

EDIT3: Oh and one more thing. Even though they love their sports and 'barrack' for their team, their chants can only be decsribed as boring. "Aussie aussie aussie - Oi oi oi" You should checkout what the fans come up with in the UK football terraces:

 

As for using words that were phased out to be politically correct ages ago elsewhere, I think it's more along the lines of - we don't give much of a shit provided that you're individually not a massive dick to everyone and if nobody is actually offended by the word and own it despite it previously being considered derogatory then we don't particularly see an issue with it and if there issue an issue with it then you respond as quickly as you can "Sorry mate, won't do it again mate. Didn't know it upset you." sort of thing but typically it's not an issue as most people just shrug it off when it happens.

I've got Lebanese, Greek, Turkish, Egyptian and so-on co-workers and they tend to group themselves together under particular titles that were derogatory but they don't particularly care as from what I've found if they use "Wog" then they usually mean someone more traditional or completely stereotypical to their culture but they also still find the stereotypical comedy shows like "Fat Pizza" funny as they accept how the stereotype portrayal is. Same as with how the average mining community could be portrayed in the film "Red Dog" too.

A large amount of our comedy is either political satire or joking around on stereotypical views of anything and everything - could be a particular gender, age group or culture. For example:
Fat Pizza is a comedy t.v. show based on the super-stereotypes of some of the Lebanese, Greek, Maltese and so-on community like car tuning and the like.

Summer Heights High is another comedy t.v. show based on rich schoolkid and poor schoolkid stereotypes in different high schools.

Housos is yet another comedy t.v. show that is based on the stereotypes of people "bluding on the dole" (government handouts and living in government (cheap) housing as well) which was made by the same guy that did Fat Pizza (who happens to be Maltese himself).

Red Dog was a comedy movie based on the stereotypes on outback mining communities (which my Mother agreed with as she grew up in one) that also dealt with the legendary "Red Dog" that got around the country by getting lifts from people in the distant communities.

The sad thing is that if you've lived in particular parts of the country, the stereotypes are often alive and kicking.

But could just be me, I've also grown up watching political satire by D.A.A.S. and Paul on Good News Week so the majority of it probably just totally goes by me. *Shrugs*

The prices are stupidly high sometimes, in like 2008 or 2009 or so PS3 games were like $120 and 360 games were about $100-$110 but were still less than a brand new PS3 game. The same thing goes for any sort of software even if it's being digitally distributed - the Adobe suite is notorious for overcharging us a few more grand than the US or UK regional ones do. It actually works out cheaper to get a return flight to the US, buy the Adobe software and come back here!

If you couldn't find the type of drugs you were after, you probably would've had better luck elsewhere like in Sydney - the drug dealers are waaaay too obvious and sometimes try to deal in ridiculous places like just outside a supermarket if you end up going to a shitty area. I've not tried anything though, nor do I intend to.

Though it's hilarious to watch when a Holden goes by with tinted windows and they all just completely bolt down the street thinking it's an unmarked police car (happens to my parents all the time as they both wear uniforms with the same light blue and dark blue as officers here and that's all they pay attention to when staring at their Holden).

If you've been to some of the sports that use theme songs per team then you may have heard some colourful ones. Like the Essendon Bomber's theme starts off with "See the Bombers fly up! Up!"... The next part of the line is often changed to "The other teams go fuck! Fuck!" instead of using the actual lyrics.

But it wasn't anywhere near as bad as when I went to see a baseball game in San Fransisco with a bunch of drunk Americans that confused the chanting of particular player's names for "USA! USA! USA!" and the entire stand switched over to doing that the whole game with a drunk Mexican guy getting his family to chant other country names randomly to throw the Americans off. XD

 

ozone hole
dermis
piss beer
most hilarious english accent