Last weekend, I headed back to my home town to attend the Merriwa Festival of the Fleeces, an event I haven’t been to since I moved to Sydney in 2005. Established in 1990 to promote agriculture in the area, it has varied in size from a small one day event, to a 2 day event … [Read more…]
Australia’s war on Halloween is similar to the War on Christmas in that it just involves some indignant grumbling rather than actual violence, but different in that it has nothing to do with religion. It’s a civil war, with one side excited about Halloween and desperately wanting to make it a bigger deal in … [Read more…]
Although it happened more when I had just moved to the US than now, I still occasionally hear from Americans about the positive things they admire about Australians and Australia (they are able to see past our nasty wildlife sometimes). Steve Irwin is still greatly missed, some of our animals are cute, and we created … [Read more…]
The menus in the US have an unusually large focus on entrées. It was annoying when all we wanted was a main, and we weren’t interested in entrées. The supermarkets often devote a rather big section just to entrées. Larger than I would have thought was necessary. I didn’t get it. What’s with the … [Read more…]
Directly after reading that title, you might (probably are) thinking “Well, duh. That’s why they’re called Southern Foods, on account of them being found in the South and all. You dummy”. It’s not as simple as that, though. Often there are foods we don’t realize are so specific to our own country or region until … [Read more…]
You get used to a few things being different when you move to a new country. Most of them are obvious, some…you just can’t put your finger on at first. It was only a few weeks after moving to the US that, one night as my husband and I were about to fall asleep, one … [Read more…]
Living in a different country and getting the chance to interact more with the locals, rather than just see the selective sites and bugger off happily back to your home country, you get a chance to see the more nuanced differences in their culture to your own. It’s easy to just assume that people in … [Read more…]