I’m trying to pick up the lingo here and hearing certain things on the news continues to crack me up. Truck drivers are just called “truckies” and electricians are called “sparkies” – the list goes on and on, and it makes me want to make up my own names for various jobs. I think plumbers should be “flushies”.

A startling trend I’ve noticed here is the proliferation of the “El Camino” or “Suburu Brat” style cars here. You don’t really see pickups, but man these things are everywhere. Also, one of them is named the Thunder, which I find fitting.

They have their own “Flo” for Progressive Insurance here, but her name is Kitty. They pronounce known brands differently here – Hyundai – which is typically “Hun-Die” in the US is “Hee-Yun-Die” here.

I watched almost the entire Australia / India World Cup Cricket semi-final (almost 8 hours!), and I’m fairly certain I fully understand the “One Day International” format of cricket.  The World Cup final is here in Melbourne on Sunday against New Zealand.  The Aussie rules football season starts on Thursday, so I’m going to have to figure out which team to support and learn all those rules.

I’ll leave you with more pictures!

I’ve been here 5 days and figured I’d start blogging. I’m not exactly sure what that means but here we go with some musings.

The 24 hours of flying to get here were trying, but I managed.  Not so nice to have turbulence for about half of a 15 hour flight when you really want to sleep.  I think I managed about 3 hours of terrible sleep.  I cleared immigration and customs pretty quick, but no cab drivers wanted to deal with me and my pile-o-bags.  Ultimately, some enormous van-cab came by and took me to the apartment.

Things have been good so far, I do miss my “drip” coffee – everything here is espresso based, and I for one appreciate volume in my beverages, because whatever I drink, I tend to drink fast. I got a “long macchiato” today and I think I finished after 1 block of walking.

I’m quite enjoying the tram system, it saves me from thinking about driving at this point. I have a hard enough time looking the right direction when crossing the street. I have picked up running / walking on the left pretty well.

I went to lift weights yesterday, and that was confusing since everything is in kilograms.  I’m doing so much math with currency conversion, metric system, time changes.

They still have payphones around town, which I find sort of odd. Also, the birds make extremely strange noises.  Beer is super expensive, but I knew that coming in. At bars they sell it in “pots” (8oz) and pints.  There is no discount for buying more, which I think is weird. They do have much more “craft” beer than when we were here in 2011, so that is nice. The beer store around the corner does sell Sierra Nevada, for the low low price of $26 for a 6-pack.

We signed a six month lease for a furnished apartment in St. Kilda – if you want to check out a map, we are near the intersection of Barkly and Inkerman streets.  It is about a 10 minute walk to the beach, which is nice.  The is an “Olive Garden” right in our building, but it is not *the* Olive Garden.  I find this very confusing.

I’ll call that my first post, and let you look at some pictures!