Living in Australia - Melbourne, Australia
Melbourne, Australia
For those of you thinking about travelling to Australia, be warned that there is a serious lack of clothing stores available let alone stores you can actually afford to shop in. When at home I would regularly head into town and pick up a top or an accessory but in Australia, we would only shop if it was absolutely necessary. So we ended up shopping in Woolworths an Australian supermarket and even worse, K-Mart, yes you will have heard of it but only from watching documentaries on white trash Americans. Not only did we resort to wearing supermarket clothes, they were sale items. On arriving we would ignore ‘New Season’ signs (***** please) and head straight to the ghastly red ‘Sale’ sign and rummage through the clothes along with the bogans. When we did have some money behind us our favourite store was Cotton On which sold basics, dresses and t shirts for $40! Fit? Then when you were feeling incredibly flush a shop called Sports Girl, very similar to Topshop, but if you can imagine even more expensive.
I hope that I have emphasized that we pretty much spent most of our time at the local supermarkets: Woolworths or Coles, end of list. Coles was similar to Tesco and much cheaper than Woolworths but our fellow pedestrians wouldn't know the shame of shopping there as every supermarket (Woolworths or Coles) had grey recycled supermarket bags that left me seriously missing our home brands.
What you might have picked up on whilst reading our Asia entries is that Debbie and I are both pizza lovers and whose pizza’s best friend but a delicious garlic bread. In Australian there are many things that they just don’t get right – and oh boy is it garlic bread. At the beginning we would buy the smart price equivalent – big mistake. Then the following week, we upped the ante and purchased the middle class of garlic breads – nope instant regret. We would of course mix it up trying out; single baguettes, double baguettes, seeded, un-seeded, extra crispy, ciabatta and even a garlic pizza and still no satisfaction. Then we had no choice but to indulge in the garlic bread supreme, obviously a pricey choice but hadn’t we suffered enough? So the garlic bread was purchased and the only conclusion that we drew was that west was indeed best when it came to garlic bread!
If there is one thing I won’t miss about Australia it’s their Goon, invented in 1965 in South Australia (somebody has access to Google) known to us Brits as boxed wine. Yes at home, nothing pleases me more than to get a box of wine but after 6 months of purchasing a 5 litre box which quickly gets de-boxed and you are left holding the goon bag you start to miss the feel of the glass between your finger tips and the nostalgia of a popping cork as the appeal of punching the perforated opening is not the same.
An interesting fact – do you know that it is cheaper to buy Australian wine in the UK then it is to buy it in Australia – that is blowing my mind grapes.
Just speak long-ly
One thing you will notice straight away about the Aussie's is the butchering of our native language. They like to abbreviate – a lot! They can happily string sentences together with abbreviation after abbreviation and I would often ask them to speak long-ly.
You might find these useful when visiting:
Aussie – Australian
Macca’s – McDonalds
Bogans – Lower class citizen
Rue – Kangaroo
Roo – Ute
Jamies – Pyjamas
Cozie – Swimming costume
Drongo – Fool
Trackie Dacks – Tracksuit trousers
Abo’s - Aborigines
Eski – Ice box
Floro – Florescent clothing/paint
Avo – Afternoon
Goon – wine
Alternatively pretty much shorten everything and add o:
Servo – Service Station
Smoko – Break
Bottle O – Off-licence
Including Names:
Jacko
Stevo
But not including names like Daryl and Darren. Chop off everything after the Da, add a couple of Z’s and an A (eg Dazza) and for extra fair dinkum add on a 'mate'.