Things I Have Learnt About Australia in a Month

Aside from dodging spiders and sunburn, here are 15 things I’ve learnt from living in Australia for the past month.

⁃ You can’t buy alcohol from the supermarkets. You have to go to special bottle shops.

⁃ McDonald’s is called Maccas and the menu is so much better than in the UK.

⁃ Woolworths cookies are the OG.

⁃ Walking around bare foot is acceptable and even the norm in some places – even in shops and supermarkets!?

⁃ There is a shop for everything. And I mean e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g. I was walking down the high street in Melbourne and there was a shop just for hoovers next to a shop just selling suncream.

⁃ Everyone is so happy because everywhere (literally every single bar/ pub/ club) has a happy hour every day of the week.

⁃ The bugs here are 20x the size of those in the UK (and could probably kill you).

⁃ Thongs are things you wear on your feet and not as underwear.

⁃ Kangaroos are as common as cows.

⁃ The ‘Aussie salute’ will become part of your daily routine to swat away the flies.

⁃ Australians like to add ‘y/ie’ onto the end of words to make them sound cooler – e.g. choccie biccie, ciggy, footie, tinny, mozzies…

⁃ Sunday’s are not a day of rest. Instead, they are a day of drinking, otherwise known as ‘the Sunday sesh’.

⁃ You have ‘the outback’ and ‘the bush’. The former is more remote.

⁃ Australia is BIG. I underestimated how big but you can literally travel for 6 hours and it’s as though you haven’t moved on the map.

⁃ Calorie counting goes out the window as everything is in KJ / grams. Nowadays I see eating a timtam as the equivalent of eating a salad because there’s no way to measure it – oh well!

Let’s see what I can add to the list next month and the month after…

Annabel x