1. The service in Melbourne bars is miles better than in the the UK. Last Friday night I went to meet a friend in a city centre bar after work and found it absolutely packed – outside. But inside was merely very busy. My heart sank, thinking I’d be waiting 20 mins to get served at an understaffed bar, but there I was in under a minute holding a drink. I found a similar pattern in the (many) other bars we visited that night. Even when packed, you get served. I think the difference is Australian bars are staffed properly, i.e. they have enough people working. In the UK, they try to keep costs down by employing 2 people to cover 20m of bar space with 1 other person operating the dishwasher, leaving customers in a ruck 3 people deep and very thirsty. Australians appear to have figured out the best way to get customers’ money out of their pockets and into the till is to serve them drinks as quickly as possible. This is good.
2. Aussies are a friendly bunch. Everyone you encounter seems to be happy to see you, or at least say hello. A cheerful lot, Australians.
3. The food in Melbourne is brilliant, at least in terms of variety. I’m the wrong bloke to judge food quality, but it’s good enough for me and you can get whatever you want within 5 minutes of the hotel.
4. There are a lot of Asians in Melbourne, and it comes as an initial surprise to hear them speaking with thick Australian accents (obviously being second or third generation). I’m guessing hearing London’s Indians speaking in cockney accents for the first time sounds odd at first, too.
5. They are absolutely bananas about Australian rules football in Melbourne, with either the players or the games dominating the back half of the papers. To be fair, I did know this before I came, but did not appreciate the extent to which it is true.
6. Speaking of Aussie rules, not a day goes by without a player having to apologise over some incident or other in a bar or club the previous weekend.
7. What’s with the pimped up, lowered ‘utes? They look seriously naff.
8. Melbourne is very nice, but parts of it aren’t. King Street on a Saturday night resembles Glasgow at much the same time.
9. Wild Turkey is very popular here, being a lot of people’s bourbon of choice. I’ve even seen advertisements for it, which I’ve not seen elsewhere.
10. Bourbon is not the same as whiskey in Australia.
11. The main casino in Melbourne (and I believe they have similar ones in the other Australian cities) is enormous. You don’t see casinos of this size in the UK, and unlike the one in Manchester, Melbourne’s wasn’t filled with Chinese men in shell suits.
12. The Tan running track is fantastic!! It’s a gravel track in a 3.8km circuit around the botanical gardens made especially for running and walking. I ran it last weekend for what I’m sure will be the first of many times, it was great.
13. I appear to know more about the Australian cricket team than most Australians. Three years of being in Nigeria glued to Supersports TV can explain that one.
14. The internet is seriously crap by European or Asian standards. It is slow and expensive, and free wi-fi is very hard to find (in Tallinn they have free wi-fi in the parks). I have heard different explanations for this, ranging from the geographic isolation of Australia (only 1 connection in and out) to the lack of competition between providers.
15. A year living here will be one hell of a lot of fun!
The food here is the best I’ve had anywhere, suggest installing Urbanspoon on your smartphone to assist.
Regarding 7. You’re looking at the nest of the native Boganus Maximus, a quite common breed, generally identified via the ‘Strayayan Made’ tattoos on it’s forehead and various forms of naff stickerage on the back window of the nest.
The bogans nest has the rear quarter vision of a Victoria line drivers cabin on the London Underground and given it’s agricultural design heritage (live axle, leaf spring etc) , corners like a frightened tea trolley. But we are richly assured that the nest is ‘The best in the world’, better than BMW or any of those Korean ‘buzzboxes’ (sic)
The Bogan Maximus is fiercely territorial and will always choose a nest from a single source and use it’s aggressive mating call to loudly disparage fellow bogans driving ute nests from other sources.
In the past week, one of the nest sources has decided that it can’t make money selling to Bogans anymore and had withdrawn from the market. The shrieking howls of emotional incontinence from the Ford ‘spruiking (look it up)’ Maximus has been most amusing.
“(only 1 connection in and out) ”
Which also smacks of a lack of competition…
Duopoly.
That’s the answer to most questions starting with “why” when you move to Australia.
The only ‘why’ question I can think of in regard to Australia is why anyone would want to go there in the first place? Situated at the arse-end of the world they all cling desperately to a narrow fringe around the edges of a huge desert which either roasts them or burns them. And then there is Julia Gillard . . . need I say more?
Conservative political parties in Australia seldom have much interest in free markets. Historically (and to a fair extent still), they have been about protecting the interests of existing big business. On better occasions – the present not being one such occasion – the Australian Labor Party (ALP) can be quite market friendly, except with respect to the labour market, which it finds hard to touch due to the nature of its grass roots. Not always, though.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the ALP gained a theoretical “nationalise everything” ideology as did Labour parties in many places. The conservative parties were about protecting the existing interests of their existing rich mates. Rather than have a situation in which things changed dramatically every time there was a change in government (which admittedly did not often happen) the two parties reached a compromise in which in many industries the existing large companies were allowed to continue operating, protected from further competition *except* a single state owned competitor that would be set up for this purpose.
This led to lots of cosy duopolies and oligopolies, including the one I earlier described in the airline industry. State owned companies operating in supposed competition with private sector companies were privatised (mostly by an ALP government) from the late 1980s, but the oligopolies and barriers to entry (which mostly take the form of establishment companies being well connected to the establishment) largely persist. It’s rather like France, actually.
Really, though, no more Ford Falcon utes will be the end of Australia as a distinct culture.
@Joe: lol, thanks for that!
@Michael: I suspected at much. I also suspect that the need for economic reforms have been masked by the commodity boom. Australia did well to avoid the fallout from the global financial crisis, but it seems as though they’ve got problems of their own on the way. The company I’m seconded into (one of Australia’s largest) specifically wanted the work done in Melbourne because they had no other work, and their Perth office is struggling. The anecdotes around the office suggest that unemployment is rising in Brisbane and Perth. Peter Voser, the Shell CEO, was in the paper this morning saying he was surprised that the Australian government has yet to wake up the North American shale boom which will inevtiably make their already horrendously expensive LNG projects uneconomical. And beneath the article was an advert for unlimited broadband internet at 100mbs for $299 per month. Some reforms are in order, I think.
Re: #10, Bourbon and whiskey aren’t the same anywhere that I want to be.
@Van Cloud: in the UK, all whiskey (be it Scotch, bourbon, rye, or whatever) is referred to as whiskey (or whisky!), and for clarity you state the brand you want. You hear the term Scotch quite often, but rarely the term bourbon. If you want a Jack Daniels you order a Jack Daniels, but everyone will say that “he’s drinking whiskey”. I think both are correct: bourbon is a whiskey just as much as Scotch or Irish. Only abroad they differentiate by type, rather than by brand.
Oh yes, Oz is enormous fun: we are tremendous fans. About the bars: when you reflect on Australians you’ll recognise that they generally are lousy at abstract thought – in fact, they recoil from it, they’re frightened by it, they affect to find it affected. On the other hand they are very good indeed at practical stuff pursued with sunny vigour, so that retail – in which I include bars and restaurants – is often done superbly. It’s twenty years since we lived there, but back then the tropical fruit and the fish were excellent. The meat was feeble – they didn’t hang it properly, the silly buggers – and the temperate fruit wasn’t much cop, apples being particularly poor. (Though we did find a supplier of good pear juice.) Tomatoes and potatoes were as tasteless as they were in the US in the 60s. Bakery was generally poor though you could avoid the problem in Adelaide by going to shops calling themselves Continental Bakery or Scots Bakery. Back then all the mass market beer was pisswater with one exception: Cooper’s Ale from Adelaide was a very fine drop. And the wines, as you know, can be superb. You lucky laddie, you.
The bakery issue (in Sydney at least) was solved by all the Vietnamese refugees who arrived in the late 1970s. Just about the first thing they all did after getting off the boat was to rent premises in the high street big enough for a little bakery, put up a big French flag and a sign saying “bakery” next to the front door, and start selling good bread – bread previously having been terrible. Maybe this didn’t get to Adelaide.
Yeah, I think it probably didn’t get to Adelaide. We didn’t notice it in Brisbane either, though that may have been a feature of the suburb we lived in since we didn’t spend much time in the centre.
And another thing, Tim: the big gum trees in South Australia are utterly magnificent – so look out for fine specimens in Victoria too (we spent only a few days in Vic). And be sure to book yourself a winter break to let you enjoy the Reef: we first went to Cairns which also let us see the Atherton Tablelands and the Daintree rainforest. Or, or, or, far further south in Queensland there is (or was) the lovely Heron Island Resort, out on the reef itself. Wunnerful. You’ve also gotta see some outback: we hired a 4WD and set off for the northern Flinders range in S Australia. Very, very worthwhile. Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
@dearieme: I’ll be here for about 12 months, with 9 weeks holiday to take. I have little reason to go back to Europe in that period, and intend to explore as much of Australia and New Zealand as I can. This is an opportunity of a lifetime, I’m going to try to make the most of it.
The bakery issue (in Sydney at least) was solved by all the Vietnamese refugees who arrived in the late 1970s.
I assume they learned it from the French, who are masters at pastry. There is no shortage of decent bakeries in Melbourne, nor of anything else as far as food goes it seems. The immigrants – much derided by a recent commentator on this here blog – have taken care of that.
@Tim, I warmly recommend NZ too (we had six months there).