Driving on the wrong side of the road has now become second nature. It only takes one or two slip-ups to realize that your life depends on being on the right (oops, I mean correct, which is the left) side of the road. I did two slip-ups early on and I'm pretty well over it now.

But negotiating hallways in busy places is a different story. Your life isn't in jeapordy if you walk on the right hand side of the corridor. But everybody here walks on the left as well.

Well, not everybody as it turns out. The uni is full of exchange students from all over the world. You can see them coming - and they usually walk on the right hand side. It's bloody inconsiderate. My brain is already tortured with doing everything backwards and then one of these foreign students walks by on the wrong side and it just totally messes everything up. Then I have to consciously think about which side I'm on, and my brain is telling me I'm on the wrong side, even though I'm on the correct one. 

Zero horse float activity. All equestrian movement in Australia has come to a standstill following the discovery of equine influenza at the government's quarantine station, and more recently, at one of the major stables in Sydney. 

Turns out we're right in the heart of this matter. Our horse 'Teddy' arrived from California two weeks ago.  He was scheduled to be released last Wednesday - the day that the EI outbreak was discovered in a couple of his paddock mates. Now he'll be in quarantine at least another month - maybe longer.

It's gonna' pop through any day now - in fact today looks like a spring day. I must be careful what I wish for, though.

We've spent the last few months doing everything we could to stay warm. Sometime in the next three weeks or so we'll be suddenly faced with the task of keeping cool from the sweltering heat. We don't yet have air conditioning. I'm living at approximately the same latitude as Los Angeles.

Parts of Queensland are approximately the same latitude as Mexico City. Sydney would lie around Tijuana - and Melbourne on the southern coast would be somewhere around S.F. if the world were flipped. As I've explained before, I'm actually at an altitude more like Albuquerque, even though the 'LA weather' is only about ten minutes away, over the edge of the nearby continental cliff.

The birds are getting much more noisy in the morning. And these aren't little chirp, chirp songbirds. These guys are big and loud. The whip birds, the kookaburras, the r2d2 birds. It's impossible to sleep in on a weekend because of all the avian racket outside the window. They put the American rooster to shame (though there are a few of those around as well).  

You hear all the time about the pesky kangaroos in Australia. But I've only seen a handful - mostly on the drive to Canberra.

But every couple of days I see another dead wombat - the victim of roadkill. They litter the highways. Unlike the kangaroo, the wombat is a mostly nocturnal slow-moving beast about the size of a small dog, but a bit fatter. Maybe a badger would be a better comparison. The problem with being nocturnal and slow-moving is that they can't get across the street in time in the middle of the night to avoid getting squished.

The typical wombat builds tunnels and burrows for shelter. Miles of them, which makes them a pest in farm areas (where I happen to live). The horses and cows step into the holes and break legs. You can't fence them out because the dig right under it. They also like to burrow under houses.  They're just a fact of life, and whether you like it or not, they were here first. But they're mostly peaceful creatures, which makes it such a shame when you see yet another one that wandered across the highway and went splat. 

Went over to the tombola tonight. Hey, we won two trays of meat (about $40 worth of steak and sausage) from a $5 raffle ticket. Coulda' been worse. Amanda was busy catching up on and spreading gossip. That's the favorite past-time in a small town.

Over on the far corner of the room were a few twenty-somethings. Completely out of place in the bowling club, though we get 'em in here now and again. The drinks are cheaper than the pub around the corner. I'd go to the pub myself - it's closer; except that they only serve Toohey's and Victoria - the local equivalent of Schlitz and Coors. There are only two Aussie beers that I can tolerate ("Pigs Fly" and James Squire "Amber Ale"), and I go where ever they've got at least one of 'em. 

My eyes were glued to the monitor above the jukebox. Oh yeah, vintage AC-DC. "You shook me all night long" - the concert footage. I remember it well. I was at the Back in Black concert in Denver way back when.

In the late seventies and early 80's, the U.S. rock music scene was exporting Van Halen.  Pyrotechnic guitar. Let's ignore Bruce Springsteen. England was still trying to show us up with Jimmy Page and David Bowie.  Germany chimed in with Michael Schenker and Scorpion. These were really out of place in the U.S. as we had no need for esoteric and intellectual rock-n-roll. What's the point?

But everybody had a place for Angus and Malcolm and their bare bones, no-frills 3 chord rock and roll from down under.  There were no airs about it, no 'fastest guitar on earth' to challenge. No intellectualism. Just rock-n-roll, cut to its basics. Simple, loud, driving. Ya' have to respect that. Especially when you add such eternal lyrics as "Too many women, and too many pills". 

--- 

On a related subject, as I listen to Aussie radio, there's a notable lack of rap music. That's understandable, there's no ghetto culture here. The dark skinned folks are usually aboriginal, and there is a lot of racial angst towards them - about which I'll write another time. What I would think of as 'Africans' are usually exchange students from England, and they're usually well respected here as part of the intellectual class.  They generally talk in thick British accents, which makes whatever they currently call 'street talk' in the states a foreign tongue completely. Nobody here can understand it.  The Prince of Bel Air and the Romeo Show might as well have been from Mars.

What I do notice about Aussie music is that there is an emphasis on trance and techno for the last fifteen years or so.  Obviously ecstasy and rave dancing were very big problems here at one point in time (at least in Sydney, I don't know how much the rave culture spread to the suburbs, as it is historically an urban phenomenon).  It's interesting what you can find out about a culture by knowing what they request on the radio.