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Post by Deleted on Oct 9, 2009 16:28:38 GMT
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Post by bixaorellana on Oct 9, 2009 20:55:42 GMT
Here is something that I hope somehow, someday, preferably soon, will prove to be a misconception:
People from Australia, although deeply fond and proud of their home country, fall strangely silent on an internet forum designed as a place for people to share stories and pictures about travel and home.
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Post by ilbonito on Mar 23, 2010 7:02:57 GMT
Hahahaha...I'll do what I can
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Post by spindrift on Mar 23, 2010 19:10:31 GMT
I knew the one about Koalas.....
Sharks are not mentioned and they're EVERYWHERE.
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Post by hwinpp on Apr 6, 2010 6:49:24 GMT
I knew kangaroos are about as dumb as sheep.
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Post by ilbonito on Apr 7, 2010 3:56:15 GMT
Its those supposedly cuddly wombats you have to watch out for:
Wombat mauls bushfire survivor Updated Tue Apr 6, 2010 1:08pm AEST
A man is recovering in hospital after he was mauled by a wombat at Flowerdale, north-east of Melbourne.
Paramedic Robert Gill said Bruce Kringle, 60, was a survivor of the Black Saturday bushfires and was living in a caravan while he built a new home.
Mr Gill said when the man went to leave the caravan this morning, he found the wombat on his door mat.
"Unfortunately the gentleman stood on the wombat and the wombat proceeded to get rather nasty and attacked him and inflicted some wounds to his lower legs and also to his arms as well," Mr Gill said.
"It took about 20 minutes. He did try to exit the area and get away from the wombat but my belief is that it kept coming at him."
A local resident said the man managed to kill the wombat with an axe.
Mr Gill said other residents had had a run-in with the wombat earlier.
"They were able to exercise caution with him and get rid of him further down the road, but unfortunately the next stop was this gentleman's door mat," he said.
Mr Gill said the man was bitten on the arms and legs and taken to the Northern Hospital in a stable condition.
Mr Kringle's friend, Kelly Smith, said the wombat pulled him to the ground in the attack.
"Apparently it attacked his leg and got him to the ground and started attacking his chest, then Brucey killed the wombat and got taken to hospital in an ambulance," she said.
Jeff McClure from the Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) said it was highly unusual for a wombat to attack a person.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 7, 2010 5:02:52 GMT
The wombat from hell!
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Post by ilbonito on Apr 7, 2010 6:13:58 GMT
There was another bizarre story recently about an insane kangaroo holding down a farmdog in a dam to drown it. It then attacked a man who went to help. Wild Oz!!!!
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Post by Deleted on Apr 7, 2010 9:24:51 GMT
And the kangaroo from hell too!
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Post by Deleted on Apr 7, 2010 9:56:28 GMT
I think all those uranium mines are leaking stuff into the ground water.
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Post by ilbonito on Apr 8, 2010 9:04:50 GMT
Here is an interesting misconception about Oz; despite having the reputation for being funloving and laidback, always having barbecues at the beach, several recent studies have found Australians work some of the longest hours in the Western world: www.abc.net.au/business/mnb/content/s1232103.htm
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Post by Deleted on Apr 9, 2010 13:33:42 GMT
Is that still true 6 years after that article, or is it even worse now than in 2004?
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Post by ilbonito on Apr 10, 2010 4:22:25 GMT
Oh was that one from 2004? Its probably worse now - its been in the news a bit recently; another, most recent survey came to similar conclusions.
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Post by ilbonito on Apr 11, 2010 3:02:55 GMT
Article in Melbourne paper this weekend about Australians flocking to New York to open coffee shops, which until now, have been poor quality:
MOST Australian visitors to New York will understand the difficulty in finding a decent cup of coffee in the city that never sleeps.
While some would argue that Americans don't need more caffeine, a growing band of Aussie baristas are taking Melbourne-style cafes to Manhattan and taking on the big franchises such as Starbucks.
The trend was dubbed the ''Australian coffee diaspora'' by The New York Times, and even the humble flat white has made it big in the Big Apple.
Melburnian Alexander Hall who previously managed St Kilda's Cafe Racer and
Il Fornaio, reckons New Yorkers still have plenty to learn.
''The New York coffee scene is similar to Melbourne in 1985. When I moved here about six years ago, there was virtually nowhere that served quality espresso coffee. I originally planned to pick up an idea here and then move back to Melbourne to cash in.
''But I realised there was a huge opportunity here because nothing in New York compared to our cafes,'' Mr Hall says.
He opened The Milk Bar in Brooklyn last year and is looking for another site in Manhattan.
''The concept is straightforward. We serve lattes in glasses, flat whites in ceramic cups and offer basic Melbourne hospitality; remember what people drink, pat the dog outside and give customers a smile.''
Fellow Melburnian Francesco Agoftino says Americans only recently discovered the pleasures of an espresso or cafe latte, after weaning themselves off cloying Frappuccinos in enormous cups.
''Americans love to have 100 options and they also like sweet, syrupy coffee. That's the influence of Starbucks, but we're a straight-up Melbourne [style] cafe. I refuse to use skim milk, we don't do shots of caramel or vanilla, we do cappuccinos and lattes in Duralex glasses,'' Mr Agoftino says.
And he says he has been flooded with requests for flat whites, which are treated with disdain by Melbourne's coffee aristocracy.
''I know they're considered uncool back home, but I've made hundreds of them in the past two months.''
After honing his barista skills at the Federal Coffee Palace in the GPO complex on Elizabeth Street, Mr Agoftino opened the Glass Shop in Brooklyn last year.
His venue was runner-up in last week's Time magazine award for best new cafe and was recently nominated by The New York Times as one of the city's best.
Two venues associated with Sydney barista Adam Craig also made the list, including Culture Espresso Bar near Broadway in the heart of Manhattan. Mr Craig says US coffee drinkers are becoming far more discerning about their morning brew.
''Only until a few years ago, people in New York would pay $2 for a crap coffee and come back the next day and do it again. I get a lot of Americans coming in and saying, 'I recently went to Australia and the coffee was amazing and it's made me realise how bad our coffee is'.''
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Post by gertie on Apr 15, 2010 11:32:12 GMT
I can fair appreciate this whole misconceptions thing since I hail from Texas. I used to get asked in chat rooms all the time about my cowboy boots, did I have a horse in the back yard, did I have a bunch of cattle, was there an oil derrick in my back yard. My Pièce de résistance was always to talk about having dined at JR's home, which indeed I have done ....sort of. The home used for the filming of "Dallas" is available for party rentals and a company I worked for in the 90's had their year's end dinner there for several years. ;D
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Post by hwinpp on Apr 26, 2010 5:21:15 GMT
The impression I got was that (in the retail business) Oz working hours must be among the shortest in the world.
10am- 06pm, including an hour for lunch. I thought this must be a unionist's utopia, 35 hour working weeks.
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Post by fumobici on Apr 26, 2010 18:06:14 GMT
Why would anyone work for someone else more than 35 hours a week except in cases of dire necessity? Really its not like it'll make a whole lot of difference from working 40 either in the pay or the work output. Life's short.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 26, 2010 19:35:58 GMT
The law in France sets the work week at 35 hours. Right wing governments have been trying to undo it for the past several years, but they quickly discover that public opinion is against them. This is not to say that most people really work only 35 hours, but they very much appreciate being paid overtime when they work longer hours.
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Post by fumobici on Apr 26, 2010 21:57:47 GMT
Hooray for France then. If you can't get it accomplished in 35 hours, far more likely than not another 5 aren't going to suffice.
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Post by ilbonito on Apr 27, 2010 8:51:01 GMT
Most people working in shops in Oz would be working part time or on casual wages. But agreed - shops close here way too early (by Asian standards). Although apparently parts of Europe are worse - my husband is in Switzerland and says everything shuts at 6pm, and all day on Sunday!!! How archaic!
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Post by bjd on Apr 27, 2010 9:59:42 GMT
re the coffee article. What's so special about serving coffee in glasses? I have only ever had it served in cups in Italy. I would think glasses are for serving tea.
How come Australia (or at least Melbourne) have this "coffee culture"? Were there a lot of Italian immigrants?
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Post by ilbonito on Apr 27, 2010 10:36:11 GMT
I know; its actually highly impractical to serve coffee in glasses. They get hot! Australia - and I guess particularly Melbourne - had lots of Italian immigrants, yeah as well as many from lots of other European countries. Melbourne is famously the third largest Greek-speaking city in the world; Athens, Thessaloniki, Melbourne. I had to learn it at school (and I have no Greek ties).
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Post by Deleted on Apr 27, 2010 11:13:25 GMT
One of the things that surprised me the most in Melbourne were all of the trilingual signs in English, Italian and Greek.
I also noticed in Sydney that the municipal art museum had a sign in eight languages and that French was not one of them. Of course, this was not too long after the Rainbow Warrior days, so it might have been a political statement.
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Post by ilbonito on Apr 27, 2010 11:22:55 GMT
French is - annoyingly to my mind - still the most commonly taught second language in Australian schools. I switched to Indonesian as soon as I got the chance.
But there would be relatively few native speakers. I think the most widely spoken foreign languages in Sydney these days are Chinese (in its various forms) and Arabic.
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Post by bjd on Apr 27, 2010 11:28:14 GMT
The French didn't emigrate much either, so that might be another reason for no French on the signs.
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Post by ilbonito on Apr 27, 2010 11:34:09 GMT
Wikipedia gives the number of native French speakers in Australia at 94,000 but no mention of where they are from; France, or Vanuatu or New Caledonia perhaps ...
Its also worth considering that the whole of Australia was very nearly French. The French fleet of La Perouse landed at Botany Bay (in Sydney today) just six days after the first English settlers, in 1788.
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