Month 5 review

Happy new year! Five months in now, and I’m continuing to try and learn new things: more driving, a trip to Tasmania, and accepting a position for the new school year teaching foods. 

New words this month:

• Potato cakes are more or less the same as what McDonald’s hash browns are, if only a little soggier. Not to be confused with hash browns though, those are a different potato product. 
• Aussies call ketchup tomato sauce. 
• Sour patch kids, gummy worms, malteasers, etc. aren’t collectively referred to as candy but as lollies. 
• The word bogan is “slang for a person whose speech, clothing, attitude and behaviour are considered unrefined or unsophisticated” (thanks Wikipedia). Think Aussie Trailer Park Boys and you’re on the right track. 
• Instead of telling someone where the bathroom is, you will point towards the toilet block.
• Maybe I’m the weird one here, but I’m used to pronouncing “bistro” like “beast row” and not “biss trow”

On the Agenda in December:

December 1 brought the first day of summer! I’m not sure why Aussies roll to the next season at the beginning of the month, but I don’t mind. Makes it easy to remember, if nothing else. 

Two Friday night game nights with friends – my Uno skills are severely lacking. 

A trip to You Yangs Regional Park. Not an area serviced by public transport, so a friend and I rented a car and made a day trip out of it! We hiked to the top of Flinders Peak, which is the highest point in the vicinity and offered stellar views of the Victorian countryside. We took the scenic route home and even got to see some Eastern Grey Kangaroos! 

I was lucky enough to spend a week and a bit with a grade 5 class to cap off my year, and it was an absolute delight. I am so excited to get to actually know my students next term and build a classroom culture with them. 

To celebrate the end of the school year, I took a trip out to Tasmania. I spent five days on a tour around the island, and will be posting more soon! They say Melbourne is bad for having four seasons in one day, but with Tassie (Cradle Mountain in particular) it was more like four seasons in ten minutes… 

The rest of the month was full of walking, touristing (more on that to come), and learning that Williamstown has flying foxes on New Years Eve – I was at The Strand (one of the waterfront streets that wrap around the peninsula) to watch fireworks, but the bats were far more entertaining.

I made my second blood donation down under! One of the things I like is that I get updated where my blood goes, this time around it was sent to a hospital in Mildura, VIC (a 8 hour train and coach journey from me!).

Some new things I noticed

When fuelling up the rental car, you can’t lock the nozzle on, you need to remain by the car and hold it to fill up. 

Their coins don’t have names, and there is no 25 cent piece! The closest thing I hear is “bring a gold coin” to  collectively refer to $1 or $2 coins. The coins they do have are 5c, 10c, 20c, 50c, $1, and $2. Curiously, the $2 coin is smaller than all but the 5c coin. Funnily enough, all but the 5c pieces are accepted when reloading a myki card using the self-service kiosks.

When flying, before we taxi to the runway, the flight attendants need to “arm the doors” of the aircraft. Can someone tell me if other flights do this, cause I’ve never noticed it before. 

That’s it for December – clearly I am on summer vacation mode. See you soon!

– Kate