In Which I Don't Have a Lot to Say, But I Say it Anyway

Today marks one week since I came to Bunbury and eleven weeks since I first came to Australia (although technically eleven weeks ago today didn't exist for me because of the whole international dateline thing). This is positively crazy! It feels like it's going by so fast but also like I've been here forever. Depending on my travel plans I only have something like seven weeks left. I want to go home but I also don't feel like I've really experienced Australia fully yet. There are so many places I want to go that I know I won't get to. But more than that, I feel like I still haven't met that many real Australians. Staying in hostels there are always more foreign visitors than people from Australia. There are a few Australians in the hostel I just left that I talked to, but not that many. The thing is, the Australians that live here don't need to talk to random strangers from other countries. They've got lives and friends of their own here, and just go about their business. I don't really know how to get to know Australians here, although I have a few more weeks to work on it (I've given up on finding Australians in Cairns, there are very very few).

I guess that's sort of my problem. I love doing the touristy things and seeing the country, and there's so much that I want to see, but just seeing the country and doing tours with other tourists isn't really the same as experiencing it with real Australians. I did live with Australians for two weeks, and now I'm living like an Australian, but not with them, so I guess I don't really know what else I could do to experience the country, but I feel like there should be something. Maybe that's another reason for me not to live in the hostel, I can try to meet more locals somehow.

On the other hand, I might have so much work the next month that I won't have time to worry about meeting locals, or foreigners, or seeing things, or being lonely, or anything except for dolphins. The past two days it's been dawning on me just how much forty hours per week is and writing a paper on top of it, especially when I have no idea how to write this paper or what to write it about. A month just doesn't seem like nearly enough time to collect enough data to get a 20-50 page paper done (much less enough time to get the data and write the paper). Ah! I was hoping this could double (with some extra work next year) as my senior thesis, but now I'm thinking it might be too crap to use for that and I'm freaking out a little. But not really as much as I normally would about something like this, so that's good.

Anyway, in honor of this quasi-anniversary I will leave you with a few new Australianisms:

"______ as." as in "If you take the seat out that car would be spacious as." (I assume it's just taking off the "anything" from "spacious as anything" but this is something I've only heard since I've gotten here (although mainly from a guy from Sydney and one of the German girls who went to school for a while in Adelaide, so maybe it's not a regional thing. Anyway, it's weird)

"to spit the dummy" as in "Boy did she ever spit the dummy after that." (This takes a bit of explaining, as it's actually double slang. "Dummy" is a pacifier, so to spit the dummy is to throw a tantrum - like when little kids get so upset they spit the pacifier out of their mouth to scream - but it's used for people of all ages throwing tantrums)

"...hey?" They say this instead of "What?" when they don't understand what someone says (apparently they find it rude when people say "What?" which I just found out, so I've probably been pissing off Australians all over the place), also used like "eh?" to get someone to agree with a statement you've made.

"Esky" is a cooler - like you would put beer into - taken from the brand Eskimo, I think. Don't sit on other peoples' eskies, it's very rude, because then they have to ask you to move to get their next beer.

Anyway, I should get back to work. Sometime in the next couple of days I will try to take pictures around Bunbury and post them. Also, wish me luck with my interview for my summer internship tonight, and swimming with the dolphins tomorrow morning!