This ought to be under the heading "Shadows for Brekkie", since that's what the locals (who have a magnificent ear for replacing perfectly fine two-syllable words with simpler but still bisyllabic ones) call it. The locality, in this case, is Canberra, the Australian equivalent of Washington, D.C., minus the crime rate and the coke-snorting mayors.
What's it like living in Australia? It's a lot like living in America, until you have to scramble out of the path of that apparently self-propelled car (a Ford Bluebird, perhaps) hurtling down at you at 100 kilometres per hour on the wrong side of the road. Australians think Americans are arrogant, but that's just because American society defines Australian society, from McDonald's to Models Inc. They don't seem to have picked up on realistic names for automobiles, though.
Not that I have anything against "Skippy the Bush Kangaroo" (a classic show apparently lifted directly from "Lassie") or any of his pals. I'm just a bit sore because I still haven't seen two of those Things I Came Here To See. The first is a platypus (all right already, I'll go to the zoo) and the second is a toilet that flushes the opposite -- also known as wrong -- direction. Truth to tell, I do indeed use the toilets here. It's just that they don't flush in a circle. It all goes straight down, leaving the astute viewer baffled as to the direction of the flow. Water conservation, or so they say. I'll just have to keep scouring the toilets. Pardon the expression.
My personal view is that it's just another trap for tourists or wannabe tourists like myself. I don't think Australians ever actually say "G'day mate". That's something Mick Dundee made up. Australians do nothing to suppress the myth, though, since it provides a simple way of distinguishing easy prey for scary stories about dropbears (*I'm* not going to tell you. Ask one of *them*.)
Also, the only live kangaroos in Australia, as far as I can tell, are all in captivity or in nature preserves. Kangaroos don't live in the outback, they die there. Those few that manage to survive past the pouch immediately seek out the fastest moving road train they can find and crash suicidally into its front bumper in a population control effort that even the Vatican would applaud.
But the U.S. could stand to learn a few things from its mates down under. Even though they talk funny and spell things wrong, when they're not drunk they've got a lot to say about the way the world turns. It's good to get a third-person view of the home country. With all due respect to Oliver Stone, it's sometimes tough to look at a broad aspect of one's society and decide they could be done a bit better, be it political harmony or, more likely, beer.
So I can't say I'm not enjoying it here. The Australian National University is in a much better part of town than USC, and there's even a supermarket with edible food within walking distance. Now, if only they drove on the right side of the road...