Microblog Mondays: The Aussie version – same but different

I’ve spent a week in the land of strange vowels and high-pitched voices, the land of our cousins, friendly and yet rivals, where so much is the same but different. We drove through farmland and vineyards over rolling hills, so green it could have been New Zealand. But the stark, sometimes beautiful, ubiquitous eucalyptus trees reminded me that this wasn’t home. The farms and houses look so similar, but they’re not either, because although the shape and style are familiar, here they are made out of stone, not wood. We are reminded why this is, when we see burnt out patches of forest, or we drive through towns surrounded in trees where there are signs directing us to a “last resort bush fire refuge,” and we hear that the old stone hotel we stayed in, one of the oldest in the state, was destroyed in a fire in 1993, only the original stone left standing. Yet when I sleep in an old stone cottage, and look up at all the cracks in the ceiling, I am not afraid an earthquake will bring it down on top of me – not here.

When I open my mouth, I can almost get away as a local, unless I say a vowel with an “i” or maybe an “e,” so I am very careful not to order a coffee with “skinny” milk. And when it is 24 degrees, the weather man on TV is at pains to say it doesn’t yet feel like summer.