Learning Strine

Sorry, I have been in Australia for a while now but the prospect of curling up with one of the two cats in front of the fire and eating Bangers 'n' Mash was far to tempting for me to even think about blog posts.

Anywho, I have been in Oz for a week now, and I am thoroughly enjoying it. The weather has been (excuse my Strine) shite, but it hasn't stopped me from spending a day canyoning in the Blue Mountains (where I am staying with my cousins) and making a flying visit to Sydney. I don't really care about the weather anyway as I am bathing in the delights of western culture. These treats range from Fish and Chips to TV programmes about super morbidly obese people in the US. I am also enjoying the quirks of the Australian vernacular. For example, were you aware that they pronounce 'Pantene Pro-V', Panteeen Pro-V. And, in regards to TV series, they do not say the series Finale but Final, weird ey? Ey/hey is another interesting linguistic tool which serves the same purpose as 'ba' in Chinese: basically it makes a statement a suggestion of a fact.

My journey down from Beijing was fantastically without hitches. The domestic flight to Shenzhen went ahead no problem and fortunately I only began conversing with the born-again Chinese lady sitting next to me just as we landed. I took the bus to Hong Kong, which involved some amusingly overly stringent border controls, and arrived at the airport with about five hours to spare before my flight. The airport was a bit of a mental place. Unsurprisingly it was a heady mix of western and oriental culture but I was truly prepared for how bizarre that would seem to me. It is difficult to explain but coming from a place where the ethnic groups are very definitely associated with a certain level of wealth (by this I mean that 95% of the Chinese people I had met had been relatively poor and for the westerners, the opposite was true) seeing this massive mix of cultures all strutting about (and buying in the duty free) in their big brands was very odd. Anyway, my flight from Hong Kong was hardly delayed by the heavy rainstorm that struck half an hour before scheduled take off, and what ensued was brilliant nine hour flight containing two very good meals and three good films.

I had better finish now as we are about to go out for a walk to make the most of this gap in the weather.