I guess I can’t respond to everyone (since this board moves so quickly) but as a general comment…
hehehehe!
nostromo
(nice to meet you all)
And a pleasure to meet you, nostromo.
I, too, worship at the altar of Steve!
I’m an American (States) down here in Australia for uni (college). I plan on living here after all is said and done.
istara: I would be interested in knowing how you are migrating here. What sort of visa are you getting? Stuff like that. I have to consider all that in a year’s time when Uni finishes.
Anyways, some of the most common (Australian - American) questions I get asked are:
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What part of Canada are you from? (No doot aboot it, I must sound Canadian to these poor Aussies, eh? <No offense to Canadians>)
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Do you really think we all ride our pet kangaroos to school (more specifically, ride in their pouches)?
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Have you met anyone really famous?
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Do you really think we all speak like Steve Irwin, that wanker?
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How can you NOT like Vegemite?
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Why do you Yanks say your baseball championship is the World Series when you’re the only country that plays in it? Canada doesn’t count. (That’s what they say. Once again, no offense to Canadians).
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What do you mean you don’t know cricket? When you bowler hits a wicket-- You don’t even know what a bowler or wicket is!!!
Things I have learned:
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New Zealand is to Australia as Canada is to the United States.
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Tasmania is to Australia as [insert “redneck” area here] is to the United States – almost any “redneck” joke made in the states can be changed to the Tasmanians.
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Aussies have a LOT more country spirit than the Americans do (on average). They seem to think the opposite though.
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McDonalds tastes pretty much the same – except the Chicken McNuggets actually taste like chicken here.
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Australians think that if you are from the States, you are a very rich person (what with the conversion rate being about two Aussie dollars to the American dollar). In reality, the prices here are doubled on a lot of things. A CD that costs $15 in the States costs $30 here.
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American football is not “football”. It is “gridiron”.
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A large spider is not necessarily dangerous (see the Huntsmen <or is it HuntsmAn?> spider). A smaller spider (white tail) can be. I’m not used to that. In Wisconsin (where I grew up) everything was safe.
That’s about all I can think of offhand. Just my 2c.
'Cept we’re a lot smaller. And there’s a lot of water involved. 
Latch, would be interested in hearing more on your impressions. Would you say is this stronger in a regional centre like Geelong rather than say Melbourne? Is Geelong an unusual case given it’s past financial difficulties and it’s cultural focus being centred on a football team?
Drop us an e:mail if you don’t want to post.
and the Canadians equivalent term to JAFA is said in French. 
Quite gladly. His wife can stay with you, please.
~Ferry
get back in your ute ya great gullah!
–no idea what it means
ok, i got a question - does everyone in australia look great (the women, not steve irwin) because i’ve been watching neighbours and…dayum.:eek:
All the women are beautiful except Kylie Minogue when she was on Neighbours.
The huntsman spider in my bedroom finally hatched her brood yesterday. It was phenomenal. I know everyone told me to move it before it burst but she looked so maternal and scary I couldn’t do it.
http://www.geocities.com/brisbane_spiders/Sparassidae.htm
has some fine pictures of my guest.
I screamed like a big girl’s blouse and made Mr P relocate as many as he could to the great outdoors.
wolly, I go to Deakin Uni here in Geelong, and live on res. Very few Geelong people live on res (given they can easily drive to uni). The people I talk to (and notice the spirit in, which is just about everyone) are from: everywhere in Victoria (from Melbourne to out in the bush in the middle of nowhere), NSW (bush), Tasmania, and SA (bush). They all follow different footy teams (if they even follow one at all), and they all have heard of calling Americans “seppos”, although they do it good-naturedly (sp?). Lately I’ve heard something from one of the war eras: “You Americans: over paid, over sexed and over here!”. Anyways, back to the main subject. All these people come from a variety of backgrounds and have interests in different sport (footy - rugby), so I don’t believe Geelong is a special case.
I’ve found that in a room of Aussies, there’s no surer way to stir them up more quickly than to say how much better you are because you’re American (NB: I say it jokingly, I personally don’t believe it, but it’s really fun to get the Aussies going). They all of a sudden get together and quote a statistic to whatever we’re talking about. Alot of the times it’ll be sport or athletics. This brings up the Aussie gold medals per capita vs. the American gold medals per capita in the Olympics (specifically, Sydney 2000, which was the “best Olympics ever, and will be extremely hard to beat” according to these people). If it’s just in general, George W. Bush ends up getting mentioned. Then I fight back with John Howard, and we end up agreeing that we both lost.
Visually, you can tell there’s a huge amount of pride as well. I can’t think of an equivalent “Dick Smith” or “Big Kev” in the States. I see more Aussie flags in yards over here than I remember seeing American flags back in the States. The Panadol vs. Herron ads. They are both the same thing, but why buy Herron? Not because it’s cheaper, but because it’s owned by an Australian company. That green and yellow Made In Australia sticker is on a lot of products. You don’t see the Made In America sticker so prominently displayed, even if the product was made there.
I can say one thing about where America beats Australia in the “spirit” catagory. We tend to know more words to our National Anthem than the average Aussie knows to Advance Australia Fair. But you guys seem to know every word to Workin’ Class Man; that might as well be the anthem.
Any other questions?
ICP9991: Watch out for Neighbours, it sucks you in and you don’t even realise it. Before long you are stuck to the TV at 6:30 every night (not sure what time it’s on over there) making sure you don’t miss a thing. I fell prey to it last year hehe.
Be quiet about the bunyips, and the Nullarbor Nymph, too.
If only you had’ve provided more info, Primaflora. If you had’ve said she looked maternal AND scary, I would’ve been promoting the bash-with-the-broom theory. Annoying, or suspicious, yes, move the damn thing outside, but maternal and scary ?!? That calls for an exorcist.
You do know that all of those female baby spiders will choose to return and spawn again and again in your house, don’t you ? 
We’re thinking of moving just to avoid hosting the Huntsman maternity ward that has overtaken our computer room. (I have no idea if the above is actually true, we’ve just had a lot of Huntsman births lately and it is our standard joke. Please don’t bombard me with ‘cite’ requests, or spend hours on Google, proving that spiders don’t return to their birthplace to spawn. It was all tongue-in-cheek!)
And as a female Australian, I will agree that all Aussie women are stunning
Sorry, woolly, typo’d your name above.
that spider’s huge :eek: :eek:
if i saw it over here i’d physically sh!t out my spinal chord.
Neighbours sucked me in a long time ago, it sucks that Harold has to wear hawaiin shirts and dance to get women, i bet steve irwin never had/has that problem.
Goo
my spiders are going to bugger off and never come back. I am not setting up a huntsperson’s maternity ward in my bedroom!
we’ve got a cockroach issue so I’m quite happy to have the huntspeople grooving round eating the cockies.
I was reading in the paper that because of the drought, we’ve got a significant influx of snakes. that makes me very unhappy. Don’t like snakes, no, I don’t.
I had a family of those spiders living in my res room at the beginning of this year. Started by killing them (I feel no huge love for spiders), but they left a huge mess of spider goo (guts) all over my wall, so then I just took them outside. It’s freaky to lay in bed and think you see one walking in the shadows on the wall next to you.
Steve Irwin just picked up a naive American girl, no problems for him what-so-ever :).
Ok, here’s one for the Aussies. Since I’ve been over here, I’ve noticed that you guys love Kylie (she comes from Australia, why shouldn’t you?) What I don’t get is why you guys love her when she seems almost ashamed of coming from here. She paid heaps of money to lose her accent, she spends all her time in Britian, coming back here only when she needs money, and you guys LOVE it. She was on Jay Leno in the States a few weeks ago, and it was a top news story on Nine. What the hell is up with that? I just can’t figure it out.
Thanks.
her ass.
Latch be careful when you take the Huntspeople (thanks Primaflora that’s much better then Huntsman ) outside, because they can bite. It isn’t poisonous or dangerous, it just hurts a lot. They have powerful, nasty little jaws.
No i dont think kanngaroos hop down mainstreet, but I do know that everywere you go you always here a distant digerydoo playing. Also if I ever visit there I will either be killed by a funelweb or a blue ring octopus will jump out of the water and latch onto my neck.
Thanks Goo, I make sure the spider is far away from me when I carry it out. Little spiders I am OK with, but ones that are Huntsman(people) size I keep an arms length away from me as much as I can.
It is. Well,… it could be. Ya see, you can sing the lyrics of Advance Australia Fair to the tune of Working Class Man. Come to think of it, the tune of Gilligan’s Island also fits, which is strangely apt.