Here in Australia the closest you will get to John Lewis or Debenhams is a store called Myer. We also have a store called David Jones, but today I’m talking about Myer because they went to the trouble of putting on a Christmas parade here in Brisbane. Apparently, they’ve been doing this kind of parade [...]
December 2011
I think most of you must know by now that I love Australia. I live in Brisbane, and I love Brisbane too. Regular readers will also have noticed that I love beer, not lager type beer, but bitter. Imagine my delight then, when I was doing beer shopping for Christmas, to see a new brew [...]
A couple of years ago I did a cost comparison post between England and Australia on the price of toys. At that time, from the selected toys I looked at, Australia ended up being 11% more expensive than in the UK. You can read that post by clicking the following link: The Cost of Living [...]
As I said on Wednesday, Australia isn’t so hot on real Christmas trees. But we have plenty of these things and I find them quite fascinating. What are they? They are called cycads, and you won’t find them growing in Germany, France, Denmark, Belgium or Great Britain where most of the world’s Christmas trees are [...]
Not only is Christmas in the middle of summer here in Australia, but they also have school summer holidays at Christmas time too! Yes, I know that makes sense, summer holidays in winter would be stupid! But at the same time, a six-week summer holiday break with Christmas slap bang in the middle of it [...]
In Friday’s post called How to settle in Australia I said “So do you think we will have fun? It’d be hard not to, wouldn’t it?” Well, as we approached Byron Bay around lunchtime on Saturday, the rain was so hard I could barely see where I was driving. My poor windscreen wipers, set to [...]
In Wednesday’s post I talked about Ping-Pong Poms; that’s Brits who come to Australia to live and quit to go back to the UK again, maybe several times. They are welcome to do that, of course, but what does that make me? I’ll tell you…. A Lead Balloon Pom. That’s right, I’ve landed in the [...]
AKA…. Ping Pom Merrily Goodbye. Sorry about that, just trying to keep it Christmassy. You see, the phrase being used is ping-pong poms; Brits moving back and forth between Australia and the UK. Anyway, a story by the BBC was brought to my attention by a reader called Julian. The story is called “Why are [...]
