December 2014

santa sunbathing

Hot, sunny, clear blue skies. That’s not guaranteed, but it is the default weather for Christmas in Australia and its why Christmases here are so very different. Update: today, December 23, the Bureau of Meteorology released their forecasts for Christmas Day weather around Australia’s major cities. Here it is… Sydney Expect clouds with temperatures between [...]

Santa

That’s a stupid question really, isn’t it? We all know there is only one Santa Claus and the poor man has a lot of presents to deliver on Christmas Eve. Never mind all the houses he has to visit, what about all those countries? He must get ‘cream crackered’ as we would say in England. [...]

Santa

As Christmas descends upon us it is time again to go shopping for toys; well, they don’t all come from Santa… In particular I want to compare prices between Australia and the UK. I’ve done this a few times before in previous years, notably… The Cost of Living in Australia: Buying Toys in November 2009 [...]

Kakadu

Last Monday in my post Top Holiday Destinations in Australia I started working through all the Australian destinations I’ve been to so far from the full top 100 list. The list I’m talking about is “The 100 Greatest Holidays of Australia” by Australian Traveller. Turns out I’ve only been to 14 out of the top [...]

lights

On Fridays, as you probably know, I like to look around Australia to see what’s going on elsewhere. Of course, I don’t study the news to do this, I just head straight over to YouTube and search for recent videos from each of our major cities. This week though, what with it being just 13 [...]

rooms

There’s not much that can rival the excitement of arriving in a new country for the very first time. Having stepped off the plane, you navigate your double luggage allowance through to customs who confirm your residency status and waive you through. Yes, you’ve finally arrived in Australia to start your new life. So much [...]

Elizabeth

Private schools have already broken up for the long summer holidays here and on Friday state schools will be joining them. Some of those private schools can have seven or eight weeks off, state schools though tend to only have about six. So not too different from summer holidays in the UK, but because our [...]

wombat

If you remember, last Friday I mentioned that “I had an amazingly cute video to show you about an Aussie native cuddly furry animal…” but I switched videos at the last minute. Well, Brisbane had had its worst storm since the 80s, so I showed you the mess made by that instead. I promised my [...]