A Few More Oddities

I forgot to mention a few other things we're getting used to.

-There are no switches to turn the water off to your house. So if there's a plumbing issue the plumber needs to dig up part of the road in order to access the neighborhood's water main.

-There are switches for electrical outlets. So if you want to charge your mobile phone you have to plug it in and remember to turn the outlet switch on (something I forgot to do yesterday, so my phone didn't charge).

-There is no tipping here in restaurants and such. We like this rule. We've heard that this sometimes compromises the quality of service, but we haven't experienced it thus far.

I'm sure there are other things to mention, but they escape me for the moment.

I'm hopefully starting to become a bit more involved in the community here. I'm certainly trying! I went to a choir rehearsal last night, today I met with someone at the local technical school about possible opportunities working there, I'm meeting next week with local Girl Scout leaders to see about helping out, and I'm working on several other options. We'll see what happens. Now if only John had more time off. He's been working really hard, but hopefully that will be changing. He's been very patient about it all but it's getting frustrating.

With the limited spare time we've had we have been car shopping. This is never the most fun activity to do, but we're making some progress. We also went for another nice walk through glorious Queen's Park today and finally made it there while the animal park and the greenhouse were still open.

The mixture of animals was kind of funny. They had lots of rabbits, deer, guinea hens, chickens, and wallabys. It looked so strange to us to see wallabys hanging out among the other more common (to us) animals. I'll have to go back to get some pictures.

Oh, a note on spelling. I guess mine's becoming a hybrid. It's all very British. They do things like just put an 's' on the end of words that end in 'y' to pluralize them without changing to 'ie'. And 's' is used in place of 'z' for words like 'analyse'. I'll have to post more on spelling rules later once I have more knowledge about them.

Oh, Happy Australia Day to those who celebrate those sorts of things.