Brisbane

After Lady Elliott Island, we made our way down to Brisbane to stay with friends. We've been here almost a week. It's been so much fun I haven't found time to blog. It feels like our first week here was all about Australia for the enthusiastic tourist and our second week has been all about living in Australia.

We've learned so much. When we arrived, our friends looked at us aghast and exclaimed, "your accent is so strong!"

Us? We have an accent??

To put this in perspective, these friends are the Bodimeades. It's a family we met in Point Loma at baseball little league fields. They were Australian but had lived in the US for several years. Eighteen months ago, they moved back to Brisbane, Australia. We were seeing them for the first time in eighteen months. Never mind that I could barely understand what else they said to me when we all excitedly embraced and caught up- it never occurred to me that we had the accent. How funny and narcissistic. From that moment on, we practiced adopting the Australian accent. That involved not only swallowing all "r" sounds, but adopting certain words and dropping others.

Quick and Dirty Guide

"How are you going?" Rather than "how are you doing?"

It's rubbish and you put it in the bin, not trash.

Paul is properly pronounced Paw, as in the famous Australian singer Paul Kelly (I had never heard of him but he was compared to being our Bruce Springsteen)

Bacon should be thick cut and cooked on the Barbie (not BBQ)

When in doubt, shorten all words to give them a cute 'ie' sound at the end, even if they are despicable, like Mosquitos. They become the endearing term, 'mozzies'. As in, these f-ing mozzies won't leave me alone.

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