Hello, family.
I suppose I should tell you about Australia and how wonderful it is, but I’m afraid you taught me to be honest and I cannot say such things. People say Albajeria is backwards in many things, but this country…this country is the backwards one. The climate is finicky and unpredictable, for one thing. They have no culture that I can ascertain beyond that of the ‘bogan’, and even that meaning currently escapes me. I think it has something to do with transforming yourself with alcohol and making lots of noise, but I may have to update you. Nothing here makes sense, and all of their cuisine revolves around meat like it’s a religion, except it isn’t.
I can praise one aspect, and that is plumbing. Particularly here in Melbourne, blocked drains are treated with the greatest urgency. It is a strange thing to note, perhaps, but the moment their plumbing goes even slightly awry, the Australians fly into a panic and call drain inspection experts of all kinds. That explains why they are so quick to respond.
I need only compare a similar situation in Albajeria, such as the Christmas flooding that everyone has now accepted as routine. It’s rather normal to slosh through the bottom floor of your apartment around this time of year, to the point where many on the ground floor simply move upstairs until the problem is fixed a week or so later. Here? The house in which I am staying had a slight leak in the kitchen apparently a result of a blockage. The fellow came to fix it in half an hour. What is this efficiency? Are Melbourne’s drain repair people so very high on the rung of importance? I suppose fewer live in apartment blocks, and they leave their valuables all over the floor. Strange people.
Oh, and self-serve checkouts are nice. When they are not reprimanding me for no reason.
-Johseff