July 26, 27, 2003 Weekend before School

Nothing much happened this weekend so I’ll take the opportunity to complain, er, comment on some of the things that are annoyingly different about Australia and that make it a backwards country.

Our first experience with this was when we asked for ketchup (tomato sauce here) and the person at the counter replied, “35 cents.” Excuse me?! You are going to charge us for ketchup?!! Now tell me that is not ridiculous. You can’t. You can’t because it is ridiculous.
Next, local phone calls cost around 17 cents per call. That’s simply annoying. Not to mention the fact that, for some inexplicable reason, the hyphen (—) is not used in their phone numbers anymore. So a person could give you 96664189, 96 66 4189, 966 64 189, or any other variation. All the cell phone numbers start with 04 so those are even worse. Though that idea is a pretty good one, I think. And calls from land lines to cell phones cost more, and cell phone plans charge by the minute like ours do, but without the tons of free minutes. Talk about complicated calling plans. 10 free minutes after 7 PM, free mobile-to-mobile calls, first 5 minutes to a land line free, 100 free text messages, etc. At the same time, there’s no charge for incoming calls. How does an industry develop so differently in two similar countries?

Gareth came into town Sunday night. It was good to see him again. It’s hard to imagine that we’ve only known him for about two and a half days. With class starting tomorrow, the girls and I are going to take turns taking him around. It works out that way because they don’t have class on Mondays and Wednesday, and I don’t have class on Tuesday.