Where the hell are we?

Hey everyone! We are ALIVE and in Australia now!(and have been for the last four days). It's been very surreal so far. We were picked up at the airport by a zany Australian lady with a TINY little car! I thought that when I came here, nobody would know where North Dakota was and so I didn't have to go through being laughed at. The second person we had contact with(the hotel desk clerk) saw that I was from Fargo and burst out laughing!!! There's a mix of the familar with the completely bizarre and we are so completely exhausted that all we can do is laugh at it and fall asleep. Jet lag doesn't seem like it would be a problem until about 5:30pm when we normally hit the wall. It's been very hot here and we've walked all over the place so we've sweat a good deal. We have a cell phone now(email us if you want the number) and hopefully we'll have an address on Monday afternoon. The food has been great! There seem to be more Thai restaurants than anything else so we've had a lot of that.

~Mike

~The hotel front desk clerk does a nice imitation of the Fargo accent
~The water really does go down backwards
~The trains are double-decker
~Australian money looks like monopoly money. It comes in denominations of $50, $20, $10 and $5, but $2 and $1 are in coins. There are no pennies, and no quarters, just a 20 cent piece. It still all looks alike to me.
~We just got laughed at by the front desk for our "American paper." We were trying to send a fax and the front desk agent went to the back office and said really loudly "DID YOU KNOW THAT AMERICANS USE A DIFFERENT SIZE PAPER???" We are sadly behind the times.
~We are becoming very adept at Celcius...Today it was only 23, which is a nice change from the 35 it was on Thursday. The weather report says something about it "freshening" this afternoon and it will " become fine" tomorrow afternoon.
~Our hotel room is very small but very tall
~Australian TV is predominantly American or American inspired. Wheel of Fortune just isn't right without Vanna!
~Not only does Australian paper come in metric sizes, SO DO THE CRACKERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yours, on her way to being an Aussie,
~Ruth Ann