Hellooo-ooo! I have arrived on the other side of the world! Crossed the some time between 09.35 and 10.00 and I'm now in Perth, Australia! And the first thing I did when I entered this country was to accidentally break their quarantine rules! Ooops.

When you enter Australia they ask you whether you have any food, souvenirs made of natural material, plants etc. with you since theya re very, very worried about some tourist introducing any form of wildlife into Australia that doesn't exist here yet (remember Bart Simpsons frog?). And of course I said: "Nah, don't have anything with me." - " Not even chocolate?" - "Nah, just clothes and electronics". But since Australians are smart they and know that tourists cannot be trusted they let sniffer-dogs sniff on all bags and even run it through some special kind of x-ray. And that's where they got me! And I hadn't even known that I had done anything wrong! It turned out that the juggling balls I bought in Ko Phagnan were filled with seeds! So off they went to the incinerator. Dammit, it looks like I'm not supposed to learn how to juggle! But the quarantine-guys were really nice about it. Happens all the time I suppose. Actually, so far all the people I met here were very nice.

"...and then piss off!"

Take the guy at immigration for example: When I asked him what I have to do regarding my working holiday visa (the fact that it is only electronic still confuses me a bit) he just said in this soft, slightly nasal West-Australian accent: "Well, I suppose, get a job, stay 12 months, enjoy your time and then piss off!" Doesn't really sound nice, but I can assure you it was! And I just found it hilarious that an immigration officer would say something like that. Can't imagine that happen in Germany!

In-flight memories of Cambodia

I flew to Perth on "Singapore Airlines", which so far is the best airline I've flown with. I've never ever had so much leg space before! And they had these small tellies as well, so that you could watch a movie, a tv-show or play video-games. And this was only a five-hours flight - I didn't have anything fancy like that when I flew with Thai from Munich to Bangkok! So that was really good. I saw "Paycheck" which was a bit of a disappointment. Another case of "good story badly adaptyed to the screen". Just like "Taking Lives" which I had seen in Bangkok. Anyhow: when we flew over Western Australia I had to think of something someone had said to me in the dry zones of both Myanmar and Cambodia: "If you've seen this, you don't need to go to Australia. It looks exactly the same." Of course I know that that is bullshit. But I'm telling you: From 11.000 meters Australias Outback looks exactly like Cambodia!

Culture- and price-shock

I knew I was in for it. Of course I knew it. Everybody's been telling me that I would get it and I knew it, I really did. And still: When I saw that a pint of beer costs 7 AUD (1 AUD = 0.66 Euro) and a pizza Margherita costs 14 AUD I thought I was gonna jump out of my skin - and this is suppose to be the cheap part of Australia! Ouch.

What surprised me more though was (is) the slight culture shock I'm still suffering from. I mean, this is so much like England! The houses look like it, people have these depressed, European faces of people who don't like their jobs or their lives and even the weather is far more English then what I'd expect Australia to be like: there are dark, grey clouds everywhere! Well, at least that made for a spectacular sunset which pulled me out of my gloomy mood a wee bit. And I'm telling you: somehow the sky is just bigger here!

Alright - now it's time to find out whether the water really runs down the drain the other way round!

On the web:
Paycheck (IMDb)
Taking Lives (IMDb)