AU Qs

Just a couple more things I didn't talk about in my last post. IHSers, this is for you. Remember freshman year? Australia unit?

The first event to note was on the Air New Zealand plane from Christchurch to Brisbane. The flight attendant asked us, "are you returning home now?" Hah. They thought we were Australians. Shows you that NZ and Aussie accents are very different. On that note, I forgot how much unlike Steve Irwin and Hollywood Aussies people here talk. Those extremely strong, particular accents are mostly for TV, but come from a place near Brisbane. The accents here are actually in some ways less strong than the Kiwi accents.

Second, is that today is Australia day. That means many things are closed, and most people don't have work. Australia day celebrates the first European settlement of Australia, which clearly is cause for some turmoil. Our hosts aren't too into it, although many cars have AUS flags on the wires. Apparently the overall view is that the Aborigines as a whole aren't so keen on the holiday, but that is of course generalizing extremely.

The other holiday I asked about was National Sorry Day (NSD). In IHS we talked about this a lot-- I'm not sure why this in particular, maybe we just liked the name. Anyways, I asked about it, and apparently it's similar to AUS day but not quite as widespread. I imagine that people who celebrate AUS day don't celebrate NSD as extensively, and vice versa. Apparenly the new Prime Minister just gave a very moving speech basically apologizing to the Aborigines, which was very appreciated.

If only other countries tried to apoligize. That's basically all AUS tries to do in terms of making up the sins, which may be just because there isn't much they can do, or because they only want to try the intangible stuff. The US, though, hasn't done anything like that, for Native Americans or black slaves (which is different, because they weren't the native people, but just as important). It seems like there should be some way to just make everything right and move on-- but nobody has come up with that yet. I think the country that's done the best job at keeping the native culture alive is NZ, who is extremely proud as a country for the Maori culture. Many of the road signs there are in English and Maori, and tourist shops love Maori symbols and emblems. Another reason why we should all move to NZ. That and that there's going to be a super volcanoe eruption in Yellowstone in the next thousand years that will imediately kill the whole US and slowly the rest of the planet, but the slowest NZ. (Sorry, that's a reference to a movie we saw in Geology with Chad Heidtke when I was in seventh grade.)

Enough procastinating. I'm off to write a paper. Or something. I'm not sure yet.