Somewhat underslept, today we took off for a roadtrip towards the Great Ocean Road. We got really lucky – we didn’t have to rent a car, because Lisa offered us her mum’s. She’s awesome, isn’t she? Not only that, but she even gave us packed lunch on the way! Thank you, Lisa!
We took off and immediately I felt what it means to live in Australia: it means spending the minimum of two hours in your car before you get anywhere. Everything is so far away! An hour to even get out of town – although Melbourne has only 4mln people, it seems that it’s larger than London. OK, the roads are good and there wasn’t much traffic on the Sunday, but I must have made 50km just to get out! So I’m not at all sure that people here are right to feel so good about having bigger houses and flats than we do in Britain – at least the smaller houses and multi-storey buildings mean I don’t have to spend half my life in a car trying to get somewhere. What of the fact that your house is huge if most of your time you spend in your tiny car?
Another thing that turns out to have a second face is the general pretty-ness I wrote about a few days ago. On the one hand the difference with Britain is quite startling: not only people are generally more attractive, they also dress way better. I know it’s not hard to dress better than the British, but people here do it really well. On the other hand, it looks like with it comes a very shallow culture of the body which makes some of those people act like being pretty was all there is to life. Empty looking Barbies and Kens are not uncommon and some beaches seem less like fun places to be and more like display sites for plastic people. It also looks like not conforming to a certain body image might result in much more ostracism than it does in the UK. Having said that, not everyone is plastic and it’s not like UK didn’t have its dose of plastic people – and the average here is still way way better. Plus the empty pretty is still an eye-candy for a tourist.
But back to today – the road took us to several different beaches. Since the clouds were merciful today and covered the scorching sun from time to time, it was all quite bearable. We had a swim, we lied and sunbathed a bit, I’m even wiring those words while sitting on the beach. After last night a lazy day like that is perfect!
One final observation before we have a dinner with our great hosts – speed limits. Australia allows 100km/h on a 5 lane motorway. 100. 5 lanes. I can go faster on a suburb road to my parents place. Aaargh…
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