Jim Travels The World

Hey all back to the States next week for a visit, then back to Melbourne on 29th, then to Sydney for some business meetings the next day, then back to Melbourne, then back to work for a week, then off to Tasmania for holiday. let me know if you have any questions.

A word that my boss Rohan likes to use when comparing American to Australia is "infrastructure". As in "Australia doesn't have quite the infrastructure to America when it comes to goods and services." Like, no pay-at-the-pump at most gas stations. No online bookings for many hotels. You get the idea. One place this was very apparent was this weekend as Lisa and I rode the very long train ride to Frankston and then on to Stony Point with the intention of taking a short ferry ride over to French Island national park. Weather forecast looked good. We get to the pier, and to purchase our ferry tickets (which, it did look like a very short ferry ride... we could see most of French island from the pier) we go to the stony point general store/ferry service station. The woman behind the counter tells us that we can take a ferry over, but there's a chance that the winds might pick up and the ferry wouldn't return. We would have to spend the night on this island,

been conducting informal poll of some Aussies about what they think of Americans. My results so far:  Australians think Americans are arrogant, ignorant about worldly matters, and that they all carry guns. I do think sometimes we get dirty looks on the train when Lisa and I are chatting loud enough that other people can hear our accents. It's not like we experience the same kind of dirty looks that a Muslim would have gotten in NYC on the subway in 2002, but it definitely is weird to be a foreigner. I don't think Americans can enjoy the same sort of friendly welcome (that we always assumed we had) as in the pre-Dubya days. pictured: your average arrogant, ignorant gun-toting american

it must have seen something scary