Text 20401, 76 rader
Skriven 2011-07-03 08:34:59 av David Drummond (3:640/384)
  Kommentar till text 20385 av Robert Bashe (2:2448/44)
Ärende: Easy Rider
==================
On 2/07/11 9:16 PM, Robert Bashe -> David Drummond wrote:

 DD>> You want open spaces you should visit Australia. Nearly the same land
 DD>> area as USA and mostly empty...

 RB> If I were younger, I'd love to. And I'd probably stay, if the politics
 RB> since 9/11 hadn't made emigration/immigration so difficult.

The 11 September (9/11 is USEnglish) incident hasn't effected "white fellas"
immigrating here (by their own means). If you have a tea towel on your head and
a bushy beard you can catch a sinking boat out of Indonesia and wash up on
Aussie shores. They'll lock you away in some place out woop for a year or so,
but then they'll bring you into the community and fund your lifestyle for the
next few years/decades.

 RB> The only thing that's ever turned me off about Australia is what people
 RB> say about biting flies everywhere. I _hate_ insects!

If one refrains from going naked where the biting flies are then it isn't
really a problem. Contrary to what "people" say, they are not everywhere.

One learns not to wade in the estuaries inhabited by the big crocs either
(well, some don't learn, but we don't hear much from them).

There's still plenty of Australia to visit.

Australia has much the same north south dimension as USA. The conditions at the
northern edge are vastly different from those at the southern.

As with USA some areas have climatic issues. Earlier this year we had "massive
floods" in this city - or it seemed that way if one believed the media. Yes, it
did rain a bit, and yes they did have to release water from a big dam in the
upper reaches of the Brisbane river, and yes some suburbs were badly inundated,
but it was a comparatively small percentage of the greater Brisbane area that
was bothered. The rest of us were just careful crossing our squishy lawns when
wearing our best shoes, and had issues drying our laundry outdoors.

As with parts of USA where the place is occasionally wrecked by tornadoes,
people here will just rebuild and try to learn from the difficulties. Building
regulations are being reviewed for those areas.

At Christmas I packed my sandwiches and traveled the 400km to my "country
estate" inland from Bundaberg (you are checking this in Google Maps - yes?).
For the first 5 days that I was there we had nearly 800mm of rain - I didn't
wash away, I had designed/built the cabin to allow for that. My problem was
that I have only solar power there and the panels deliver negligible current
when it rains heavily. Being summer the refrigerator consumed a few more
amp-hours than it does in winter.

I have a little petrol generator for those situations but ran out of fuel. I
couldn't make the 20km trip to the nearest gas station as the roads were under
water. Luckily the roads opened before I ran out of power altogether.

The joys of life. If one stays ensconced in the cities it wouldn't be too
different to someplace in USA, Germany or even Sweden (albeit warmer). All
modern motor vehicles here come with air conditioning (even my Mazda ute) so
travel between cities isn't too arduous in the summer.

Afterthought:

I appreciate that you are not a USAmerican but a German - but to tell the truth
I know nothing about the German geography/climate. Our news is full of US
weather disasters, and South East Asian ones but we hear very little about such
stuff from Europe.

Is the weather in Europe always perfect?

We are informed of the Greek/Portuguese financial problems.

-- 
regards

David 

--- Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.18) Gecko/2
 * Origin: Quinn's Post - Maryborough, Queensland, OZ (3:640/384)