I have to say, even though our weather is supposed to be similar, the place looks different. Everyone's lawns are neatly mowed, no lawn clippings lying around or anything. The footpaths are spotless and white, the roads don't have cracks or signs of repair... wow.

Where I live, it's not uncommon for people let their lawns grow higher than their fences. The footpaths are either mouldy from the ridiculous amount of rain we get or have layers of dirt/dust and spots of old bubblegum. Our houses have to be built to cyclone code, which means ugly brick or reinforced concrete, as opposed to pristine white/cream wooden doors, shutters, etc. Out garage doors (if we have one) are usually made of unpainted metal on rollers, not flip up door things that look like they're made of wood.

Most of our gardens resemble miniature tropical forests because our trees (palms and coconut trees are pretty common) grow like crazy in the rainy season and nobody can be bothered trimming/cutting them. Even though our beaches are warm, they aren't safe to swim in because of box jellyfish or the occasional man-eating crocodile. The beaches go for miles too, none of this houses-built-practically-on-the-sand-dunes crap. Nobody wants to because you'd be the first and hardest hit in a cyclone. We have huge ochre rocks on a lot of our beaches too.

We only have two seasons: the wet and the dry. Pretty self-explanatory. No winter or spring or anything.

We don't have any self-serve checkouts anywhere, like Walmart apparently do. Our population just isn't large enough to warrant it. We don't even have Walmart. We have Dollars and Sense and Overflow ($2 shops - yes, we call our stores shops, not stores) and Woolworths and Coles (supermarkets, or as we usually call them, shops, e.g. "I'm going [food] shopping").

I would post photos of all these Australian things, but I don't have any because they're just part of everyday life for me and I'd consider the photos boring.

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