I Come From A Land Down Under

Well, it's been about four months since my last post. In that time I've moved from Birmingham in England to Adelaide in sunny South Australia. All my records have been shipped over here, we've finally got broadband sorted (thanks to Charlotte's commitment to the battle with Telstra) and I'm ready to post again!

I had been planning to give you a little insight into the wealth of great SA music I had discovered and upload some of the amazing charity shop (or 'op-shops', as they're known here) finds, but all that's been a little thin on the ground. The op-shops are full of absolute shite, including thousands of records by this bloke Kamahl, who must've been massive here in the seventies. One of the most strangely unpleasant voices I've ever heard.

And as for great SA music, the Titans on the SA music scene over the past twenty years have been Cold Chisel (and their singer Jimmy Barnes) -just awful, really, but such absolute local heroes that my mate at work can't speak about them without welling up.

Nowadays, Adelaide's best known for the amazingly brilliant Hilltop Hoods. They're "Heaps Good", as they say down here.

So, in a nutshell, this is Adelaide so far:

* Iced coffee - consumed by the gallon by young and old alike.
* Fantastic, very strong, delicious coffee. All day, every day.
* No ozone layer - sunburn when it ain't even sunny.
* No vinegar on chips - "Chicken salt or normal salt?"
* Crisps being chips and chips being hot chips.
* Pies with tomato sauce on top.
* Sausages, sausages, sausages, morning, noon and night.
* Tailgating monster trucks.
* Little fishes in the clear blue sea.
* Big fucking sharks in the clear blue sea.
* Cooper's beer.
* West End Draught.
* Weather - the conversation topic of which you can never tire.
* Footy - unfathomable.