The 4 stages of Culture Shock.

During orientation we went through the four stages of culture shock so that we would be prepared when it happened to us, and how to handle it. I found this amusing and thought you might as well

Stage 1: "The Honeymoon Phase" the phase where you love everything and nothing could be better! This is the phase where you book future adventures for later in the summer so that when the less unpleasant phases hit, you have something positive to look forward to.

Stage 2: "The Freak Out" this phase can creep up on you or hit fast and hard. Usually a bad day or frustrating series of events set this phase off. This is where you all of a sudden hate everything Australian. The thing to do here is vent your head off to a fellow American. And not one who will try to say things like "you really just need to be patient" because that will only make you more angry. You want someone that will be like "yeah that sucks, etc" and let you just get it all out! This is also the time to treat yourself to something nice, like a shopping splurge or a sporting event!

Stage 3: "Acceptance" this is where you realize I am here for a while and you get a determination to essentially suck it up and get through this.

Stage 4: "Acclimation" where you have finally learned the differences of your culture verse this new one and accepted them and are so used to them that you are now fond of them and don't want to leave them .

We're all sitting around booking our trips for July so we are clearly still in a good phase, not that I would ever be honest on here if I was in the freak out phase anyways :) I'll save those rants for skype! haha



Today was a rough day at work, I handled more dead animals than live ones, if that says anything! But I came home and its one of our housemates 21st birthday so we had a big feast of Kangaroo meat and cake, so things are looking up already!

Here are more Aussie observations:
Potato, Banana, Tomato are all pronounced differently here.

My favorite pronunciation difference is aluminum. you know like the thing you might use when you are roasting veggies in your oven. Well here it is pronounced, (and this is my best attempt at phonetically spelling it): owl-u-min-eum. a lot of emphasis on that "u"