Australia Adelaide Mission

I also will say about the food, and this was quite a funny story on my way over there, is their portions are much smaller than ours, which is probably a good thing, but it was definitely a hard adjustment. You know, people feed you less, you end up eating less. I can remember the first day I got to Australia, we went to a subway and, you know, I just got a normal sub and a drink, finished my drink, went to go refill it, and the lady told me I had to pay for it, and I looked at her with a really confused look on my face, and I was like, you guys don't do refills here? She's like, no, and I looked at the other missionaries and they're like, no, nowhere does, and I was just so blown away by that, but honestly, it ended up being a good thing. You end up eating less, but their food is very good, and you definitely will enjoy it.

I truly wasn't as shocked to see that it really was very similar to the United States, not a ton of differences. I would say the major difference is having to learn and understand like their form of communication, which truly is very different. Although they're speaking English, their sense of humor is very different, their slang is very different, as well as you meet a ton of people from other countries. Africa, Asia, I mean you name it, you are going to meet them. And I would say the opportunity to learn about every culture truly in the world will be probably the thing that you experience the most that's most different from the United States.

So the culture there is, it's pretty similar to the United States. I think Adelaide is a very big melting pot, so you will meet people from all over the world from all different countries and it's amazing. And as you get out more in the outback, like Alice Springs and Darwin, you meet more aboriginals who were the indigenous people of Australia. And they are some of the kindest people, they love the missionaries. The people there are just amazing and I love the culture there. It's really fun to learn about the history of Australia, about the aboriginals and also be able to learn about other cultures like Indian culture or Chinese culture. There are just a lot of different cultures there, so it's very fun to learn about that.

So just a little background of the Australian people, when you run into them, they are very chill people. They're so laid back and they just love to do their own thing. And they're also not afraid to tell you how it is. They're very honest people. And so that's a little bit different than the culture in America, where we don't at first tell people, I guess, straightforward things. But in Australia, they just tell you straightforward and they don't get offended very easily. And so don't get offended if they tell you maybe that they don't want you to talk to them. Or don't be offended if they just tell you exactly how they're feeling. That's just their culture and that's how they grew up. And so we need to adjust to that. And it's actually, I love it. I love that they're so straightforward with you.