Down Under Musing

As we plan for our trip to New Zealand and Australia, we're unearthing information about all things Down Under.  We've researched the weather (it's Fall there) and the time zones (it's complicated and we'll probably end up calling folks at home at inconvenient times for them). 
We're perusing our travel books and now I'm looking at news sites there and finding wonderful new words and worldviews quite different from those in our corner of the planet.  Did you know that Australians refer to their children as "littlies"?  It's right there in today's Sydney Morning News headline"  "Firm's Lies Hurt Littlies."
The second most popular story in the online version of the New Zealand Herald is about cricket and their top video is about rugby.  I posted a link on Facebook this morning about a gathering of more than 5000 nude people at Sydney's Opera House.  The article's author was a gleeful participant in the event that was orchestrated by an artist.  In the interest of full disclosure, the orchestrator was a New Yorker, so we can't blame this craziness entirely on the Aussies.
As I've discovered in checking in with other international websites, people may have different languages, or even different ways of using the language we refer to broadly as English, but all people exhibit similar heights of heroism and depths of depravity.  Imagine the scam artists who targeted those "littlies" in New South Wales!  They purported to have a fund-raising idea for kindergartens (which locals call "kindies") and playgroups in which the drawings of the "littlies" would be transposed onto melamine plates and cups.  These were bought in advance by parents to raise money for their groups.  Parents were bilked of their hard-earned (we suppose) Australian dollars (current exchange rate says ours is worth about 1.12 times theirs).  But it was the children who suffered, we read.  One "kindie" director said that the little ones "keep asking when their plates are coming."  Clearly, cruel schemes are perpetrated in Australia as they are here in the U.S.
I was heartened by a story in the New Zealand paper about a local minister who defended an advertising campaign from atheists that NZ Bus had taken down after protests were lobbied against it.  Their message was something along the lines of "God doesn't exist so quit worrying and enjoy your life."  The minister echoed my own thoughts when he suggested that debating God's existence is healthy and free speech should be protected whether we agree with it or not.  Whatever we believe, it seems we should believe without fear that contrasting beliefs endanger our own.  The controversy in NZ was yet another reminder that people have the same issues all around the world. 
I started this blog itself to provide an outlet for our travels, so I'll share my thoughts from the trip here and Mike will post pictures on Facebook.  We're getting excited as the day of departure gets closer and we look forward to taking you with us.  I'm hearing that I should say "hooray" rather than "goodbye" in NZ, so I'll get my "a into g" and move on for now.  (I believe you can translate that for yourself.)