OK, is there anyone in the western or southern hemisphere that didn't know that? Given the extensive coverage it's been getting here, it's hard to imagine everyone isn't talking about it.
In fact, the Oprah tour is officially over today. She taped her shows in the Sydney Oprah House (get it? get it?) yesterday.
While I generally am OK with Oprah, the media hysteria here has been sooooo over-the-top. She's been sponsored by Tourism Australia and that's been seen as either (1) a brilliant salvation for Australian tourism or (2) a complete waste of several million taxpayer dollars.
It's funny how Australians think the rest of the world sees them. There are some Australians who talk like there are people in the world who have never even heard of Australia! C'mon folks, we've all heard of Australia and we could probably even find you on a map (what with you being the biggest honkin' land mass in the southern Pacific waters....). We've all heard of kangaroos and koalas (though we do continue to insist on calling them koala "bears". Really sorry about that.) and platypuses and even your snakes (oh, yes, we've heard about your snakes!). Oh, yeah, and your wines.
We're a little vague on how to get there and what we'd do once we got there (except drink the wine and avoid the snakes).... I hope Oprah gives people a broader sense of what Australia has to offer. Of course, I also hope this blog does the same thing!
Australians are also a tad ... naive? about how things work for the rest of the world. Because any trip from here (except to New Zealand) is 5 or 6 hours minimum, they're used to really long flights. There appear to be Australians who honestly don't understand that huge hunks of the planet can take fantastic vacations and never spend that much time in a plane. Consequently, a lot of us find the idea of spending 14 hours in a plane incomprehensible.
Australians also, honest-to-God, don't seem to really believe the "2 week annual vacation" limitation that a lot of Americans have. I wonder if they think it's an urban myth.
They don't quite appreciate that the strength of their dollar right now (it's at parity with the US dollar) makes Australia less attractive for a lot of people. There's a huge cricket thing going on right now between Britain and Australia (The Ashes) and it's being held here in Australia this year. There was a funny article in the paper recently about how the strength of the Australian dollar means British cricket fans have to drink their beers more slowly in the stadium to make them last! And this is just killing them. (Cricket actually moves more slowly than baseball and a match lasts 5 days, so you imagine that beer consumption is very important.)
It's tough to see your country the way an outsider sees it unless you've spent significant time as an outsider and few of us get that chance. Australians challenges seeing their country as an outsider is not different from the vast number of Americans who have exactly the same challenge about the US. Or the French about France. It's just part of the human challenge.
Still, I hope Oprah's visit does raise the visibility of travelling to Australia. It's a neat place and I'd like more people to get a chance to appreciate it.
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