This time I want to report about the Australian friendliness. For Australians it seems to be quite easy and normal to be friendly to strangers. Maybe it strikes us as unusual because we are used to the grumpy people in Vienna.

It didn’t happend once that a sales person or a public service officer was not friendly to us. Maybe not all of them are totally motivated, but they are always friendly. Well, the only exception was a bouncer in a nightclub, but bouncers are generally a bit different than normal people, so you can’t really count this.

Until now every single person had really tried to understand our far from perfect English and they were always nice and patient with us foreigners.

Really fascinating for us is that sales persons have no problem what so ever to send you to another - competing - shop, if they don’t have the product you want. They even draw you a map how to get there. Do you think that an Austrian sales person would send you to a competing company and even tell you the exact way to get there, only because they don’t have the head set you’re after??

Do you think a police man in Vienna would smile back when you are smiling at him??

What was irritating for me at the beginning was that Australians always say immediately sorry when they are in your way, let say in front of shelves in the super market. Even if you are in their way, they say sorry!

Driving with the bus is also a very friendly activity. The driver says hello in a ver friendly way and every passenger says “thank you” and “bye” when they get off the bus. At the beginning of our stay in Australia we took quite often the bus. At one evening the bus driver didn’t stop at the bus station but closer to the street we wanted to go, so we don’t have to walk that much. In school I had to take the bus for 8 years, but that had never happend to me before!

The staff of the trains is also very friendly. We were on our way to Fremantle and we hadn’t paid enough for the ticket. The ticket inspector told us very friendly that we should have paid 4 zones instead of one and that we should think of that when we buy our ticket back to town. I don’t believe that the ticket inspectors are so nice and friendly to (apparent) tourists in Vienna.

I could go on and tell more stories about the extremly friendly Australians (I reported already about these two friendly men who rescued me when I had run out of fuel), but the message will always remain the same.

The Aussies are excessively friendly and they don’t seem to have to make an effort to be friendly. We just can say that the Austrians could really learn a lesson from the Australians!