More is Better, Except When it's Not

We couldn't help but compare our sights and sounds while driving through California with those we had just experienced while living in Australia. A word that kept coming up for me was "more." More bottomless coffee, more soda, more food on a plate.... Here are 10 more things we noticed.

1. More traffic, more big cars, and more traffic cops. We waited an hour in traffic just to get across the Golden Gate Bridge to get to Sonoma and I saw two stretch Hummers! I learned that sitting in that kind of traffic makes me even more crazy than when Andy is driving on the left side of the road.

2. More ethnic diversity. We realized we missed the mix of cultures that we experience in California.

3. More people who are homeless, and they have more stuff. In Australia, we occasionally saw people who we perceived to be experiencing homelessness, but not many.

4. More non-alcoholic beer! In all the restaurants we ate in Australia, only one had non-alcoholic beer. Andy has had success in every one here so far.

5. More disposable paper toilet seats. I never saw these once in Australia, but on the whole, the public toilets were very accessible and clean there.

6. More cars stop for pedestrians. Australians we met were really friendly, but I learned to never expect a car to stop for me. Not that all cars yield to people in California, but a surprising amount did on this trip.

7. More national flags (but no indigenous flag). American flags are made into any sort of product and then displayed, repeatedly. I mused that the Honda dealer had a 50 foot American flag on their lot, but across the road the Ford dealer did not. Not sure who owns what anymore, though.

8. More sand dollars on the beach. These have barnacles. I'm not actually sure if there are sand dollars in Australia or not, but we never ran across any.

That's an Australian $2 on the right. :-)

9. More salad options. In almost every restaurant we've been to in California so far, each had heaps of salad options.

10. More squirrels of many types (this is easy since there are no squirrels in Australia...). This is a ground squirrel, sometimes referred to as a prairie dog, we saw at a La Purisima Mission.

We even saw some Australian emus in a cheesy roadside attraction (and ostriches - who knew ostriches are twice as big as emus!).

Emus

Ostriches

 
However, we did not see more koalas or kangaroos, because these are best seen in Australia as a natural attraction of the roadside. Seeing koalas never gets old, and as it turns out, showing people pictures of koalas never gets old either!