i know the past couple blogs have been pretty boring! Sorry! Other than my colorful Carla the frog friend not much to report so something I saw today made me think that I should let you know how folks dress down here!
After my walk on the beach this morning I saw a man brushing his german shepherd right by where I go up and down to get to the beach and seeing the dog made me know that he was our neighbor that we have not met yet so I took the chance to go up to him and introduce myself. His name is Clive, his dog is Emma and his wife who I did not meet is Jane. He is an older gent and Rod was right when he told me about the one neighbor who mows his yard in a G string. Well, it wasn’t QUITE a G string but close to it and trust me….not a good look. Anyway, he was very nice—as I find most folks are if you just take the initiative and make a point of being interested and he was happy to talk to me. At one point he did ask if I was American…..I can’t fool many people here. So after I walked back up to the house I got to thinking about how people dress here and how it kind of cracks us up. Basically anything goes.
The business folks tend to dress up in suits and many of the places that I have gone they have “uniforms” of sorts. The tellers in the bank wear suits with the bank logo on the shirt but they are dressier than just wearing a polo shirt with the logo on it. Someone has suggested that a lot of the places have uniform shirts because it asures that they look presentable since Australians seem to be so casual in their dress.
Most of the tradespeople wear hi-vis (florescent) shirts. When Chris is in the mills he wears his great pumpkin shirts and jeans (bright orange shirts with reflective strips) and his boots as they have to wear 100% cotton, long sleeves, etc. A lot of the tradespeople wear the long sleeved shirts and shorts. What cracks us up is that the younger guys wear shorts to the knees while the old blokes wear long sleeve shirts with short shorts just under their bum!!!
School kids wear uniforms complete with the hat which is considered part of the uniform.
What we have really decided is that anything goes here as far as dress other than work. What we are used to wearing is just fine here but you see everything here. A lot of things that people shouldn’t wear they wear if you know what I mean. Footwear seems to be kind of optional at times—-I have seen a lot of people (mostly men I would say) out shopping, walking around, whatever with no shoes and one book I read noted that that was very typical for Western Australians and Queenslanders. I still cannot get into going barefoot outside much here other than on the beach where my daily walks have morphed from wearing walking shoes to beach trekkers to now walking barefoot. There are just a few too many creepy crawlie things at this point for me to go barefoot too much around here but I guess you just watch where you walk.
So the good thing is that you can wear just about anything and fit in here! The fashions are probably similiar to the US but remember it is so warm here all the time that it is mostly beach wear and shorts and boardies. I am glad I did not send much more over than I did as I wear tshirts, polos and shorts most of the time these days! Life is good indeed!
