Australia: Expat and Why It Matters

Hello everybody. I hope that you are well. My name is Christian and welcome to my channel Backpacker Bananas. I am currently I'm from the UK but I am living in Sydney. I am here in Australia on my second working holiday visa and a few weeks ago I told you things that I missed about the UK. Yeah, but I was being nice because there are actually a lot of things that I really don't miss about the UK and that is what I'm going to go through with you in today's video. The first thing that I definitely do not miss is the traffic, the narrow roads and the narrow car parking spaces. I do love the history that England has but because so many of the roads were made way back when we had tiny cars or when

we didn't even have cars when it was just horses and whatnot. It meant that the roads were made really narrow and I feel like the UK hasn't really made a huge effort to keep up with the advances of the size of cars. And so driving just can be more difficult there. I feel like it's much easier for traffic to build up. Australian cities got developed a lot more recently than when England did and so the roads have been made wider. The second thing that I do not miss about the UK and maybe this should have been the first point cuz it's arguably the biggest point, the weather.

Obviously I do not miss the mostly great weather that the UK has to offer. The fact that summer lasts for maximum 8 weeks. that in the winter it doesn't get light until like 8:30 a.m. and then it gets dark at like 3:00 p.m. And in Australia it feels like we have summer for like 8 months of the year. It's so much sunnier, it's warmer and I personally prefer the climate here. I do not miss that about the UK at all. For the next point I'd like to introduce you to the sponsors of today's video Surfshark because the third thing that I do not miss is British TV and that is because I am still able to watch British TV in Australia. With Surfshark VPN I am able to switch the location of my device

to anywhere in the world. So when I'm here in Australia I can switch it back to the UK and it means that I can stream British TV shows and I feel like I've not made it a secret about how much I enjoy British TV in particular British reality TV. I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, Strictly Come Dancing. I feel like Love Island has got to be starting up again kind of soon, right? I don't miss it because I can still watch it. What Surfshark VPN also does is it turns your public Wi-Fi connection into a private one which is super useful anytime you're traveling and you are connected to a free public open Wi-Fi network. So you know, anytime you're in

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for free. To get that you just need to use my code backpacking or you can head straight to surfshark.com/backpacking and the link for that will be in the description as well. Number four, I do not miss the expensive public transport prices. Not just that but the fact that it's expensive and there are delays and strikes the whole time. I am from Woking which is just a 25-minute train ride from Waterloo which is one of the main terminals in London and the most recent time that I was in the UK I went to purchase a return train ticket for the day and it cost me 28 pounds. Not for a travel card, not including the tube or anything like that. Literally just Woking to Waterloo return, 28 pounds. That is 60 Australian dollars

which a lot of people commute to London from Woking and they are paying this every single day and it just makes my toes curl and God forbid I want to get the train to Manchester or on Newcastle. It literally sets you back hundreds of pounds. It's literally cheaper to fly or to drive and both of those are way worse for the environment, they increase traffic. Surely the UK needs to incentivize us to get public transport. To give you a bit of perspective, whenever I get public transport in Sydney it's never costing more than $10. That would be like the most expensive journey that you can take. So that's about 5 pounds to get anywhere in Sydney even if you wanted to travel like

several hours up the coast. And in some states, more specifically Melbourne, because of this huge fuel crisis which we obviously know is happening, they've made public transport completely free for the foreseeable. Completely free. England could never. I do not miss the need to be fully clothed and wear shoes in the UK and I understand that this links back to weather because it's not exactly in the UK to be scantily clad but generally if you were to walk anywhere outside without shoes it would be a bit frowned upon. In Australia, if you're in a beach town which is almost everywhere, you can walk into a supermarket, into a store in your bikini top without shoes on and literally no

one bats an eyelid. And I'm going to link this to point six of things that I don't miss about the UK. If it did happen to be a hot summer's day and I was wearing less clothes than usual I would definitely feel a lot more conscious in the UK because of the men. And I appreciate not all men but I feel like in the UK you're much more likely to get stared at, to get catcalled. In Australia people are just desensitized to you in a bikini not wearing very much clothes because everyone around you is in swimwear attire. You are not looking any different from anyone else. So I feel like you're just much less likely to be preyed upon by the men here.

Number seven, I do not miss having to pay for parking in shopping centers, normally in like national parks, like pretty much everywhere where you drive in the UK and you park you have to pay. In Australia, of course there are some parking lots which you have to pay in but almost always in shopping centers you will have at least 2 hours of free parking so that you can go and do whatever shopping that you need to do. You just obviously can't stay there for the whole day or overnight. The eighth thing that I do not miss about the UK is the fast-paced city culture. I mean like the really fast-paced city culture. You go down the London tube and almost

everyone is in the walking overtaking lane. It's fast, it's furious and whilst it is arguably very efficient it's not very calming, it's not the way I want to live my life and I feel like even in the center of the cities here in Australia it's just a much slower, more relaxed pace. You don't see as many people in such a rush. People aren't trying to barge past you. People just seem to have more time, it's more calming and I like that. The ninth thing that I do not miss about the UK is that there is no obvious side of the path that we walk on. Even though we drive on the left in the UK and we all know that we drive on the left, it's not really like a common social etiquette to walk

on the left. You can walk on the right, you can walk on the left, you can walk in the middle. There's no rules and it's very rarely enforced and what it means is that a lot of the time you find yourself like dancing with people in the street like to get around them. That doesn't really happen in Australia because we drive on the left and also on most walking paths you've got a line in the middle which enforces you to also walk on the left. And because that is encouraged so much it often means that even on the paths where there is no signage people just automatically walk on the left and it's just this commonly known etiquette that you walk on the left and so you're much less likely to be in this like

dancing situation with a stranger cuz you know which side you're going to and I like that. The tenth thing that I do not miss about the UK is how everything is so compact. We live in small houses with small kitchens, small bathrooms, small spaces and I guess growing up there you do get used to that until you come to a country like Australia where you realize that things are more spaced out, they've been designed more practically, there is just more space here to move about and for sure when it comes to the cost of things it is cheaper per square meter here when it comes to living. The eleventh thing that I do not miss about the UK is the drinking culture pressure. Now I do appreciate that this is massively

affected by who you hang out with, the social circles that you are in. But I feel like when I was back in the UK if you wanted to socialize with people the first option would always be oh, let's go for a drink in the pub. And whilst I do enjoy that now and again, especially as I'm in my 30s now I am drinking way less than I used to. I'm so glad for that change in my life. I feel like in Australia and again this is probably due to just the circles that I'm hanging around in. If you want to meet up with a friend option that you're coming up with would probably be a sunrise walk and coffee in the morning which I love.

Those are the circles and that's the lifestyle that I have kind of put myself into here and I absolutely adore it. It's one of the biggest reasons that I love living here and I do not miss that drinking culture at all about the UK actually. Not at all. The twelfth thing that I do not miss is seasonal depression. This is I guess linked to my second point about the weather but it's so true because the winters are longer in England and the summers are shorter there is this seasonal depression that so many people go through. Blue Monday is such a well-known thing in the UK. I didn't hear anything about it in Australia because it's just not a thing and even in the winters here it doesn't

get that cold. People are still swimming in the ocean in winter. The thirteenth thing that I do not miss about the UK is the rental prices. Of course, if you want to get a completely average two-bedroom flat in let's say zone two of London, it's going to set you back over £2,000. For that same price in Sydney, you can get yourself a very nice two bedroom flat, probably right in the center of the city or close to the beach, somewhere with really good transport links, basically somewhere that's just a lot nicer to live. The 14th thing that I do not miss about the UK is again linked to the weather and it's never knowing what to wear because with so many layers, you sweat so much in the day, but then you find yourself

freezing at night if you've not put on enough layers. In Australia, it's just always warm. You just don't need to wear layers at all and you're always going to be warm. I feel like all seasons of the UK I have this issue of not knowing how to dress for the day because of how hot or cold it's going to be. And the 15th thing that I do not miss about the UK and I'll make this my last point, it is the UK coffee shops. Many things that I do not miss about the UK coffee shops. One, I think they open too late. Many of them don't open until like 9:00 a.m. and my day started at this point. I need my morning coffee first thing in the morning. It's the thing that I most look forward to when I go to bed at night and

it's the thing that really gets me to start my day. So I really need it first thing. Also the coffee prices in the UK are just really too expensive for it to taste absolutely mediocre. I'm pretty sure Pret and Costa are charging like over £4 these days for just a flat white, which is completely outrageous, but also on that point, most of the coffee shops that we have in the UK are chains. In every town that you go in, if you need a coffee, you're going to Pret, Costa, Nero, Starbucks and we all have our favorite one of those. But in Australia, that's actually really hard to come by. Almost every single coffee shop here is an independent and I of course like that a lot more. And that is

it, okay, my UK slander is over. I've told you the things I miss about the UK. I've now told you the things that I do not miss about the UK. I hope you guys enjoyed this video. Do you agree with me? Are these things that you would not miss about the UK? Is there anything that I have missed? Thank you guys so much for watching and I will see you in the next video. Bye-bye.