Left Is Wrong, Christmas Is Winter

I'm at that awkward stage in Being Foreign where nothing makes any sense at all. You know how at the beginning, people are driving on the wrong side of the road and you always look the wrong way to see if you are going to be run over when you go to cross the road? After a while you get used to this and you know which way you want to look but you force yourself to look the other way, because where you are now that is the right way to look. Eventually it becomes normal to look the wrong way (which is now the right way, of course), and then you find yourself wondering when you look the new right way if it is wrong because it doesn't feel wrong any more.

Similarly, the seasons are confusing me. Christmas is in summer. My birthday is in autumn. Now everything is topsy turvy and I spent my birthday sweltering in some 30 degree nightmare. I was just reading something in the paper that said "The biggest decision we made that spring was to ..", and so I put this event in the timeline of the story at the end of the year, but of course it's not the end of the year (because the bloke writing it was English, and in England), it's in April or something. Not that this isn't a problem I have come across before, but it's more immediate here because the backwards answer is always the right one.

No doubt all of this confusion is bound to intensify next week when, for those of you who don't already know, I am going back to Australia for a while. I don't really know for how long, actually, because I haven't bought my return ticket yet, but rest assured I will be there, revelling in the english-speaking background noise and having a movie-watching frenzy at the Sydney Film Festival (yay!). And when I'm standing in the gutter I'll be looking at the cars (and wondering which direction I'm going to be killed from).