Student Loans

Has anyone out there ever applied for educational funding? I feel like I'm the last person on earth to realize that you can actually GET THE GOVERNMENT TO PAY for a large chunk of university fees! I feel really really annoyed right now that I never bothered to look into this as an undergrad. Grrrrr.... hopefully by eschewing the loan world until now I will have a better chance of being granted enough money to eat while I'm at school in Sydney. I guess there is a bright side of not being approved; achieving my ideal surfer girl weight will be that much easier if I can't actually afford food. 

So, to acquaint myself of all things Aussie, I've been reading Australian travel books (see sidebar) and revisiting my photographs from when I was there in 2005. This particular photo reminded me of the myriad complexities of what one might expect to be an ordinary straight-forward venture - ordering a coffee. In any regular Tim Horton's type coffee shop, conveying one's order requires careful attention to a certain vocabulary. This puzzled me and it often resulted in the level of confusion and bewilderment among us tourists that I am used to seeing in novice Starbucks patrons. In contrast though, it wasn't pretentious, or unique to one chain of shops... to me it was just... peculiar...

 I must quote Bill Bryson on this as I couldn't say it better myself:

"....It appeared you had to specify a length (principally long or short), a color (black or white), and even an angle of orientation to the perpendicular (flat or not), and these could be put together in a multitude of permutations- "long black, "short black," even 

"long short black.""

This, I can assure you is not an exaggeration in the slightest.