Hoons (Go get your Australian dictionary)

When you are walking around in Amsterdam and you get to a traffic light, you either won't notice it, or ignore it, because that is what everybody does. Cars however, do, naturally, stop most of the time when they have to. It seems to be exactly opposite, like everything on the other side of the world. Other pedestrians look at me disapprovingly when I cross the road on a spot where there is no zebra-crossing or traffic light and cars don't seem to stop for either of them, so what is the point of using them anyway. Alright, I might have been exaggerating that a little bit, because of course, not all cars ignore the red light, most of them don't. However, most of them really do ignore zebra-crossings and quite a few slip through the red light or seem to simply forget some other traffic rules.

Exaggerated or not, the traffic appears to be a complete chaos compared to what it is like in the Netherlands. Cars are driving with a short distance in between them, showing that they want to make a turn after they've already turned and accelerating and slowing down all the time. The kind of driving that makes you nauseous, but everyone is doing it, so you practically have to.

It's also a lot easier to obtain your license here. "If you are over 25, you can get your license without really having to do anything, because they assume you know how to drive responsibly"-quote. A driving license isn't so precious here either, many people just drink and drive or drive when there license has been taken for a couple of months, because the sanctions are not so high for doing that anyway. They might take your license for some more months, but who cares if you are driving without it anyway.
Then again, I don’t feel so much like driving on the wrong side of the road without a license amongst all of the other idiots (and non-idiots) that drive their cars around here, so luckily there are buses (and people who drive me around). Public transport is relatively cheap compared to that back home, except, that they charge you for time zones here, and there are only three of them:
-up to one hour
-one to four hours
-the entire day

So getting a bus for a 5-minute drive would be just as expensive as a 55 minute drive. On the other hand, waiting for the bus for a 5-minute drive is probably not worth your time. If you believed that public transport in the Netherlands sucked, don’t even try to take a bus here. My experiences are that it is normal for buses to arrive 10 to 20 minutes late and when you are finally on the bus and ask for some help, because you are not exactly sure at which stop you have to get out, the bus drivers don’t even seem to know the stops on their own route. (No offense to the two bus drivers who did know how to do their job and who were also very friendly). Then again, being a bus-driver here must be a very unsatisfying job, because I turned out to be about the only person, who was actually using it.

I am really glad that all the nice people here are happy to drive me around for a bit (:
To make up for the boring and rather depressive report, (but I just had to show my amazement about traffic), I can tell you that a train ticket to Sydney, is only 9 dollars, so I’m planning to go there anytime soon. And there is much, much more to tell.