The foretelling of culture clash
Jul. 24th, 2009 04:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
changelingIt's easy to forget that the US is, geographically speaking, about the same size as Australia, and not three times the size. It has about THREE HUNDRED AND SIX MILLION people to our twenty-one million. I mean, it has FIFTY states. We have SIX (plus two major territories).
Our friends told us to go to Newark Airport, because although it was in a different state, it was easier to get to than the New York airports. I can't even conceive of driving to a different state just to pick someone up. Unless you were right on the border. To get to, say, from Melbourne to Albury-Wodonga, which is straddles the Victorian–New South Wales border, would be about a 7-hour round trip (according to Google. That sounds about right). And I live in our second-smallest state.
One of my favourite bloggers was talking today about how big Texas was, and how you can drive a whole day and not leave the state.
So? I thought. Out of curiosity, and because I was constantly told to "look it up" as a child whenever I asked my parents anything, I did a half-arsed Google search to find out how big Texas is.
Apparently it's 696,241 km2.
That sounded pretty big. I chucked in New South Wales (our moderately sized state) as a comparison.
801,600 km2.
In fact, pretty much all of our states and territories except Tasmania (apparently roughly the size of Scotland, according to The Internet), Victoria (a third of the size of Texas) and the ACT (roughly the size of a medium-sized car) are bigger than Texas. Western Australia makes it into the Fucking Massive category, being just over 1 million square miles, or 2.5 million sq k.
Australia. It's Bigger Than TexasTM.
Our friends told us to go to Newark Airport, because although it was in a different state, it was easier to get to than the New York airports. I can't even conceive of driving to a different state just to pick someone up. Unless you were right on the border. To get to, say, from Melbourne to Albury-Wodonga, which is straddles the Victorian–New South Wales border, would be about a 7-hour round trip (according to Google. That sounds about right). And I live in our second-smallest state.
One of my favourite bloggers was talking today about how big Texas was, and how you can drive a whole day and not leave the state.
So? I thought. Out of curiosity, and because I was constantly told to "look it up" as a child whenever I asked my parents anything, I did a half-arsed Google search to find out how big Texas is.
Apparently it's 696,241 km2.
That sounded pretty big. I chucked in New South Wales (our moderately sized state) as a comparison.
801,600 km2.
In fact, pretty much all of our states and territories except Tasmania (apparently roughly the size of Scotland, according to The Internet), Victoria (a third of the size of Texas) and the ACT (roughly the size of a medium-sized car) are bigger than Texas. Western Australia makes it into the Fucking Massive category, being just over 1 million square miles, or 2.5 million sq k.
Australia. It's Bigger Than TexasTM.
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Date: 2009-08-03 04:59 am (UTC)