'Straya Day

 Spent last night awake and feeling either very cold or very hot. .Couldn't even manage to sleep until around 4am. Well.... spending Australia Day being sick (really bad fever + headache) is... interesting And spending a month in this hole really makes you appreciate and miss your friends, and the fact that life in Australia is so much better.

Nobody chooses the circumstances in which they are born. You and I could have been born as the child of a Wall Street executive or as an orphan in Somalia, Afghanistan or.. *shivers* Vietnam. But fortunately, we belong to a relatively peaceful, tolerant and wealthy country (well compared to pretty much every Asian country) with an extremely high HDI. 

A place where you can walk down the street with an iPhone or laptop or Rolex watch and not worry about a group of thugs trying to rob you (a family friend recently had his laptop snatched in Vietnam.. LOL). A place where cars will actually stop for you as you cross the road. A place where... the police aren't brutal, incompetent and corrupt thugs who will actually pull over drivers just to get a bribe out of them (happens to alot of people over here). A place where you wouldn't see a $200k Mercedes Benz sedan next to kids living in pretty much absolute poverty. 

Well... you get the idea. The economic and individual problems we experience in Australia (two speed economy, Dutch disease, wealth/income inequality, the very high likelihood of Tony Abbott becoming PM, the fact that some Australians actually listen to people like Alan Jones and Andrew Bolt , etc.) are quite insignificant to the problems faced by most of the world. 

So yeah, let's take a moment to think about just how good life is and how fortunate we really are :)