Who is Kylie?

4/1/2012

Sunday. Today was a pretty relaxed day. My roommates all went to palm beach but I decided to stay back and work on some other things. I ended up going to the concord library where I ran into Emily, Jenae, Gina, Elise and Mary. I spent several hours posting blogs and pictures.

Later I went home and met up with Megan and Carly and Sarah. We were all going to go to a Uniting church together. We ended up going to a uniting church in Burwood. And it was quite the experience.

We got there, and there was maybe 15 people in the place, including our party of four. As soon as we walked in, it was obvious that we didn’t go there, so we were immediately pounced on and greeted. There was some awkward chit chat and small talk about where we were from, what we were doing in Australia, the usual. We took our seats and waited for service to start.

The whole service was a lot of stand up, sing a song, sit down listen to scripture, stand up sing a song, sit down listen to something else, stand up sing a song, greet one another, sit down etc. The greet each other section was super uncomfortable. In an effort to make us feel welcome many people went out of their way to come and talk to us.

The whole thing was just very uncomfortable. At one point they brought us name tags. At the end of the service the pastor was making announcements. The media crew had an open powerpoint slide and as he was talking, we watched

“Welcome Sarah, Rachel, Megan and Kylie*” being typed onto the announcements.We made the announcements...

*Australians cannot figure out the name Carly. When they say it, it sounds like Kylie to them so that’s what they thought Carly’s name was. (try saying Carly with an outrageous Aussie accent and you can see why).

Overall, one of my more uncomfortable experiences in Australia. We probably should have stayed for tea afterward, but I was pretty much done socializing at that point, so we high tailed it out of there…in the most respectful way possible…