50 stories - Diana Koprinkova
25 July 2022 Events and Discussions
Sydney
Co-host of the Bulgarian radio program on SBS Australia
I remember the incredible fiery sunrise from the plane just before I set foot on Australian soil. 20 years later, this red-orange element still somehow excites my soul every morning when I get out of bed. The sunsets are just as picturesque, but with other colours of the rainbow - purple-red, yellow-blue, they look like the amazing colourful parrots - lorikeet, cockatoo, galah, king parrot, which are all around you, like the sparrows in Bulgaria.
What is Australia - a place where there is no my mum and dad, my sister and all my relatives, but a place where I discovered how beautiful and colourful and diverse is the world of thousands of people, immigrants like myself, whose fate or circumstances have them dragged to this distant continent. This is the most multicultural country in the world, where otherness is not punished, but respected and celebrated. There is absolutely no prejudice here about what you look like, how or where you live, or what you do, or what you carry on your back or eat. All people are equally well received and have the opportunity to live well.
Australia is a disciplined nation. I remember once making the mistake of throwing an envelope on which I had spilled something in the general waste. Minutes after this fatal mistake, a woman who turned out to be the housekeeper of the building where I lived at the time knocked on my door and politely said, "I think you seem to need instructions on how to separate your waste," and then explained at length and in detail with the relevant visual brochures which where should I distribute. I have not forgotten it to this day.
Australia is a social country which takes great care of its people. Here barbecues are in every park and completely free. Australians do not fail to enjoy these benefits and spend a lot of their leisure time in the parks. However, eating outside is sometimes a challenge, because here there are lurking birds named kookaburra, of the "kingfisher" family. Their laughter is really as sinister as a horror movie. As an acquaintance of mine said, to whom one of the kookaburras took the steak straight from the fork: "It makes a cuckoo call and takes someone’s food." (Game of words – In Bulgarian “Kuka” means “to make a cuckoo call” and “bara” means “touch, snatch”)
Australia has almost 12,000 beaches along 60,000 kilometres of coastline. If you were to visit a new beach in Australia every day, it would take you over 32 years to see them all. I still haven’t seen even one eighth of the 100 picturesque, secluded, secret, lively and with very turbulent waters surf beaches in Sydney, where I live. When my parents visited us, we took them to the northern beaches. My father, may God rest his soul, looked at the huge almost deserted beaches of several kilometres and said: “Where are your tourists, if your beaches are so famous? On the beaches in Burgas you can't find a place to put on your towel. ”And he was right, there were definitely no people, but that's why here on every beach you feel like you are on a private beach.
This is my short story about the country down under, which if you look at the globe will make you think that people are walking upside down there. And the water in the sink certainly spins counter clockwise.
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