Helping Folks get their own Australia experience...

You may be wondering what I have been writing lately. As promised in an earlier post, I am now doing marketing on a global scale. Gotta love actually achieving a dream - I work at a great place with multilingual people who promote cultural exchanges. I am the Director of Global Marketing for Intrax Cultural Exchange. That means I am promoting Study Abroad among American & Canadian high schoolers and Intern Abroad among North American university students. Pretty fun, all in all.  Net net, if you like my writing style, you can get the homogenized version at intraxinternabroad.com and to a lesser extent at intraxstudyabroad.com.  While the nature of the job is to promote cultural exchange rather than explain my travels, I am still talking about the same sorts of things: few things can change your life for the better like immersing yourself in another culture.  I've been to 30-some countries and you can be sure that I am helping people get to experience their own, personal version of Australia (along with about 20 other countries).  With any luck I'll get back to Australia for work next year.  A year ago I told my old employer that I was leaving in January '08...man, I am so glad I went.  

Oh, one thing I re-wrote in our overview of Australia was that the national sport is cricket - I wrote that the national sports are cricket, Aussie-rules football, and (in deference to NSW) rugby.  Half of my visitors are Australian, so if you believe that cricket is alone atop Australian sports, let me know.  If cricket, AFL, and rugby are the main sports (in your mind) let me know. Rarely does one have the option of directly influencing how foreigners write about you, but you have it here. 

Also, this post would be incomplete if I did not thank the many folks who have visited over the past year.  Along with visitors from Iran and North Korea, I've had visitors from most of the US,  Europe, Canada, NZ, and Australia. To those of you in the Southern Hemisphere, I jealously wish you a lovely summer. As for me, not only do I have enough vegemite in the office to keep me going, there are co-workers who also eat it. 

Last point, I just just got back from my 20th high school reunion in Pittsburgh. If any of you are thinking about going to your high school reunion but are not sure, go. It was a great time.  The people you liked are still friendly and the people you did not like have evidently forgotten why they disliked you. I am not sure if all the annoying people changed or if I changed or if the only people who went were the ones looking to enjoy themselves, but everyone there was all set to have a good time.