Just got back from a week in the sun - Perth, my former hometown. Why we left I'll never know. Who'd give up permanent sun and a city on the sea for a drab, unsettled city across the other side of the continent? Well, us obviously. It's funny though - Perth people all seem to have a little chip on their shoulders about East vs West coast. Mention you're from Melbourne and whoa, watch that visible shrinking away. Oh. Melbourne. You're from the East Coast. Mmm. I think they're still suffering from cultural cringe. As the most isolated large city in the world (as they never fail to mention), they've got the plus of self-reliance and a wonderful place to live, but the minus of always wondering if it's better elsewhere. Melbourne and Sydney have both gotten over their cultural cringe (well, almost), but Perth keeps looking at us, half-longingly, half-snidely. And as for Europe and the U.S, it's best not to mention them. It's interesting though, that even with these divisions (Western Australia has tried to break away from the rest of Australia twice that I know of, once seriously before Federation, and once not-so-seriously in the 80's), the city is not united. If you read the personal ads there (c'mon, who doesn't? Someone's life in fifty words or less) you'll notice an unusual acronym popping up between the more common GSOH's, DTE's, NS-ers and SD-ers. Yep, Perth has got it's very own acronyms - NOR and SOR. Standing for North of the River and South of the River. And most ads that mention this division also specify that they'd prefer to remain on that side of the river. Now, sure, the Swan River is pretty big, and there aren't that many bridges, but why this split along watery lines? Locals have tried to explain it to me by saying that Perth, like the Bris-GoldCoast-SunshineCoast sprawl, is spread up and down the coast so much that people tend to stick on their side of the river, in their local suburbs, and don't tend to cross over. Not only are they isolated from the rest of their country, and of the world for that matter, but they're isolated from the other half of their own major city. I'm sure that means something, but I'll leave that to qualified psychologists.