Sacha had read a story somewhere about some movement towards "Australian-style cafés" in London. She'd probably read it in one of the newspapers or magazines that lay around the common room in the hostel, with all their crosswords and puzzles completed and their pages smudged with ink and food stains. She didn't really know what an Australian-style café was, but it was undeniable that there were an astonishing number of Australians in London.

She heard them when she went out: when she was on the tube, when she was in a pub, when she was just walking down the street. She'd even heard one making the incomprehensible announcements at a train station when she'd got out of the city one time. For her first few weeks in London she'd fought the urge to turn to every Australian voice she heard and declare her fellow citizenship, her shared nationality: it'd been the homesickness, she'd known, making her feel some misplaced sense of companionship with every Antipodean in London.

And there were so many of them. In which case, she couldn't understand why the English seemed to so misunderstand them. Perhaps it was wilful, but whenever she heard an English person mocking Australian culture, or speaking condescendingly towards Australian attitudes, it completely baffled her. How could they not know? How could they bump up against Australians every day and not see how wrong they were, how outdated their assumptions were?

She spent a lot of time just listening to other people's conversations. She was surprised, somehow, to find that people here were as frank in their public utterances as people in Australia were. Perhaps it was the English accents that had made her think at first that the people here would be any different.

She spent so much time listening because in the hostel all anyone ever wanted to do was talk. Talk to you, tell you about their lives, ask about your own life, ask about your country and where you came from; it was exhausting. It was also so thoroughly different from the outside world, from the city outside the hostel: a city in which no-one seemed to care to listen to anyone, in which everyone seemed content with their assumptions and unwilling to allow any change to their opinions.

She knew there must be a happy medium between always talking and always listening. Or at least a content medium, a tolerable medium. Yes, tolerable would be fine: there was no need to get greedy, first she could learn to tolerate being here - far from home, in a strange country with all its quirks and peculiarities - and then she could start to enjoy it. It was something she greatly looked forward to.

Have a good weekend, everyone. Get plenty of sleep and don't drink too much!