Cairns is a small Asian city

The travel ads are in Japanese. If you look close enough, you'll be able to find a short introduction to the services in English hidden somewhere in between the kanjis. The restaurants have Japanese and Chinese names, the menus are in Japanese and Chinese, the souvenir sellers in any souvenir shop will gladly serve the customers in Japanese or Chinese and sometimes in Korean, too. All the special offers are also in these languages. Yes, we are still in Cairns. See the pictures below. They are not the best possible example of what I'm trying to explain here, I just took them on my way to Woolies so that I could finally finish this post.

I went for a walk around the city center about a week ago and then it sank in. The two biggest groups of tourists are the Asian tourists (who have money) and the backpackers (who don't have so much money). There's one shopping mall that has an entire floor of Korea, Japanese and Chinese businesses. I go there whenever I feel homesick. In addition there must be a hundred small or medium sized Asian grocery stores supplying the authentic culinary experience of the neighboring continent. They are not even expensive (doesn't apply to the restaurants, though).

Here you can see the steadily growing power and importance of Asia, especially eastern Asia. Many Australians have told me that Australian business life is shifting towards Asia. This is reflected in education, as today's kids are more likely to study Chinese, Japanese and other Asian languages at school instead of French and German that dominated in the past. That game is pretty much over now. The future is in Chinese. Damn, should I have continued studying Chinese? The wise men once said the 21st century is the Asian century and they might have been right.