The quiet lanes filled with boutiques, the busy streets packed with important-looking people walking fast, the sounds, the lights and even the smells.

You learn pretty quickly all the life skills you need to get through.

How to elbow your way through stocktake sales, how to fight with taxi drivers to make sure they don't rip you off, negotiating the rabbit warren of Melbourne's public transport system, but most importantly - how to do a hook turn.

Since moving to Ballarat though, I have learnt a whole range of things that I would never have even heard of if I had remained an ignorant Melburnian.

I've become more horse-savvy and now know what a farrier is and what an equine bowen specialist does (for you Melbourne readers, that's someone who puts horse shoes on their hooves and an equine bowen specialist is as specialised as a horse chiropractor).

There are a few things that took a little bit more explaining though.

I started work at The Courier in January at the height of summer.

My first day was a scorcher, and on the front page of the paper was an article about burn-offs at the lake.

Everyone was discussing this horrible epidemic affecting all the houses on Wendouree Parade - that's right, fairy grass.

All my colleagues seemed to know exactly what was going on and I was so swept up in my first day and meeting everyone and learning everything that I never clarified exactly what fairy grass was.

Imagine my embarrassment a few weeks later when a photographer and I were driving around the savanna (aka Lake Wendouree) to do a story.

I pointed out tumble-weeds rolling across the road in front of us and started making cowboy sounds.

He was pretty quick to point out that it was actually fairy grass and my yipee-yah-yay, round-em-up attitude took the next wagon home.

I don't know what I thought fairy grass was, but it certainly sounds a lot prettier and more magical than it actually is.

However I'm not the only ignorant Melburnian in our office.

My colleagues and I recently had a big debate about livestock.

Where I come from, we buy our meat at the supermarket and don't really give much thought about where it's been before it was shrink-wrapped and put in the big fridges for easy consumption.

One of our journalists, let's call her E, and her family had become surrogate parents to some lambs whose mothers had died.

My colleague, let's call him J, asked if he could take one home for Sunday roast.

E scoffed, and said J couldn't eat it yet because it was just a lamb.

My mind began to boggle. A lamb?

We eat lamb - roast lamb, lamb chops, lamb cutlets, lamb shanks - it's all lamb, right?

Apparently not.

The life of a lamb can be explained in "people-terms".

The cutesy little lambs you see frolicking in grassy paddocks are considered toddlers and you wouldn't eat a baby, would you?

The next stage in their life is adolescence.

Now that's not a fun time for a person let alone a lamb.

Forget acne, try being mulesed and have the skin near your bum chopped off to keep away the flies and being eaten alive by maggots.

(I would like to point out that I am not against mulesing but you have to admit that would be pretty painful.)

This is about the time these little lambies become prime lamb and they lose their baby teeth and cut their front two adult teeth.

Just when their lives are starting to get a little interesting, these prime lambs are shipped off to the markets and prepared to be splashed with mint sauce and served up with roast spuds.

Somewhere later down the track, the prime lambs that aren't eaten become sheep and the sheep become mutton but my sheep knowledge hasn't extended that far yet.

I still have plenty more to learn while living in the country.

For those who read last week's blog on wanting to experience snow, unfortunately I had work to do in the office on Tuesday when it snowed so I'm still yet to experience it firsthand.

But this is where I'm opening up the forum for people to tell me what I need to know.

What have you learnt living in Ballarat or the country that I will need to help me in life?