I will start by giving an overview of recent experimental results in microwave metamaterials from the Nonlinear Physics Centre at ANU. This will be followed by a talk on my modal impedance model of coupled meta-atoms. Meta-atoms are the building blocks of metamaterials. It is shown that eigenmodal current distributions are the fundamental degrees of freedom for meta-atoms, and represent a natural basis for describing their excitation and coupling. This approach generalizes simple circuit models to arbitrarily-shaped meta-atoms supporting multiple modes and having highly inhomogeneous current distributions. It is also demonstrated how coupling between metamaterials can be accounted for without the restrictions required by a Lagrangian approach, thus allowing coupling to radiated waves to be included naturally. This approach is strongly inspired by the method of moments approach used to solve electromagnetic scattering problems, but yields a compact analytical model for the dynamics of meta-atoms.