Rachel and Mike in Australia

Over Christmas and New Year’s, we spent 2 and a half weeks on the South Island of New Zealand (gotta love the Aussie attitude when it comes to vacation time–4 weeks is standard!). We had a fantastic trip. The island is much greener, mountainous, and sheep-filled than Sydney. Many of the mountains were carved by glaciers, some of which still exist, so there are massive lakes that are an incredible glacial blue color.

The southwestern part of the country is largely Fjordland National Park, which includes the famous Milford Sound. We did one of the New Zealand ‘Great Walks’ in Fjordland, called the Routeburn Track. The Routeburn is a 3-day ‘tramp’ through a remote area of the park. It’s a relatively easy walk covering 32 km (~20 mi) and 800 m (~2600 ft) elevation.

There are several Department of Conservation ‘huts’ along the way where you sleep and which are equipped with running water, wood stoves, and bunk rooms. We started the hike on Christmas Day and lucked out with a gorgeous afternoon of hiking (following a cloudy/rainy morning).  For Christmas dinner we had carried up wine, ham, cranberry sauce, and some fresh veggies. I was expecting people to be on the trail with Santa hats and in a festive mood at the hut. I don’t know if it was because most of them had hiked in the wet morning, but most people weren’t acting as though it was any different than any other day. Luckily my elfish nature had though ahead and brought candy canes and Christmas poppers, so I did my best to spread some Christmas cheer!

The second day of the hike we weren’t as lucky with the weather – it was solid rain and clouds, so we missed out on some of the best vistas. We were basically hiking up or down a stream or waterfall rather than a trail, and 95% of the day we were above the treeline, so there was no shelter at all from the rain.

It should have been miserable, but it was still gorgeous. Perhaps the thin air helped by keeping us a bit light-headed? It was like hiking in a cloud forest in some science fiction movie.

We were rewarded at the end of it by the hut ranger who, rather than just a 5 minute weather briefing, treated the hut to a ~40 minute impromptu stand-up comedy routine. He told us to expect more of the same weather on our last day, but when we woke up the sky was overcast but not raining, and as we hiked, the clouds cleared, so we got some welcome sunshine to dry out our coats, boots, packs, etc.

It’s been quite awhile since I posted – what can I say? My new job and commute are keeping me quite busy, and the prospect of sitting at the computer on the weekends is less tempting. Blogging is also a funny way to communicate with people. I mean, I write about what we’re doing and sometimes a few people comment, but mostly it’s me sending things into the void, never knowing if anyone reads it. I’ve hear from a few people that they enjoy the blog and that I should keep it up, so I’m trying to turn over a new leaf and be better about posting this year. However, if you read a blog and enjoy it, please leave a comment, as that will help motivate me to make time for writing and posting.

Here’s what you’ve missed in the last 5 months:

My job is going really well. I’m trying to get 8 town councils in Sydney to change how they deal with water internally and with one another in order to improve the health of the Cooks River, which is the most polluted river in Sydney. As you can imagine, it’s a challenging task, but the people I work with are great, and it’s very rewarding to be doing work that has a tangible effect on the environment.

Mike jetted around the North American continent in September and October going on research cruises in the Santa Barbara basin and the Cayman Trough, which luckily ended a week before a good friend’s wedding in New York city, so he was able to attend the wedding. My parents visited Oz for the month of November. We had a great time with them and they enjoyed their first trip down under. They jumped right into the Aussie spirit on their first day in the country, which was Melbourne Cup Day. The Melbourne Cup is a horse race that is like the Kentucky Derby, only much bigger. It’s billed as the “race that stops the nation.” The Aussie’s are always up for an excuse to drink or gamble, and Melbourne Cup Day is a quintessential Aussie holiday that incorporates both. Almost straight off the plane, Mom and Dad hopped onto a ferry with me to downtown Sydney where we met some friends to drink champagne and watch the race. In proper Aussie fashion, we made a detour on the way to place some bets, and my Dad picked a winner! Let this me a lesson: the fates smile on those that travel to Sydney (hint, hint!).

They were also in town for Thanksgiving.  The Aussie’s of course have no reason to celebrate the landing of the pilgrims in the New World, and some find it odd that the holiday is largely about eating copious amounts of food.  The food’s often the best part of any holiday in my opinion, so I wasn’t about to let Thanksgiving go by unobserved.  We rounded up 10 or so Americans and had a proper Thanksgiving dinner.  It was a delicious meal and fantastic company!  Though it did feel a bit bizarre to be celebrating Thanksgiving on a warm spring day where we sat outside to eat.

The Blue Mountains are situated about ~100 kilometers (~70 miles) west of Sydney.  Many Sydneysiders regularly escape to the Blue Mountains for bushwalking (i.e., hiking), rock climbing, seeking cooler weather, or just going for a scenic drive.  We have been meaning to make it up there, and when an impromptu celebration was in order, it seemed like the right place to go.  I got the fantastic news of a job offer on a Friday afternoon, and Mike was due back after 2.5 weeks at sea the following evening, so to celebrate my job offer and Mike’s return, we spent a couple days exploring the Blue Mountains.

The Blue Mountains get their name from the bluish tinge of the mountains when gazed at from afar.  The trees in the Blue Mountains are mostly eucalyptus.  Tiny droplets of oil coming off eucalyptus trees scatter sunlight giving the hillsides a blue appearance.  Eucalyptus (a.k.a. Gum) trees abound in Australia.  There are over 90 species of eucalyptus trees in the Blue Mountains and more than 700 species of eucalyptus found in Australia (compared with only ~15 that occur outside of Australia).  Eucalyptus leaves are the main food for koalas, who are particular about what eucalyptus species they eat, though the species they prefer varies depending on what region the koalas live in.

We drove to Katoomba, which is the main town in the Blue Mountains.  The name Katoomba derives from an aboriginal word meaning ‘falling waters.’  Hundreds of millions of years ago, the Blue Mountains were a shallow sea, until the area was uplifted to a plateau about 170 million years ago.  Since then, rainfall and rivers have carved deep gorges and canyons out of the mostly sandstone rocks.  The carving power is still apparent in the many modern waterfalls in the area.

One of the main tourist attractions in Katoomba is the Three Sisters rock formation.  Legend has it that long ago there were three beautiful sisters of the aboriginal Katoomba Tribe.  Three brothers from a neighboring tribe fell in love with them.  Tribal law forbade marriages outside the tribe, but the brothers were determined to marry the sisters.  A fierce battle ensued.  To protect his daughters from the fighting, their medicine man father turned them to stone.  He planned to turn them back once the battle was safely over; however, he himself was killed in the fighting, so the sisters remain in stone (let this be a lesson to fathers that want to be over-protective).  There is some dispute over whether the legend of the Three Sisters is a true Aboriginal Legend or one made up by those in the tourist trade in the first half of the 1900’s.  Certainly hard to say since Aboriginal history was kept orally, a tradition which no doubt suffered from Australian government policies (thankfully now defunct) of removing Aboriginal children from their families.

Another major tourist attraction in the Blue Mountains is Scenic World.  Scenic World is a theme park focused on the beauty of the Blue Mountains and has 3 rides that allow you to experience the Blue Mountains without breaking a sweat.  We thought it was a pretty bizarre concept and were expecting a lot of annoying kitsch or anamatronic koalas.  With so many good hikes in the area, it seemed silly to experience the beauty of the Blue Mountains packed onto a ride with 50 strangers.  But, after a day of hiking that included walking down many, many steps along the steep gorge to get to the trail head, we were quite happy to hop on the Scenic World railway to take us straight to the top.  And I mean, STRAIGHT to the top.  This is not a winding switch back choo choo train.  It was originally developed for hauling coal from the mine at the bottom of the gorge to the top.  Katoomba’s scenic railway is the steepest incline railway in the world and is not for the faint at heart.  Particularly since Australian safety standards are not the same as those in the U.S.  There were no safety harnesses, no safety belts, not even a safety bar.  I was nervous going up and would have been screaming my head off going down.  All in all, Scenic World was a lot better than we expected.  It allows people that wouldn’t otherwise have access get down into the gorge and had some interesting information about the history of mining in the area and the geology of the mountains.

Having now seen them in person, we can attest to the blue haze that blankets the mountains.  Thankfully, the haze didn’t make us blue at all—it was hard to keep smiles off our faces as we soaked in the warm winter sunshine and gazed on the gorgeous hillsides.

We visited Australia’s 5th largest city a couple weeks ago.  Compared to Sydney, Adelaide feels tiny.  The inner city, which is 10 blocks by 15 blocks, is ringed on all sides by parkland, giving the impression of a small town that you can walk across with ease.  I never would have guessed that it is a town of 1.5 million people.  The only thing that suggested a large population was their central market.  It was a huge smorgasbord of fresh fruit, vegetables, meats, cheeses, nuts, and flowers.  There were a myriad of different types of sausages and a number of fruits we didn’t recognize.  We decided to try the dragon fruit, which has a sort of magenta flesh and an outer look of a succulent but an inner look of a hot pink kiwi.  It was quite yummy!

If you travel basically in any direction outside of Adelaide town center, you hit wine country.  To the south there’s McLaren Vale known for its reds, to the east the rolling Adelaide Hills for ‘cool climate wines’, and to the north the Barossa Valley, which is Australia’s best-known wine region where many a Shiraz is produced.  We drove up to the Adelaide Hills to a small town called Hahndorf.  Hahndorf was settled by German immigrants in 1839 and still has a strong German influence.  The food was perfect for a cold winter day.  We had Hungarian goulash for lunch and for dinner a sausage platter (6 different kinds!) with Hofbrauhaus beer on tap.  It was delicious!  I wish I could say we burned off the calories with a nice afternoon hike in the hills…but the rainy and cold weather kept us to indoor activities—wine and cheese tasting to be precise.  We tasted several wines that have won Australian and international awards.  Though our palettes aren’t nearly as discerning as international wine judges, we had to agree that there were some really tasty wines.

We made a detour between vineyards to visit another Aussie Big Thing (We are now up to 13 total visited).  The Big Rocking Horse stands more or less in the middle of nowhere next to a wooden toys store.  I think the Big Thing strategy definitely works here.  We never would have stopped (let alone made a purposeful detour) if there wasn’t a Big Thing out front.  While we resisted buying any wooden toys (some of which were pretty cool), we did pay the $2/pp to climb the rocking horse and purchased a couple coffees at the conveniently attached cafe.  Not a bad Big Thing experience, though it would have been truly awesome if the Big Rocking Horse actually rocked.

We visited the Cleland Wildlife Park on our way back to Adelaide.  It’s a pretty big park and they have a huge array of Australian wildlife.  We saw a bunch of varieties of emus, ‘roos and wallabies.  They live in big enclosures that you can walk into and feed grass pellets to the animals.  It’s a pretty amazing opportunity to get a close-up view of these guys.  We had seen a lot of ‘roos during our drive cross country, but I still find them fascinating.  Their heads remind me so much of deers and their upper bodies have a very human-like look, but then looking at the tendons in their legs and their tails, they are like no other animal I know.

There were a number of other animals at the park that we had never seen before.  There were dingos, which it is thought were brought over to Austalia by sea about 4,000 years ago.  I was surprised to find out they are endangered in their pure-bred form.  I was also a bit amused to find out about the Dog Fence.  In the late 1800’s, the Aussie’s built the longest fence in the world (stretching over 3,000 mi) to protect southeastern Australia sheep herds from dingos.  The results were only partially successful.  There seem to be fewer dingos in southeastern Australia, but this has led to more rabbits and kangaroos that compete with the sheep for grazing vegetation.  I can’t help but smile at the Aussie spirit of trying to tame this wild land with really massive fences.

We got to see our first koalas.  For a couple hours every afternoon, they bring out koalas (on 30 minute shifts) so that people can get an up-close view of these animals that are so tough to see in the wild.  The koala was bigger than I expected, though I suppose the ones at the park are probably bigger than average since they have to work even less than normal koalas for their share of eucalytpus leaves.  I was also excited to see our first hairy-nosed wombats.  There’s no feeding these guys, and I dare say I wouldn’t want to run into one in a dark alley!

It is not often that we scientist/engineer types see our names in lights or have the sense that more than a handful of academics have any interest in what we do.  Mike was recently the part of quite an exception to that!  While working at Johns Hopkins, Mike worked on a new underwater robot named Nereus.  Nereus’ name was selected from a competition of high school and college students after the Greek god who can change shapes, which is appropriate for this robot that can be configured so that is either is connected to the surface ship by a tether and driven with a joy sick or is thrown over board without a tether and trusted to run a pre-programmed mission and reappear at the surface ~24 hours later.

What makes Nereus unique is its capability to explore the entire ocean.  There are a number of underwater robots in operation that can dive to about 6,000 m (~4 miles), which reaches the majority of the sea floor.  But the deepest parts of the ocean are trenches 11,000 m deep (that’s 2,000 m deeper than Everest is high!).  At that depth, the pressure is ~1,000 times higher than at the surface.

Building a vehicle to withstand such enormous pressure is a real challenge.   If you use heavy pressure-resistant materials like titanium, you have to add more flotation so that the vehicle will be buoyant enough to make it back to the surface, so the size of the vehicle gets large fast, limiting what kinds of ships you can deploy it from.  The innovative solution used on Nereus is the use of ceramic spheres for buoyancy—they are light in air, but very strong against the extreme compressive forces of the deep ocean.  Nereus contains about 1500 ceramic spheres (each the size of a grapefruit) to keep its 6,000 lb-self afloat.

Two other vehicles have made it to the deepest part of the ocean, which is located in the Mariana Trench, close to Guam.  In 1960, the Trieste, which was basically a giant 2-person underwater blimp with 22,500 gallons of gasoline used for buoyancy, spent 20 minutes on the ocean floor in the Challenger Deep at ~10,916 m.  An unmanned Japanese robot named Kaiko made it to 10,897 m at the Challenger Deep a few times in the late 1990’s, but it was lost at sea when its cable connecting it to the surface ship broke.  Both the Trieste and Kaiko were extremely expensive, needed special ships to be deployed from, and provided limited ability to explore the seafloor.  Kaiko was powered through its tether to the surface, which meant that the tether needed to be quite large, which resulted in the tether acting like an anchor so that Kaiko could only move within about 200 m of where it landed on the seafloor.  The Nereus engineers wanted to build a versatile robot—one that could explore all parts of the ocean at a moderate cost and from any ship.  Rather than powering the vehicle via the tether, Nereus contains batteries for power and the tether is a lightweight fiber optic that only transmits data back and forth.  If the fiber optic tether breaks, Nereus automatically goes into autonomous untethered mode and heads for the surface.

Because of delays in the Nereus building schedule, its voyage to the Mariana Trench did not occur while Mike was at Johns Hopkins.  Luckily, the Nereus project leads still wanted Mike to be involved in the project, and his fellowship in Australia allowed him the flexibility to participate.

Mike flew to Guam the day before our two-year wedding anniversary to be a part of Nereus’ attempt to reach the Challenger Deep.  The team of engineers working on Nereus are all excellent and had tested Nereus extensively, but even so, the team was nervous.  If one of the ceramic spheres cracked and broke, it could set off a chain reaction and implode the vehicle.  After a few warm-up dives to shallower depths, on May 31st 2009, Nereus dived at the Challenger Deep reaching a bottom depth of 10,902 m.  Nereus cruised around the bottom for 10 hours, sending live video feed up its tether to a very excited set of scientists on board and transversing about 2,800 m along the bottom.  Nereus has a manipulator arm that allowed the scientists to collect samples of mud, rocks, and worms.  Nereus also deposited a marker on the seafloor signed by those on board the ship.  The Challenger Deep didn’t have nearly the charismatic biodiversity of a hydrothermal vent site, but maybe once the sea creatures see what cool people are interested in the site, it’ll become more of a hang out.

The surface media creatures were definitely interested in the event.  News of Nereus’ dive was reported by the BBC, Fox News, Nature News, the Washington Post, and the front page of the Baltimore Sun.  A film crew from the Science Channel was also on board filming what will be a one-hour documentary (or ‘doco’ as they say over here) this fall.  That added an interesting dimension.  Because the crew wanted to be able to splice together recovery and deploying footage from different dives they asked Mike and the rest of the scientists and engineers to wear the same clothes so that it would look as though it was all from the same day.  The doco crew was willing to do the laundry to facilitate the wardrobe trickery, so nobody really seemed to care.  Keep a sharp eye out this fall and see if you can catch any discrepancies!

Most iconic images of Sydney involve Sydney Harbor and the Opera House or Harbor Bridge. We wanted to take advantage of the harbor while living here and what better way than by sailing it. Sailing in Sydney is hugely popular, and on nice weekends the Harbor is full of all different sizes of boats. We live in Balmain, a suburb just one cove west of the Harbor Bridge and downtown Sydney. Not long after moving to Sydney, the Balmain Sailing Club advertised that they were having an open house in our local newspaper, so we decided to go along and check it out. We are lucky that the club closest to us is also relatively casual and inexpensive. For most of its history, Balmain has been an industrial working class suburb that had several shipyards, but in the last 15-20 years Balmain has changed into a residential suburb known for its boutiques and cafes.

We asked about crewing opportunities and were told that we could just show up on Friday nights about 45 minutes before the race and ask around for anybody needing crew. So that’s what we did for most of last season, and we got on a boat every single time (though one boat never made it off the mooring). There are several different classes of boats. We mostly sailed on Apache, which is a ~30 foot ocean-going yacht owned and captained by a feisty Dutchman named Franz. The race course normally headed east to the Harbor Bridge and around several of the Harbor islands. It usually lasted about 1.5 hours, though it obviously depends on the wind speed.

After Friday night races, everyone goes up to the club house for a drink and dinner. The food is really cheap and surprisingly good, considering it’s just a couple of volunteer ladies working in a small kitchen. They serve the best meat pies I’ve tasted so far in Australia!

We had some pretty exciting races. In one race, the jib sheet (one of the ropes that operates the forward sail) snapped in half mid-race. The rope was 3/4 inch thick and didn’t show any frays—quite amazing that it could just break. Franz managed to tie the line back together, and we finished the race. On one particularly windy night, several guys that normally sail their own boats sailed on Apache because the wind was too much for their lighter boats. We were happy to serve as ballast that week to avoid all the arguing in the cockpit. I am continually amazed at how comfortable people are at telling Franz the correct way to sail his own boat—particularly considering how successful he is at it himself (Apache had the won the previous season series). It was a classic case of too many cooks in the kitchen, and we ended up having a collision with another boat.  No one was hurt (except for Apache), and once again we finished the race.  That definitely made for an interesting evening in the club house!

With the friday night races, we got plenty of experience in winding winches and tailing lines, basically the mechanics of sailing.  However, in a race situation, there’s not much time for explaining why something needs to happen, you are just told that something needs to happen NOW. In an attempt to learn more of the “why”, Rachel signed up for a dinghy class that the club was running over Easter (which is a 4-day weekend in Australia). Unfortunately, the weekend was as still as it gets, so Rachel ended up with more practice paddling than sailing. A second attempt at instruction with both of us on a 50-foot yacht went better, but the wind was still quite low, so we motored for part of that day as well. Mike is convinced that the way for us to really improve is to buy our own sailing dinghy…

The 25th of April is the national holiday of ANZAC day. ANZAC stands for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps and ANZAC day honors those who fought and died from Australia and New Zealand. ANZAC day was first celebrated in 1916 in honor of the ANZAC soldiers who were part of the Gallipoli campaign in WWI. The ANZAC force landed at Gallipoli (in Turkey) on the 25th April 1915.

What Churchill planned to be a decisive strike turned into an 8-month campaign where over 10,000 ANZAC soldiers died (of over 200,000 total Allied casualties). It is often said that though Australia’s Constitution came into force in 1901, it was not until Gallipoli that Australia gained an independent national identity. Though the Gallipoli campaign failed and ended with the remaining soldiers evacuated, it established a reputation for Australian people having great courage and a sarcastic sense of humor, whom rejected unnecessary restrictions. We have both been surprised that the presence of WWI almost seems to overshadow that of WWII here in terms of monuments and references, whereas we feel the opposite is true in the U.S. After WWII, ANZAC day was extended to honor its soldiers, and now it commemorates all Australian and New Zealand soldiers.

ANZAC day is celebrated a number of different ways. Wreaths of flowers

are laid on war monuments, often with personal notes attached to them. There are sunrise memorial services attended by veterans or their family members wearing medals. There are marches and parades. And then there’s two-up. Two-up is a gambling game that is outlawed in Australia except for about 6 hours each year on ANZAC day. The soldiers played two-up in the trenches to pass time, so in honor of their sacrifice, you’re allowed to gamble on the day of national remembrance. Some argue that it is not an appropriate way to pay one’s respects, but in modern times, it is a huge tradition for ANZAC day, so we thought it important to experience.

Two-up is a simple game. Someone tosses a couple coins in the air, and you bet on whether they will land with either two heads or two tails up. These days there’s quite a bit of structure to this simple game. Before each toss, if you want to bet heads, you put your money over your head and start yelling 5 (or however much you want to bet) on heads. Someone in the crowd who wants to bet 5 on tails finds you and hands you $5. The person who’s betting on heads always holds the money (this simple detail is pure genius as after a number of rounds of two-up and drinks it can be quite easy to forget which way you bet on the last toss). You can bet with people across the crowd as long as you can catch their eye. This would be much harder to pull off in the U.S. since all our currency is green. Australian bills are purple, yellow, blue, and red, so you know how much someone wants to bet by what color bill they’re holding even if you can’t hear them. It’s quite a sight – all these people with colored bills in the air hollering at each other and passing money around.

At some point the two-up umpire calls out “no more bets.” The coins are placed on a little paddle (heads up). A lot of bars now play with 3 coins so that you always have a result. The person tossing the coins has to get them over their head and on the coins’ ascent they have to spin an adequate number of times. I’m not sure how many, but the two-up officials were keeping track. They would yell out and stomp on the coins if the toss didn’t pass muster (and the crowd would boo). Everyone is cheering for their result with cries of “Heads ‘em up” or “Tails never fails.” If a fair toss ends with 2 heads showing, the heads keeps the money. If it comes up 2 tails, heads hands over the money to tails. This can be a bit tricky if you’ve bet with someone across the crowd, and we heard a couple of tails people shouting over their heads person going missing. We kept our stakes at $5 or $10, but some people were betting a couple hundred a round! We didn’t keep great track of how much we put in, but our pockets seemed fuller after a couple hours of two-up (not counting the bills that went to beer and bubbles…not sure we’d end up ahead counting them!).

One of the most interesting things about living abroad is realizing what you take for granted as being the way things are always done.  We’ve been compiling a mental list of everyday things that have surprised us here.  Some of them have been pleasant awakenings of “wow, why didn’t anybody bring this to the U.S.?” and others continue to frustrate us.  One of the most surprising things was how hard it can be to understand the language—considering it’s an English speaking country.  We knew Aussie English is ripe with slang but weren’t expecting the slang to be so prevalent.  For instance, the sign for the garage that does vehicle registration reads “rego.”  And no one calls Mike’s workplace the University of Sydney—it’s Sydney Uni, which sounds better than U-Syd but is confusing considering the actual order of the words.  Restaurant menus commonly list how many ‘veg’ a main comes with and what they serve in the morning for ‘breky.’  There are a few places that keep the language formal, my favorite being the loud speaker recording on the Manly ferry that asks you to “Please dispose of your rubbish thoughtfully.”

We expected that being a more recent part of the British empire that tea would be big over here, and as a tea drinker, Rachel was very excited for that.  When it comes to food though, the Aussie’s have largely thrown off the British ways.  Meat pies and beans-on-toast are still big, but tea is out.  The Aussie’s love their coffee, by which they mean espresso.  You would be hard pressed to find drip coffee in this town and chain Starbucks-style stores are not king.  Coffee shops are typically little one-off cafes that each have their own unique attributes.  We’ve been really loving the food experience over here.  The produce is generally very fresh, avocados abound, and the take-away condiment packages are genius. Ever gone to open a soy sauce packet only to end up covered in a salty black stain or with all the soy sauce concentrated in one spot?  Not to worry here, where soy sauce comes in little plastic fish with screw caps that allow you to squeeze the soy sauce out by the drop.  Or have you struggled trying to get the ketchup out of its packet?  Aussie ketchup packets have a butterfly style to get all the “tomato sauce” out with ease.  Many of the freezers also have excellent ice delivery systems.  The ice cube trays are built into the freezer and ice cube bin.  The ice cube trays have handles so you can empty the cubes directly into the bin just by turning a lever.

There’s no worry of chinese waiter water torture in Australia.  It’s common practice at restaurants to leave a big bottle of water on the table so that you can refill your water glass as needed.  For the first week or so, as we were meeting up with Oscar’s friends or walking around, I thought it was so odd that everyone drank in hotel bars.  We still haven’t figured out exactly what the legal or historic reason is, but all the pubs here are called ‘hotels,’ even though most ‘hotels’ don’t have accommodation attached.  In the pubs, you can order beer from the tap as a midy, schooner, or pint (and often get a steak for under $10).  Midys are 10 oz, schooners are 15 oz, and pints are 20 oz.  There are a number of regional Aussie breweries, though it’s common now for the beers to be available around the country.  A couple of the most popular beers in Sydney are Toohey’s New and Pure Blonde.  Most of the beers are basic lagers, and microbrews are uncommon.  I’ve never heard so many men requesting ‘light’ beers before moving here.  The term ‘light’ here refers specifically to the alcohol content rather than the calorie content, with ‘light’ beer having less than 3.5% alcohol-by-volume as opposed to ‘full-strength’ beer, which has ~5%.  Drinking light beer doesn’t necessarily prevent drunkeness considering that Australians rank 4th internationally in their per capita beer consumption (Czechs are 1st: http://www.kirinholdings.co.jp/english/ir/news_release051215_4.html).  Despite the U.S. ad campaign, this beer consumption does not include Fosters; we’ve yet to see it here.  The Aussie’s also love to drink bubbly and ordering a glass (or bottle) of champagne at a pub is not unusual.  Arguably the best thing about drinking and eating here is that there’s no tipping.  You can round up a $48 dollar meal to $50, but tipping 15% is not done. 

The mental list of surprises goes on, and we’re continuing to discover differences and figure out how things work here, so there will be more blogs on this subject to come!

Apologies to our faithful readers for not posting in quite some time!  There’s been a fair amount of excitement down under what with moving house, Mike teaching his first Uni class and heading to the States for work, and an unwelcome though ultimately benign introduction into socialized medicine.

Thursday evening about a month ago, Mike came home from work complaining of stomach cramps.  Around 10 pm, he asked me to figure out if we could see a doctor ASAP.  We had no idea how off-hours care works, but luckily, there was a 24 hour help number on the back of our insurance card.  After consulting with our insurance provider, and a short cab ride later, we arrived at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital (RPAH), and checked in with the nurse.

Australians pay a Medicare levee as part of their taxes.  This entitles all residents to basic medical care, including doctors visits, prescriptions, and hospital care.  Sounds simple enough, and the cost is surprisingly small: the medicare levee is only about 1% of the roughly 30% income tax rate paid by middle class Australians.  But of course it’s much more complicated in practice.   Australians who can afford it typically purchase their own private health care to supplement their public coverage.  This not only increases their level of coverage but gives them some flexibility in choosing their care.  Medicare covers doctors visits and various procedures up to a fixed, nationwide rate.  For instance, doctors visits are covered to the tune of $60 per visit.  But doctors are not obligated to charge that rate, and whether or not it’s true, the perception is that if you’re willing to pay more you can get better care.  Our doctor’s visits thus far have been $60 or $90, which seems surprisingly cheap compared to the U.S.

So what did all this mean for us waiting in the emergency room?  At the time, we had absolutely no idea.  We knew before coming to Australia that we would not be eligible for medicare and therefore would have to purchase our own insurance, which, dutifully, we had done.  But that’s about where our understanding of the system ended.  We ended up spending the night in the emergency room, which went much as you’d expect in a hospital back home.  Upon checking in, the triage nurse took a blood sample, had Mike deliver a urine sample (the Aussies say You-’Rhine), and told us to wait.  After a few hours we got to see the doctor (who introduced herself by her first name).  There was more waiting for blood work, then waiting for a chest x-ray and the results of that, and in the end, we got sent home at 6am the next morning with a diagnosis of “severe constipation” and a pile of laxatives.

By noon the next day, the laxatives had produced nothing and Mike’s pain was worse.  Long story short, we saw our GP who suspected appendicitis, Mike got a CT scan, which confirmed appendicitis, and that evening we checked back into the emergency room at RPAH (only about 12 hours after we’d left).   This time we didn’t have to wait long before Mike got moved inside to a bed in the pre-op area.

Australia has two kinds of hospitals, public and private.  RPAH is a public hospital, which means if you have medicare, you can get treated for free.  When signing up for health insurance, the insurance providers had horror stories about the waits and facilities at public hospitals, which of course is why you should pay for private insurance.  Turns out that private hospitals don’t have intensive care units, so if you’re having any major surgery with potentially life-threatening complications, they send you to a public hospital even with private insurance.  However, RPAH has all kinds of perks you can claim as a patient with private insurance - without private insurance clients, all the hospital’s money comes from the government, so they have a vested interest in attracting paying clients.  As a private client, you can request a particular doctor and private room among other things.  As they were wheeling Mike into the OR, one of the doctor’s indicated that the head surgeon would probably do the operation since we were Americans.  In the end, a resident performed a laproscopic appendectomy - good thing, too since the head surgeon would have probably charged well above the Medicare rate!  The operation went fine, and Mike spent a few anxious days in hospital under the naive assumption that as soon as the source of problem was removed he’d be back on his feet — he tried to equate the situation with taking a car into the shop.  We’re happy to report that he has fully recovered with nothing but three small scars to show for it.

We never did request a private room.  The hospital looked more or less like a hospital in the US.  The only big difference I noticed was the doctors’ dress code.  Weekends were casual, and I don’t mean business casual, I mean Aussie casual — one doc was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, which was a bit confusing from a patient perspective trying to figure out who the doc’s were.

With Obama in office, nationalization of health care in the States is back on the table.  If the Australian system is any indication of what to expect, then I’d say we’ll be okay.  Public hospitals will have poor patients and terrible food, and if you can afford it, preferential care will be available, but in the end people’s lives will be saved.  Between Rachel’s pulmonary embolism a few years ago and now Mike’s appendicitis, we probably would not be around to write this blog without the care we’ve received.

We thought that 46C would stand for quite some time as the record for the hottest temperature we had ever experienced.  No dice.  Last weekend the temperature peaked at 48C in the sun (118F) where we were.  The high temperatures are part of the reason the fires in Victoria, Australia were so bad.  The bushfires were outside of Melbourne, which hit its highest temperature since records began in 1859.  Bushfires are not uncommon in Australia at this time of year.  The country is so dry that sparks from a power tool, cigarette butts, or lightening strikes can start a fire.  However, you rarely hear about fires causing many deaths.  A number of factors seem to have conspired to make last weekend so deadly: the high temperature, drought conditions, and gale force winds that shifted directions from their predicted path. Victoria has a fire policy of either “leave early” or “stay and defend.”  Many people in Victoria have fire protection plans, involving things like water storage, back-up generators, and sometimes trenches or cleared areas around their houses. A number of the survivors and casualties from last weekend had successfully “stayed and defended” during previous fires.  The intensity of this fire was well above average.  Some fled after realizing they were no match for the fire, but fallen trees and accidents due to poor visibility in the smoke made escape routes difficult to come by.  The bushfires dominated the news all last week here, and there were many heroic and tragic stories.  With so many people killed and close to 2,000 homes destroyed, it is a weekend that will be infamously remembered.

We live one state west of Victoria in New South Wales and are about 500 miles from where the worst fires were.  New South Wales had a fire warning on for the weekend, and several fires did occur but none like those in Victoria.  The recent danger to worry about in New South Wales is shark attacks (two in Sydney in the past week).

We spent last weekend on the water, but thankfully on a river where there was no danger of sharks.  We went canoeing in the Kangaroo Valley, which is about a two-hour drive south of Sydney.  With the extreme heat, we were very glad to be able to spend a fair portion of the weekend in the water.

Perhaps surprising given the valley’s name, we didn’t see any kangaroos, but we did get to see some exciting Australian wildlife.  Saturday evening a goanna was hanging out around our campsite.  Goanna’s are monitor lizards (so are komodo dragons) and look like big iguanas.  The one who seemed to want to join us for dinner was about 1 m long, but they can get to be 2 m long.

Apparently, they eat lizards, snakes, insects, birds, and eggs, but this goanna seemed awfully interested in our spinach and mushroom risotto.  You can see how close he was to one of our tents.  They walk really funny, swinging their legs out to the side before moving them forward.  Mike tried out his National Geographic videography skills so that you could see, but the subject wasn’t terribly cooperative.

We were paddling on a section of the Kangaroo River above a dam, so the water was more like a lake than a river and required constant paddling if you wanted to make any progress.  Unless of course, you have MIT engineers in your boat who like to sail.  The wind picked up on our paddle out on Sunday and was blowing the same direction we wanted to go, so out came one of the tent flys.  Aimee and I were the masts and Mike and John held the two canoes together and steered…and a sailing canoe was born.  It was surprisingly effective, and a nice break for our shoulders!  You may think this was pretty smart, but even smarter, a bunch of people who were on the river in kayaks had brought umbrellas. They would open the umbrellas when they had a good wind blowing in the right direction for an instant sail that was easy to put up and down.  One of the added benefits of the sails was also that they provided a bit of shade from the hot sun.