Rachel and Mike in Australia

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.

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…

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 made it back from spending Christmas in the States (where we enjoyed spending time with  family and friends and had a white Christmas in CT!) in time to celebrate New Year’s in Sydney.  We had a tasty dinner at a friends whose house has a view of the Harbor Bridge.  The fireworks definitely lived up to their reputation–they were phenomenal!

We’re starting 2009 with a truly Australian adventure.  Tomorrow morning we’re flying out to Perth (on the western coast of Australia).  We’re meeting up with a couple friends there who have driven their campervan from Sydney to Perth.  We’ll be driving the campervan back to Sydney.  Should be a beautiful trip, though parts of it will be pretty dull.  There will be 2-3 days of crossing the Nullarbor desert, which is mostly just flat, dry, and hot.  Mike’s a little nervous about how we’ll handle the heat after 2 weeks of freezing weather in the States and a couple days of the mild Sydney climate.  The temperature in Perth was supposed to be 41 C (you don’t have to do the conversion to know that’s freaking hot!).  We’ve rented a SPOT transmitter that should track our progress across the country at this website:

http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=0vyHzuXhXIJgPHbm5WvjM9aOA1DG1KGCq

Think cool thoughts for us!

Things can feel a bit upside down Down Under sometimes.  Even though it’s summertime in the southern hemisphere, all the Christmas decorations are the traditional evergreen trees and poinsettias.  Lots of stores have Christmas trees and candles and holly in the windows and a fair number of houses in our neighborhood have lights decorating them (though they’re on for less hours since it doesn’t get dark until about 8 pm).  There is one notable exception to the traditional decorations in

Sydney.  Downtown in the financial district there are a number of Christmas banners hanging up emblazoned with an upside down possum.  We don’t know what the story with him is, but we’ve embraced the Christmas Possum and he has made a few Christmas deliveries for us!

Sydney-siders consider December 1st the first day of summer.  Since it’s summertime most Australians don’t do a big Christmas ham or turkey dinner.  A classic Australian Christmas dinner is shrimp on the barbie, and it sounds like many spend the day on the beach or by the pool.

The school year runs from February until mid-December, so Christmas falls during the summer vacation.  We’re told that most of Sydney clears out for the month of January, and we’re going to do the same.  We are flying to Perth where a campervan will be waiting for us that we’ll drive back to Sydney.  We should have some great photos to share from the trip!

Happy Holidays everyone!

As the East Coast has been socked in with cold weather this fall, we’ve been enjoying our first spring in Sydney.  Sydney is the equivalent latitude as Atlanta but being on the coast its climate seems to be closer to that in San Francisco, though people say it can get really hot.

Freezing weather and snow are rarities in Sydney, though the Blue Mountains (elevation 1100 m or 3600 feet) west of Sydney do sometimes see snow in July or August.  For a famously dry, desert country, it feels like it rains a lot.  We’ve gotten a good rain pretty much every week, which is good for the soil but makes drying laundry on the line difficult.  The temperature has been really up and down, so we end up with one 85F day followed by a 60F one.  Not attuned to the weather yet, we often end up either over or under dressed!  Though this year has been particularly bizarre, so I’m not sure experience would have helped much.  October 22nd was coldest October day since 1978, yet the mean temperature in October was slightly warmer than average.

Spring hasn’t felt as dramatic as it normally does and I’m not sure if its because we weren’t here for true winter or because things stay green all year long here or because in the city people don’t have large yards and most of what’s planted is succulents or shrubs.  There are some flowers we recognize from home (petunias) or from past travels (birds of paradise, plumeria) but much of it we don’t know.  There are a number of flowering trees that are pretty.  Jacaranda trees are the symbol of spring in Sydney and have small lavender flowers.  Apparently, the expression at Sydney University goes “by the time the jacaranda in the main quadrangle flowers, it’s too late to start studying for exams”.

I’m surprised how much the weather seems to influence my perception of time and season.  Though the dates were passing on the calendar and Christmas decorations were going up in stores, I wasn’t feeling the holiday spirit or that Christmas was coming.  When we stepped off the plane last weekend and the first gust of cold air hit me, I immediately thought, mmmm, feels like Christmas!

It’s funny how you learn things about home by living somewhere so far from it.  Being in Australia has reminded me what a sterilized culture modern day American is.  There are far fewer attempts in Sydney to separate oneself from the outdoors.  We were surprised in our first month or so here how cold Sydney felt.  The houses aren’t insulated the way homes in the US are and they don’t typically have central heat (electric radiators seem to be what most people use).  There are big gaps at the bases of two out of the three doors that lead to the outside.  And in one bathroom and one bedroom there are small windows that just have screens–there’s no glass.

Granted that Sydney doesn’t usually get freezing weather, but considering how it felt in late spring, I would not want to hang out in that room in the dead of winter.  My first Australian purchases were a scarf, heavy sweatshirt, and a wool quilt, and I was very thankful for all of them on more than one occasion.

Houses in Sydney often don’t have A/C either.  Now that the weather has warmed up, we’re opening the windows frequently.  Unfortunately the two small windows that don’t have any glass are the only two windows in the house that have screens.  I think you could argue that in the US we are overly worried about separating ourselves from nature, but I’m still having a hard time understanding why, in a country that has some of the world’s deadliest insects, you wouldn’t put screens on your windows.  The lack of sealing has introduced us to some of the native fauna.  We’ve had quite a number of wild beasts wander into our house: flies, mosquitos, ants, regular cockroachs, flying cockroachs, spiders, beetles, caterpillars, a cat, lizards, slugs, mice, and rats in our house…and that’s in just 9 weeks and only the ones we’ve actually seen.

The ones that have mystified me the most and which prompted me to write this blog are the slugs.  I’m used to seeing slugs only in really wet places…usually outside after a big rain.  One morning here I went to fill the kettle with water for my morning tea and nearly leapt out of my skin when I looked down and saw a gigantic slug on the sink basin.  I think it was the biggest slug I’ve ever seen.  The day before it had rained and Mike had been cleaning our oven shelves outside.  The rag he had been using was also on the sink basin, so I figured the slug must have been on the rag.  How else could this giant slug make it into the house and up onto my sink?  Well, I don’t know but a couple nights ago as I was getting ready for bed I went into my office.  It looked like there was a twig on the ground but when I got closer, I realized it was actually slug.  The office is the middle of 3 rooms downstairs, and it and the room next to it that goes to the outside are carpeted.  I was amazed the thing had made it across that much carpet.  I can’t say I know what slugs eat, but surely it wasn’t in my office, so I thought it would dry out overnight and die.  As I lay in bed contemplating what on earth had prompted the slug to come inside and where it had come in, I thought that I ought to take a picture of the thing for the blog.  I went back downstairs and I’ll be damned if in the elapsed 20 or 30 minutes, the thing had disappeared.  These Australian wildlife are impressive!

As my new friend the exterminator said, “You can’t worry too much about it.  That’s Australia.”

There was an editorial in last week’s local paper on the U.S. vice presidential debate. The article argued that the Republicans had done a wonderful job of managing expectations, such that everyone was expecting Sarah Palin to flop. So when she didn’t fall to pieces, everyone was impressed, even if she didn’t do much more that stick to prepared sound bites. Last week was a very frustrating one for me, and I am wondering if I did a poor job managing my expectations. The predominant language here is English, it’s not a 3rd world country, and I’ve moved four times in the last two years…so how hard could it be to get settled in Australia? Well, as it turns out, a lot harder than I thought it would be! Because so many things are different than I expect, it takes me ten times longer to do things, since I try and do them one way, only to figure out that way won’t work, then I figure out the right way, and try again the right way. And it hasn’t helped that the morning after we moved to our new place, Mike left for a research cruise in Tasmania, so I’ve been dealing with it all by myself.

For example, before Mike left, he and I were hanging out with some of Oscar’s housemates. We were running low on beer, so Mike and I offered to get some more since we had to go to the supermarket anyway. We bought two six packs of beer, and the price was A$35 for two non-premium 6-packs (a 6-pack of Corona goes for A$22). We couldn’t believe it. The beer prices in the pubs were about the same as back home, how were the store prices double? It was a sad walk back, thinking beer might have to be considered a luxury item. It seemed particularly odd considering what a beer-loving nation Australia is purported to be. Well, the mystery was solved when we got back to Oscar’s. Our mistake was buying 6-packs. Cases of beer go for around $45, but they charge a big premium on 6-packs. I don’t really understand why, but that’s the way it is. And this is just one of many snags we’ve encountered. Some of the other bizarre differences that have caused me confusion and wasted time: the phone jacks don’t look anything like U.S. phone jacks, a bus that runs the exact same route will have a different route number depending on the time of day, the credit check to obtain a cell phone contract seems to have more stringent ID requirements than for a work visa, and perhaps my favorite, the street numbers don’t jump to the next hundred at the end of a block and don’t track with the other side of the street, so you can be at 10 Darling St and 437 Darling St is directly across from you! I’m sure I’ll figure it all out soon enough. In the meantime, I just have to try to remember their favorite phrase around here: No worries mate.

We signed the lease yesterday and picked up the keys. We’ll stay there tonight and then have a friend helping us pick up a bed, table, and fridge tomorrow!