Rachel and Mike in Australia

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.