Rachel and Mike in Australia

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!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 19th, 2009 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Upside Down Living. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.