Introducing the Top100 and Bottom100

If you were blindly dropped  in the middle of Sydney, and you didn’t bother to listen to people talking or somehow didn’t notice that cars were driving on the other side of the road, you might be hard pressed to calculate what country you had landed in in under 5 minutes. Until you saw the opera house, or the harbour, or a woman wearing really colorful makeup and jeans that are too tight (all very Sydney).

But despite that fact that it’s an english speaking westernized country, there are countless differences that make Sydney and the rest of Australia unique to living in the U.S.  Some are very subtle and take a bit of time to pick up on, like the prevailing attitude of the people we meet, or nuances in dialect, and style of dress.  Other differences are extremely apparent.  Like the accent, the climate and the cost of beer.   But whether they are subtle or obvious, these are the things that make living in another country worthwhile and interesting, and we’ll try to post about some of them as we go.

To get us started, below is the beginning of what we call our Top 100 and Bottom 100 differences we note while living in Australia.

Top 100 (favourite):

• Beaches.  In my mind, the single greatest asset that Sydney has to offer.
• Availability of fresh, in-season  fruit from from all over Australia, including multiple varieties of things like mangoes and bananas (lady finger bananas are our favorite)
• Mid-range wine: While beer is astronomical in price, wine is generally a good value ~ $15 bottles.
• Screw top wine bottles
• Ferries as a mode of public transit
• Rock pools: Saltwater-filled Olympic sized swimming pools are nestled into the harbor all around the city.
• Thai food
• Learning the arcane and perverse rules of  cricket.
• The inventiveness of Australian phraseology and colloquial idioms (warrants a separate list for itself)

Bottom 100 (least favourite):

• The unnecessary insertion of the letter ‘u’ in the word above
• Cost of beer.  The absolute minimum you will ever shell out for a six pack of beer is $14.  And this is not microbrew, this is your big name lagers like Toohey’s and VB (equivalent to Bud and Coors).  An ale of any kind will set you back at least $20 for a six pack. How is it that a country with the 4th highest beer consumption per capita pays so much for  crap beer?
• Beer selection.  Would you like a lager or would you like a lager?  Anybody from Boulder want to come down and help me open a Mountain Sun franchise in Sydney?
• Lack of mexican food.
• Cost of rent.  Puts San Francisco to shame.

We’ll keep on ongoing list here, and post whenever we have updates!

Please post a comment with your favorite/least favorite differences if you’ve been to Australia…

For the carb lovers

Last week I made bread. This is not necessarily noteworthy in and of itself, I was doing a little bread baking experimentation in Traverse City this fall with two of the best judges a bread baker could hope for, my sister and brother Olivia and Parker.

By the way, if I were a captain in the US Bread Tasting League, Olivia would be my first draft pick. She has a notoriously “selective palate” shall we say, and she is crazy about bread. There were many an afternoon in September when she would bound in the door after school, and before even closing the door she could identify what was cooling on the butcher block. To to watch her happily wolf down slice after slice and all the while giving great feedback… it was the best. I’m not sure the quality of those first few batches of bread were deserving of the praise they received, but the thought of hearing Liv bouncing back down the stairs for seconds on the bread is enough to inspire me to keep trying while I’m here.

I tried my very first batch of sourdough from a homemade starter. Sourdough is made with a starter from natural process of fermenting with captured “wild yeasts” (how dramatic!)  and lactobacili which are present in any sample of wheat or rye flour. So all you need is flour, water, a little warmth, and time. I used the book “Bread Matters” by Andrew Whitley (checked out from the library), and it worked out better than I expected. Actually I am happy it even worked at all, I wasn’t so sure for a few days. I enjoyed the process this bread required, not much effort, just a little tentative waiting and a few surprising simple steps. This was a French country bread with a wheat leaven starter, next up: a rye sourdough.