Australia Day

Two hundred and twenty one years ago today, Captain Phillip led a boat of English criminals to the shores of Australia  to start a new (penal) colony for the British Empire.   Since then,  that initial group of several hundred  has grown into a nation of 20 million Australians… and this year, we are two of them.

It’s interesting that Australians celebrate their “national day” as the day their land was colonized by England – not the day they achieved their independence from England (like we do in the US).  Nor is it the day Australia was discovered by Europeans (most attribute that feat to Captain Cook in 1770).  I think this is an interesting difference between the US and Australia.  We celebrate our “national day” – Independence Day – as the year we defeated our mother country in war and declared our independence, our freedom.  It was  a pivotal and victorious event in our history, and has defined our  view of ourselves as a nation ever since.  Australia, on the other hand, never really experienced such a  defining moment.  Their independence has been a slow and somewhat nebulous evolution over the last 100 odd years.  It wasn’t until the Australia Act of 1986 that Britain finally lost its ability to form laws for Australia, and Australia still celebrates the Queen’s birthday as a national holiday.

I can’t claim to draw too many conclusions from this simple difference, but it’s interesting to consider on this national holiday.

It should be noted that aboriginals (like our own native people on  Thanksgiving or Columbus day),  view this day quite differently, and often refer to it as “Invasion Day”.  Good point.

Anyway, we celebrated Australia Day weekend with a good movie (Milk), relaxing pancake breakfasts at home, and finally an enjoyable picnic with friends on the harbor.  It was a great weekend.

While i’m at it, below are a few quick updates to our list of favorite and least favorite differences of living in Australia:

The Good

• Cinemas: Assigned seating, and many have a bar where you can purchase beer and wine, good chocolate, and bring it to your seat with you!
• Cheap airline tickets.  We bought tickets in January to fly round trip to Byron Bay (a beach town up the east coast) for $49 each way per person, including taxes.
• Vegemite
• Asian food: Thai and Indian is everywhere here, and the quality is generally very high.
• Turkish bread

The Bad

• Bike commuting: No doubts about it, Sydney is the least bike friendly city I have ever lived in.  No bike lanes, minimal shoulders, bad traffic, and drivers not used to bikes.
• Peanut butter: No such thing as peanut butter without sugar or vegetable oils as far as we can tell.  Ironically, we found incredible all natural peanut butter in New Zealand made from Australian peanuts!  Go figure.
• Sprawl: It takes the better part of an hour to escape the spawl of the city.
• Cost of public transit: The network of trains and buses is reasonably comprehensive, but the cost is just silly.  $3.20 for a single bus ticket is robbery

One reason why I still prefer running

Sharks Rampage in Australia

A surfboard with a shark bite in Binalong Bay, off the Tasmanian coast in Australia’s far south, on Jan. 12 (Tasmania Police / Reuters)

Running will never be as sexy or as cool as surfing.  Ever.   I often wish I was blessed with incredible surfing abilities as I admire surfers gracefully riding the waves out in the break.  But at least this will never happen to me in my running shoes.  (unless i get bit by one of the ten deadliest snakes in the world that also happen to live in this country)

Read the story

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…