I stumbled across this blog as I was trying to find an outsider’s perspective of “Australian Etiquette” but I’m pleased to be doing my bit for cross cultural understanding.

Australians eat a lot too, I think we’re second in the obesity stakes and I think we’re rising to the challenge. But that still looked like a lot of food.

As for duty free, I was taking the piss. Some of our airports are privately owned and they also own the duty free so in order to make more money they push everyone through it.

Sepos = Septic Tank = Yank = Americans. Its rhyming slang so don’t get too caught up on it. The sentiment has long since changed but the term stuck. And what’s the difference between Catsup and Ketchup? And its called a powerpoint because it supplies power at a point. Australians tend to be a bit literal that way (eg. blue mountains: its blue and its a mountain; the snowy mountains: its snowy and its a mountain, Tomato sauce: a sauce made of tomatoes etc).

Glad you liked your time here Arlo, have you been to the land down under Joe? Arlo came at the right time. October/November sunny and warm not too hot. Come over for Christmas and enjoy prawns (I think Yanks call them shrimp) and beer on the beach on Christmas day - can get rather hot though in December.

See yous later

Thanks for the comments! I read them with a huge smile on my face – it’s always interesting to get a native’s perspective on your own perspective, if you know what I mean. I also hope you realize that many of my points were decidedly tongue-in-cheek. I never mistook the McDonald’s sandwich for a national food.

Joe beat me to it in his comment, but he’s right. Americans do eat a lot, or at least some of us do. More to the point, our servings seem to be much larger. I read somewhere that our problem with obesity could be traced back to when we were all taught as children to “clean our plates,” that is, to eat everything put in front of us. Now, in adulthood, we don’t stop when we’re full, we stop when the plate is empty. And when restaurants compete for our dollars by giving us more food instead of better food, well…

I have to admit that we didn’t hit any of your “true Aussie culinary experiences” while we were there, but let me assure you that we didn’t just frequent American-based fast-food restaurants, either. By and large, we ate well.

I suppose Duty Free is also a pretty big deal for many American travelers, too. We have plenty of duty-free shops in our airports, but none (that I can recall) that passengers are required to walk through. Personally, I don’t see the discount outweighing the opportunity cost. Is it really that much of a savings?

Powerpoint switches, eh? That’s what you call them? That’s what we call Microsoft’s presentation software! I guess we use “wall outlets” or “electrical sockets” in the States. Yes, they’re always on, which I suppose is arguably more convenient. It has the added benefit of giving a financial boost to the “plastic safety plug” industry whenever new parents childproof their homes.

We considered going to see the Jenolan Caves while we were in Katoomba and, come to think of it, that would have been a great option for the day that we were rained out. I don’t know why we didn’t think of it, except perhaps because Oksana had already seen them, some 15 years or so ago, when she first visited Austrailia on a Russian student exchange. Caves and Skycar, next time for sure.

Did we have a good time in Australia? We had a FANTASTIC time, and neither my wife nor I were ready to come home after three weeks. We’ve many other countries on our list of places to visit, but I can’t imagine that I won’t ever go back to Australia. It was too friendly, too beautiful, and we didn’t see near enough of it. We shall return.

How much do we eat? Quite a bit typically. We have a problem with obesity in this country (me included) and are accustomed to getting too much food.

I enjoy reading the terms you use such as beetroot, and tomato sauce, instead of beets and ketchup. I had to look up sepo, not very appealing from the definition I found. :(

Sanger was also a fun new word for me.

As you guessed, our power outlets are always on. In some living rooms there are switches for some of the outlets to allow for a single place to turn on/off freestanding lamps. With our local energy “crisis”, I think folks around here would welcome on/off switches for our outlets.

Thanks again,

Joe

And McOz isn’t really an Aussie burger. You need to go to a takeaway joint and get a burger with the lot: beef, cheese, beetroot, pineapple, egg, bacon, lettuce, tomato and onions. And if you’re really Aussie you will then drown it in tomato sauce (or ketchup as you sepos call it).

The true Aussie culinary experience is a meatpie (drowned in tomato sauce) or some sangers (sausages) in a role (with onions and tomato sauce).

And Duty Free is an Aussie tradition. Where else can you buy 1L bottles of whiskey and cartons of a 1000 cigarettes? Going through Duty Free is the highlight of the trip for most people.

But I don’t understand the thing about the powerpoint switches? How do you get power when you plug something in? or are American ports always “on”?

All in all did you have a good time though? are you gonna come back?

See yous later mates

Thanks for the link in your post, Arlo, for your Haleakala article. I enjoyed reading it and posted a comment. The url above is where you can find an article about last week’s snow in Hawaii.

Wow, 5 bucks for a gasoline gallon Down Under? I’m definitely going to quit whining about expensive gas here.

Oh, and for what it’s worth, I think we figured out that gasoline was around $5/gallon while we were in Australia.

Is that Haleakala crater in your website photo? Did you hear that the mountain top got a couple inches of snow this past week? Yup, snow on Maui.

We got back from hawaii the other day, and I will probably write something on that soon too. I wasn’t late for the Seminar on Friday (thank God!) and it’s been interesting. I’ve got loads to read by the next meeting. It’s all at the Bill Ray Center, but I might stop by at the main campus sometime to say “hi.”

Cheers.