A Very Aussie Christmas

We had a couple sweltering days last week but on for the 24th and 25th the weather was perfect. We worked Christmas Eve morning and then had a potluck brunch - complete with Kris Kringle and champagne - with colleagues. Then we went to Christmas mass at the oldest Catholic church in Melbourne, St. Francis, which has an unusual and beautiful cedar ceiling. Our first antipodal Christmas was spent with our friends the Alessios at their beach house on the Mornington Peninsula. Christmas eve was a traditional Aussie barbeque with snags (sausages), lamb roast, and some summer salads. Christmas morning we took a walk along the beach where the winds were calm and the sea a clear blue/ green. We walked to the end of Rye Pier (John, Frani, Nita, you’ve all been to this pier) where we spotted a massive stingray and the local seal that regularly suns itself on the pier.

Christmas day was with the extended Alessio clan – 26 in all – feasting on the northern traditional Christmas feast if turkey, pork, and ham, roast potatoes, green beans, etc. The meal was capped with traditional plum pudding – a secret Alessio family recipe. It’s a dark dense boozy collection of stewed fruit, nuts, brandy and cake. Old coins are buried within the pudding, and one coin, a sterling silver florin is good luck. The finder gets to keep the coin and according to tradition will receive a year of good fortune. While neither of us received the buried treasure, we savored the dessert. We returned to Melbourne that evening so we can go to the cricket on the 26th. But given the sun hadn’t set at 9 PM, we went for a ride along the beach where all the families were winding up their family events. As for the cricket today, the Boxing Day Test is one of the most famous matches known for hot sun and an “enthusiastic” crowd. We’ve slapped on the sunscreen and are looking forward to a slow, relaxing day. Tomorrow we head to New Zealand for two weeks so you won’t see an update to the blog until mid-January.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Weekend Weather Comparison

As I sat here working with one eye on the cricket on TV (Australia is batting and leads South Africa in the second innings of the first test by 203 runs, in case you're wondering) I got a St Paul weekend weather report: snow, poor roads, high temps in the teens.

Weather in Melbourne this weekend - sunny and 70s. And now that my work is done, we're going to the pub and enjoy a cold beer in the sun.

But I'd still prefer a white Christmas in MN.

A Day of Thanks

Thanksgiving and all that goes with it - eating turkey, pumpkin pie, and mounds of mashed potatoes - is a uniquely American phenomena (although the Canadians have a similarly named holiday). With Matt in the US for the Thanksgiving and Melbourne embarking on summer – it didn’t really ‘feel’ like Thanksgiving so I thought I’d just let this American holiday slide on by. My dear Aussie friends, Dominique, Maria, and Jen had another idea altogether.

For weeks these three had been conspiring WITH MY MOTHER to put on a surprise, honest-to-goodness Aukee Thanksgiving dinner of turkey with all the trimmings. Family recipes like yams with pecans and marshmallows and rutabaga casserole made their way to a Melbourne table thanks to email, much time to converting family recipes from imperial measurements to metric, and driving to the lone USA store that sells canned pumpkin (another Aussie slang term for you – “in the middle of nowhere” is referred to as “woop woop”).

The clever ruse was an invite to Jen’s for pizza so I wouldn’t have to spend Thanksgiving alone. Sounds good, I thought, all this alone time is torture for my extroversion.

6pm on Thanksgiving night I walked into Jen’s house and was greeted by the giddy looking trio. First they brought me to the dining room, which had a beautiful tablecloth laid with Jen’s finest china, wineglasses, and full silverware. There were hand-made Thanksgiving decorations on the table - felt turkeys. Wow! What a beautiful table, I said, so much trouble to go to for a pizza dinner. Well, not quite pizza. They brought me into the kitchen, opened the oven door to produce a turkey and multiple covered dishes of family favorites. I was (in another apt used Aussie term) gobsmacked. "Happy Thanksgiving!!!" they chimed.

Eight of us feasted on a delicious meal. It will always be one of my most cherished Thanksgiving memories. One that closed with a full stomach and a very full heart.

Marlys Dom Maria Jen

Happy Thanksgiving

Wishing you all a wonderful Thanksgiving from warm and sunny Melbourne!!

Australian Political Primer

Because today is Election Day in the US we thought we’d give you a quick glimpse into Australia politics/ election process.

An overview: Australia is a constitutional monarchy (Queen Elizabeth II) and a parliamentary democracy.

Australian Constitution: 1901, established a federal system of government where powers are distributed between national and state levels of government.

Head of Government: Australia has a Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. Who reminds us of Martin from"The Simpsons". They even look a bit alike.

The legislature: Commonwealth Parliament. The Parliament is comprised of the Queen, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. The Queen is represented by the Governor-General, who in practice exercises little or no power over the Parliament. The GG serves “at the Queen’s pleasure” without a specified term (although it’s usually 5 years). This past September, for the first time ever, the queen appointed a female GG, Her Excellency Ms Quentin Bryce.

Political Parties: Australia has a number of recognized parties – Labour, Liberal, National, Democrats, Greens, and One Nation. While you’ve got your fringe parties – i.e., One Nation which runs a populist, anti-immigration platform - it is basically a two-party system. The two main ones are:
Labour party (the party of the left)
Liberal party (which…just to make it confusing to US expats…is the conservative party)


Voting: Voting is compulsory in Australia. Every Australian citizen (18 years or older) is legally compelled to vote. If you do not vote and do not have a valid and sufficient reason for failing to vote, a penalty is imposed. I suspect there’s a lot of money and time saved due to no “get out” or “rock the” vote campaigns.


Finally: One of the national TV stations ran an election poll asking Australians which candidate they would vote for in the US election. The result?
Obama 83%
McCain 17%

10 things we learned on our trip to New Caledonia

1. Air Calin (the national airline) offers free liquor on their flights. It’s only a 2.5 hour flight from Sydney to the New Caledonia capital of Noumea, but, in addition to a nice meal, they give you an appertif, wine for the meal, and then the flight attendants walk around with a brandy bottle. Très French. Most certainly not très avion américain!

2. It rains during the dry season. October is the driest month of the year and prized for its sunny weather. But we arrived in a torrential downpour - we couldn’t see 100 yards in front of us – and it remained cloudy with occasional rain the entire time we were there. The sun only broke through on our last day. But we’ll say this for New Caledonia – it was a fantastic trip and never once did it feel like the weather got in the way of a good time.

3. French Colonialism has its upsides. Here we were on a tropical island and every morning we could have wonderful coffee, breads, perfect buttery croissants. All our dinners were amazing – especially a Vietnamese meal prepared by a family that left Vietnam with the French in the 50s. Best of all, because it’s a French dependency plenty of vin rouge and vin blanc is available and duty free from the motherland.

4. The natives call it Kanakyland of the Kanaks. OK, technically we learned that from an informational placard in the botanical gardens in Melbourne, but it was so odd we had to get the word out.

5. Theft is apparently not a concern. When we got to our hotel, we locked our “valuables” (i.e, about A$50 and our blessedly inoperable blackberries) in the room safe and set our secret code. When we tried to open it the next day it wouldn’t budge. After numerous tries, we called the front desk.

• Marlys: “Our code won’t work and we can’t open our safe.”
• Pleasant French-accented receptionist: “Just to enter 0000.”
• Marlys: “Will that work?”
• Receptionist: “All ze safes in ze ‘otel open to 0000. Voila!”
• Marlys: “Ahhh. The old ‘un-safe’ safe!”
• Receptionist: “Pardonnez-moi?”

6. Over 1 million US servicemen came through during WWII. We learned this at the small but fascinating Maritime Museum in Noumea. Because it was close to Australia but sufficiently far from Japanese conquests, New Caledonia became a massive staging area for the Pacific War and the country enjoyed an economic renaissance on the back of Uncle Sam's taxpayers. The legacy is a tremendous amount of good will for Americans and interesting place names. For instance, there is a suburb of Noumea called “Motor Pool”.

7. It’s surrounded by the world’s 2nd largest reef, making it the largest lagoon in the world. This means superb diving: we spent a day checking out the reef life. Lots of sharks, turtles, barracuda, and plenty of colorful fish.

8. It’s very multi-cultural. The dive company owner/operators were French (him) and Japanese (her). He was a former French Foreign Legionnaire. They have two kids: he talks to them in French, she in Japanese, and they talk to each other in English.

9. Obama mania is a global phenomena. They get few American tourists (mainly French, Australian and Japanese) and we never heard an American accent while we were there. When people learned we were Yanks they immediately wanted to tell us how much they hoped Obama would be elected and ask us if it was true, really true, that such a wonderful thing could happen. “He’s a new Kennedy” they’d say – presumably meaning the Camelot Kennedy, not the Chappaquiddick one.

10. We want to go back.

Halloween Nicht

One of our blog readers has asked: What do Australians do for Halloween? (And you thought we ignored all those comments…). Despite the best efforts of Cadbury and Mars, the Australians do not celebrate Halloween. They know it exists and understand the basic concept, and you may find the odd decoration or costume in a store, but for the most part they think it is more than slightly strange to have a holiday where people arrive at your house unannounced, demand gifts, and commit criminal mischief if you refuse to give them anything.

Anticipating the usual follow up question, no, they don’t celebrate Thanksgiving either. But their opinion of Thanksgiving is much different. They find it downright admirable that Americans have a holiday where they stop their overworked lives, sit down with family, and give thanks for all the blessings they enjoy. Of course, we’ve never let slip the dirty little secret that after the giving of thanks Americans proceed to indulge in sloth and gluttony on such a scale that no one goes to work the next day.

I think the State Department could get a lot of positive press for the US by playing up our celebration of Thanksgiving. I mean, it’s such a great idea that the Canadians copied us and have their own Thanksgiving day - and their society’s sole raison d’etre is to be the anti-America. Maybe they justify it by loudly pointing out it’s in October.

Of course, without Halloween and Thanksgiving, Americans would just be looking forward to Christmas. Wonder what that would be like? Let me tell you – it ain’t all that great. The picture below was taken in early October in the local Big W (sort of a Walmart) and it only captures a small portion of a massive section.

Yes, the wrapping paper, bows, Santa hats, fake trees, and oodles of special Christmas presents (or “Chrissy prezzies” as they say) have been on the shelves for weeks now. A full two months before the big day! Can anyone say over-commercialism of Christmas? Bah humbug.

Editors’ note: this will be our last entry for a little while because tomorrow we make our second attempt to visit New Caledonia. During the first attempt we ended up at Ayer’s Rock instead (see a map to fully appreciate the magnitude of this detour) but we hope second time’s a charm. South Pacific– here we come!