When Michael got back to the hotel, he told me our friends had been disappointed in the performance of Onegin at the Opera House. “I’m glad we didn’t go,” he said. “I’d have hated to spend that much for seats and then not gotten a good show.

Our friends belonged to the Sydney Yacht Club, and had invited us to share a meal there with them. We dressed just a bit nicer than we usually did. (Black slacks and shirts that had only been worn once) and walked with them to a typical boating club, a nice clubhouse on the water, where the elderly gentleman in white manning the visitor’s book teased me about the Americanized date I wrote in. “It’s not October 5th, my dear,” he said. We ate our steaks out on a wooden deck beneath lamplight, listening to the water lap at the pilings. Order a steak in Ausrralia and they ask you what sauce you want with it. I chose lemon.

We asked our friends about the ballet performance, and they shook their heads. They thought the costumes too bulky and the choreography uninspired. “I think the San Francisco Ballet has spoiled us,” he said. She said she wasn’t sure about Australians and design. “I mean, look at our hotel.” (Understandable but not entirely fair. I’d hate San Franciscans’ sense of design to be judged by the Transamerica Pyramid.)

Michael began talking about how friendly Australians seemed to be, how good the service. Our friends, who visit Australia fairly frequently, agreed. “I think it’s because they aren’t scared all the time,” David said. Yes, there’s poverty in Australia, but on the whole, he observed, Australians have a stronger social safety net. They’re less likely to stay at a job they hate because losing a job needn’t be a catastrophe there. And they don’t have to worry as much about a serious illness bankrupting them. That level of security makes them easier, less tense and resentful.

My own scientific comment on the nature of Australians was possibly related to the fact that I was listening to all this while cramming chips into my mouth. Australians eat exquisitely fried foods, fish, chicken schnitzel, and always, always, the potatoes on the side, no matter how starchy the meal might already be. Fried potatoes with rice, fried potatoes with bread, probably fried potatoes with corn. And yet, I’ve not seen the same number of painfully overweight people we see here in the United States. Sure, there are a few Aussies with beer bellies, but I’d not seen anyone I’d consider graduates from stout to just plain fat. Australians, at least those in Sydney, seem to be relatively fit.

I attribute this, (though I did not share this rather dreamy-eyed opinion with my dinner companions) to the availability of Schweppes Bitter Lemon Tonic Water. We bought three six-packs of it on the first day. No corn syrup, no sugar, just thirst-crushing bitter-lemon goodness on the back of your throat. If we could get Americans to drink that instead of Coke, the obesity epidemic might be contained.

Of course, it would also help if more of us surfed.