107, 108 & 109 – ANZAC Day, Monteith’s Zesty Radler Bier and “Two Up"

107. ANZAC Day

ANZAC Day is a great Australian tradition. It’s been running since 1918 and celebrates the lives and sacrifices of all the Australian and New Zealand soldiers that have served and given their lives in the wars these countries have been involved in. It’s held on the 25th April and gives people a chance to reflect on previous and present sacrifices made by these brave people. However, whenever I asked anyone about ANZAC Day and what people did on this holiday I always got the same answer – “You go to the pub and play Two Up and get pissed”.

I assumed that there must be something more to the day but no matter how hard we looked we really didn’t find anything out of the ordinary going on. There was a big Dawn Service being held in Sydney but we slept in and missed that. In fact we ended cruising the Mall in Chatswood for a couple of hours buying various items from the few shops that were open and finally landed at the cinema watching a crap Bruce Willis movie and it wasn’t till we were on our way home that we saw anything ANZACy. Acutally it was just one old lady walking home from the train station in her old WW1 outfit but at least she looked like she had been at something remotely sentimental.

108. Monteith’s Zesty Radler Bier

Cost 4
Smoothness 5
Piss-Factor 4
Aftertaste 3
Coolness 5

What a surprisingly brilliant NZ beer. Isla and I decided not to wade through the supposed crowds of pissed up Aussies in bars on ANZAC Day and came home with a sixer of these and played “Two Up” in the comfort of our own home.

109. Two Up

Two-up is a semi-legal gambling game involving 2 coins. I say semi-legal as the Government relax the gambling laws on ANZAC Day to allow all the pub patrons to play this WW1 trench game. It involves putting you bet into the pot and throwing 2 coins. You bet on either 2 heads or 2 tails and the winners of the toss divide the cash. If it lands on one of each then the pot is untouched and people add more cash for a second round of bets and so on. As we had spent the whole day in the shops we didn’t have any cash to bet with so we used Jelly Babies instead.

After a very unremarkable National Holiday it was a great way to finish up an otherwise run-of-the-mill day.