I always thought that operating an oven is an universally simple thing. You switch it on and it works. Well, we are now in Australia and quite a few things works differently here, why should be the oven an exception?

The first time we wanted to use the oven, we couldn’t manage to put it into operation. We pressed all buttons, but it refused to work. You really start to doubt your technical education, when you stand in front of the oven and there is no obvious reason why it shouldn’t work, except it’s broken.

So we called the caretaker of our house in order to report the malfunction of the oven. She smiled whimsically and asked if we already tried to switch on the timer. What shall we say? When we set the timer, the oven works just fine. Our caretaker was quite sympathetic with us and assured that we wouldn’t be the first Europeans who would have despaired in front of the oven.

The question why you have to set the timer in order to use the oven was answered with a reference to the Australian safety regulations. Meanwhile we are well acquainted with safety regulations and we know that some things just have to be the way they are (see also the fun we had with these safety regulations at the petrol station).

The only thing we still don’t know is how you cook something that needs more than 120 minutes in the oven, e.g. a goose. Obviously you have to be at home, in order to restart the oven, because it stops automatically after two hours. But this particularity of an Australian oven bothers us not too much, because we don’t intend to cook a goose.