Postcards from New Zealand: Day Sixty-Eight

It poured rain all yesterday afternoon, all last night, and so far today, all day today. Being in this country without my love is no good. Outside, the chickens are huddled under their blue chicken house, which is where I saw them yesterday. Why don't the chickens go inside the chicken house? I would hate to spend today huddled underneath our shack, where there is indeed a roomy hollow crawl space, where I could squat and shiver just like the chickens.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Sixty-Seven

This afternoon, I drove Aldo to the airport for his flight back to the states (my flight isn't until tomorrow). Pulling his suitcase out of the trunk at the curb, the rubber seal around the inside came loose. We were in a hurry, so I shoved it back into place, kissed him goodbye, and got back in the car to park it while he got on the check-in line. We heard a honk from behind; the trunk was open. He closed it and ran inside. As I pulled away from the curb, I saw the open trunk bouncing behind me. I pulled over (into a bus stop) to fix it and a smoking man jumped up from his bench to close it for me. A bus behind me honked. The man closed the trunk, but it flew up again. He closed it again. It flew up again. He closed it hard and it stuck, and I drove to the parking lot without further trouble.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Sixty-Six

Tonight, we had our goodbye dinner at No. 1 Chinese Seafood BBQ. I couldn't believe how many people were there; we took up two giant round tables, pushed together to create a kind of infinity sign. I was sitting next to Tristan, one of the boys from our big house, who is about 8 or 9 years old. I overheard his father, on the other side of the table, tell people that they had only been in the country for three years, which I hadn't realized. I asked Tristan where he had been born. "England," he said. I asked him if he had lived anywhere else. "Hong Kong," he said. "For how long?" I asked. "Eight days," he said. I asked him which place he liked best. "Hong Kong," he said. I asked why. "Because they have Legoland there," he said earnestly.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Sixty-Five

A week ago, we caught a little mouse hanging out in our trash bag. We tied that trash bag up and put it in the rubbish bin outside. Today, I realized that not only was the rubbish bin full and stinky, but it was unlined by a big bag. Here, the rubbish truck will only pick up your rubbish if it is in a special gray bag, which is provided at the cost of $2 per bag (this is quite brilliant, as people are thus less wasteful). In any case, I had to transfer the little plastic baggies of trash piled in our bin into one of these gray bags. As I got to the bottom, I remembered the mouse bag, because there was a soggy sack of liquefied brown, seething with tiny, blind white worms. I thought about waiting for my man to come home to take care of it, but after much vacillation, I wrapped each of my hands in more plastic bags, put the lid on the trash can, turned the can upside down and then lifted it, and plucked the nasty bag up off the lid and flicked it into the gray bag, tying that sucker up. Then I washed everything, including me.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Sixty-Four

Home alone with a sprained ankle and feeling very sorry for myself, I wanted nothing more than ice cream. I wanted a pint Ben & Jerry's, with more nuts and chunks and fudge ripples than actual ice cream, and I wanted to eat the entire thing from the container while I sat with my foot up on ice and watched a dreadful movie on our tiny TV set. So, I limped my way to the car, and drove two blocks to the dairy. The options were grim. There was no Ben & Jerry's, no Häagen-Dazs, no nothing in a pint, in fact, except for some generic gelato. There were some equally generic tubs of foamy stuff, and two freezers full of brightly packaged ice creams on sticks, none of which were appealing. I settled on something I'd seen advertised, which is a block of vanilla ice cream, one-half sandwiched between two not-very-chocolatey biscuits, and one-half dipped in milk chocolate and ground almonds. I ate it in the car and found it rather dissatisfactory.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Sixty-Three

This afternoon, the family at the big house had a barbecue. We had a few glasses of wine as the sun set, and then started grilling. It was dark by the time we were ready to eat, but there were more guests than plates. Our hostess asked me to run down to our shack and get some more, and, in my haste to keep people from waiting hungrily, I ran down the hill to find the front door of our little house locked. In the dark, I skipped along the path that goes around to the back door, and then came down with a snap on my foot where there was an unexpected and unseen step down. I cried. It is said that most accidents happen close to home. It's rather ironic that I managed to go night-hiking unharmed, only to sprain my ankle the next day, five paces from my own front door.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Sixty-Two

This afternoon, we went to Karekare. I had a bad headache, so as we walked on the beach, I kept my eyes closed, with Aldo's arm around me (an exercise I'd done at summer camp as a kid, called a trust walk). When I eventually opened my eyes, he'd led me away from the beach to the wetlands where families of black swans live. We climbed a black sand dune and crossed a footbridge. Without realizing the time, we decided to walk back a different way, on the Hillary trail that follows the ridge behind the beach. Dusk fell. The climbing was hard and I was tired, but I knew that each minute I stopped to rest was a moment of daylight squandered, so I pushed on. Nevertheless, we spent over an hour hiking in the black night. There was no moon. Sometimes, I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, I saw only the same darkness. This became a real trust walk, both of us shuffling slowly forward, single file, feeling for the trail through our soles. When I fell off the trail, wailing, I had no idea how far down the drop was from which Aldo pulled me back up.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Sixty-One

The big news today is that the New Zealand government has apologized to Maori rugby players for having complied with South Africa's requirements during apartheid that the country only send white players to the world cup games in that place. Some years, South Africa did allow Maori players to come, but made them "honorary whites." This is revolting. The South African government apologized last week, and suggested that New Zealand apologize as well, and for some strange reason, a week of public conversations were required before this actually happened. I actually heard a panel discussion on public radio during which the speakers said that the government shouldn't apologize, because they were tired of our new culture of apology. This is revolting.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Sixty

Today, the cover story in the New Zealand Herald was about the gang-related "assault" of a four-year-old boy on the playground.* If, however, you actually read the article, you found that the assault consisted of a man taunting the child for wearing a red shirt, then poking him and pulling the shirt off. Now, I am not condoning this behavior, but is it really assault? This label strikes me more as a diagnosis for this country's particular hysteria; in the states, it would be headlined as child molestation or attempted kidnapping. The mayor was quoted as saying, "Gang colours are part of life in any town in New Zealand," which is the most absurd thing I've ever heard. A local mother, the paper stated, stopped dressing her two children (3 and 5) in red, "After she heard of an 80-year-old woman being abused for the colour of her jersey in downtown Whakatane." What?!

*Article here.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Fifty-Nine

Today it poured rain, so I couldn't do any washing. We slept in and went to the Packing Shed for brunch, where, for the first time, we sat inside, due to the weather. According to the sign taped up in the bathroom, if you want to sell your art at the Packing Shed, you should bring in 2-3 pieces to show to the owner. Indeed, the cafe is filled with 2-3 pieces each of different local artists' work, one of which was a very finely painted oil portrait of two chickens. I might take up chicken painting if I lived here permanently, too.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Fifty-Eight

Tonight, Aldo was working in the lab quite late. Auckland closes up pretty early, but we were too tired to cook, and the only place we found open for dinner was a milk tea bar filled with trendy Asian youth playing cards. All of the waitresses had bangs, and none of them spoke comprehensible English. I haven't worn nail polish since my 8th grade graduation, but I was fixated by our waitress' manicure, which had mega-glitter tips. When we went to pay, Aldo asked to see her nails. "Bling bling!" she grinned, showing him her hands.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Fifty-Seven

This morning, when we went out to the car, one of the chickens was in the driveway. "Chicken," I said, "What are you doing out here? Go back home." Instead, it walked out the gate and into the neighbor's yard. I took Aldo to the train station, and he said that I should probably get that chicken back inside and close the gates. When I got back home, I looked everywhere for that goddamned chicken, but I couldn't find it. All day, I've only seen two of the three chickens, and I am actually starting to worry about the darned thing.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Fifty-Six

This morning, we took our reading to the Alleluia café in town; usually we walk there from Graham’s house, but today, since we were coming from home, we took the car and parked it around a big corner. We walked through a small park to get there, encountering a marble sculpture of a grave man dressed in robes and sandals, carrying a tablet, with. . . horns emerging from his curls. A plate notified us that this was Moses. Hmm. What is the degree of political correctness of horned Jews these days?

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Fifty-Five

This morning, we got our usual breakfast of sticky rice with banana from the Thai woman at the farmer’s market, but for some reason I was voraciously hungry, so we topped it off with a purchase from another booth: fried bread with an herbaceous, oily topping. I’ve been seeing signs for fried bread the entire time I’ve been here, and from a purely linguistic appraisal, I did not want to taste it, and I did not want to like it. But, it was purchased, and it was consumed, and it was, I’m afraid, delicious.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Fifty-Five

This morning, we got our usual breakfast of sticky rice with banana from the Thai woman at the farmer’s market, but for some reason I was voraciously hungry, so we topped it off with a purchase from another booth: fried bread with an herbaceous, oily topping. I’ve been seeing signs for fried bread the entire time I’ve been here, and from a purely linguistic appraisal, I did not want to taste it, and I did not want to like it. But, it was purchased, and it was consumed, and it was, I’m afraid, delicious.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Fifty-Four

This morning, I didn’t want to hang around Graham’s flat as usual; I was feeling unsettled, so I went for a walk in the Domain, one of Auckland’s big parks, which is actually a grassy volcanic crater. I went into the Wintergarden, two small glass arboreta connected by a courtyard with a pond, which opens onto a fernery in the back. Inside one of the arboreta was a Maori woman with the traditional lip and chin tattoo. She and her ten year old son were sketching the plants. So much for savagery.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Fifty-Three

Today, I drove our rental car back to the agency because the letters ABS had lit up on the dashboard, and the breaks were making a stuttering sound, accompanied by a sticking feeling underneath the pedal. This was our third rental car thus far, both of the previous having been returned for brake issues as well, in addition to the second one having an expired registration, for which the car received a $200 ticket. They didn’t have any other available cars on the lot, so they had one of their guys drive with me to their airport branch to pick up a different car, which we did. Back at the city-center agency an hour later, it was found that our new car had an expired registration, because, in fact, it was supposed to be for sale. One would think that a business would be better organized, but one would be wrong.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Fifty-Two

Washing today was more successful than it has been yet, except that when it came time to take it all in, the boys were playing with another friend and the chickens in the garden. As I swung the giant clothes-tree round and round, I kept laughing and shouting “Watch out!” as the sun-stiffened sheets slid over their shoulders and across their faces. The garden is sufficiently large that they did not need to play underneath the clothes-tree, but the chickens like it there, for some reason, and the boys like it where the chickens like it.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Fifty-One

The past few weeks, I’ve been taking Aldo to the train station in the morning and driving into town later in the day, so that he doesn’t spend the first hour of the workday sitting in traffic. The train in the morning seems to come on time, which is a good thing, because the trains in the evening tend to depart a few minutes early. I think that a train that departs 3 minutes early is worse than a train that departs 3 minutes late, but there is a tipping point somewhere; a train that departs 3 minutes early may be better than a train that departs 25 minutes late. The precise location of the tipping point also depends on the length of time until the next train. At night, when the trains only come once on the hour, more lateness is acceptable as opposed to a bit of earliness.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Fifty

This afternoon, driving home from the Coromandel Peninsula, we stopped at a roadside cafe for a snack. It turns out we had stopped into a royalist cafe for a snack, where we read pamphlets provided by The Monarchist League of New Zealand while eating chocolate banana cake. You can read some of their delightfully innocuous propaganda at www.monarchy.org.nz. Here is a particularly tasty morsel: "Like most monarchs, the Queen receives no salary for serving as New Zealand's head of state. She is a volunteer. . . She does this, not for personal glory or accolades, but out of a great personal respect and admiration for New Zealand." As a New Yorker, it was hard for me to believe that this cafe and all its memorabilia (commemorative cookie tins for the wedding of Price Charles and Princess Diana?) wasn't displayed ironically, but Aldo assures me it is in earnest.