Based on all you’ve heard about New Zealand, whether it be through extreme sports magazines, Lord of the Rings ‘Making Of’ documentaries on the special features disks, or, heaven forbid, this blog, what music would you think our college-aged upstairs neighbor listens to?
If on the poll that is supposed to resemble an iPod you picked D, the Grammy-nominated product of the musical pairings of Shakira and Wyclef, you’d be correct.
This is your prize:
A cookie.
Since our house is old and the walls thin, we can hear everything that goes on in our neighbor’s flats. The people behind us aren’t that bad. The husband of the pair has a hearty, robust laugh that randomly bursts through our wall. That’s actually kind of fun.
Remember that scene in ApocalypseNow in which Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore has his solders perform psychological warfare by blasting Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries out of helicopters, then proceeds to bomb the banh cuon out of a Vietnamese village. Here’s a refresher:
The kid who lives upstairs, Andrew, has the speakers that were attached to those helicopters and enjoys turning them up to full eleven. It’s brutal. When I lived in the dorms at FSU, you could hear the neighbors music sometimes and it would just be a little bass and some muffled singing that sounded like the Swedish Chef. When Andrew has the music on, I can hear the lyrics crystal clear. Usually, a twentysomething male that plays music loudly blasts rap, metal, rock and/or roll. Not this Kiwi. He’s a maverick. He plays Shakira.
He also watches soap operas. At 7:00 every night, the most popular soap opera in New Zealand, Shortland Street, comes on. It’s a five-night-a-week, half-hour hospital drama with about 75 characters and more love triangles than Grey’s Anatomy. Compared to U.S. soaps, it has better-than-average production values, decent acting and surprisingly fluid writing. Granted, it’s forced sometimes, and last week’s storyline about the Maori daughter fueding with her uncle over whether to bury her father the “traditional” way verusus the modern way was a bit much and the actors were way over the top — even before the uncle stole his brother’s body … OK, I watch it. Sue me. I like my stories. That’s how I know Andrew is watching it too; some nights, about a half-second behind our TV, we hear the same exact silly drama coming from his TV.
Maybe, I’m approaching it the wrong way. As the brillant Dr. Stephen T. Colbert once postulated, my generation, Generation X-Nay, is one that tackles problems by blogging about them. I should go up there and watch Shortland Street with him. He could be a really charming guy.
We asked her nicely. Rather, I asked her nicely. Stacy didn’t want to deal with the trouble of stripping the wallpaper, painting the high walls of our apartment flat and then painting them again in a few months. When Heather, our landlady, stumbled over a polite veto, Stacy jumped quickly at the opportunity.
“You can say ‘no,’” the quitter offered.
“OK, no.”
It’s not that the wallpaper in our apartment flat is bad, per se, just dull, lifeless and a bit quirky. Since being plastered up, it was painted over, and the paint has chipped away in some spots and the seams are all fairly obvious. In one corner, the wallpaper looks wrinkled, like someone grabbed the top of the wall and the bottom and twisted. Heather assured this was the only real problem with the wallpaper; it had happened when a support under the house slipped and that corner of the flat — the middle of the house — started to sink a bit.
That’s just the first thing you notice about this flat we live in. Actually, the first thing you notice is that it’s halfway up a hill, so you have to climb up 49 steps (or come down 65 if you start at the top) past a graffiti-covered wooden fence. The graffiti looks more like a mural though than random tags, leading me to believe it was a project hosted by the city or the condo owners next door, much like the graffiti walls in Los Angeles. The house we live in — the front-bottom quarter is our apartment flat — is around 100-years-old and was converted into four flats some 60 years ago. Our landpeoples, Heather and Richard, bought the house 15-years ago and have rented it out ever since.
Once you get in the front door, (which, for you Tim Taylor-types, we think is the original front door of the house because it’s the only front door of the four flats that isn’t actually one side of a bay window), the thing you might notice before the wallpaper is a loud PING! A floorboard or something is lose under the house that bounces down and hits a tile if you step on it in the right spot. Heather assures us it’s perfectly safe. It’s kind of fun. Then the smell will hit you. It’s a kind of stuffed up, moldy, grandpa-type smell. It’s not us, we swear, it’s the stinky couch.
This is Colac Bay. Our coffee table borrows a color from here.
We inherited two pieces of furniture when we moved in. One is a bean bag chair that had a serious bean deficiency and the other is a couch with an odor so powerful that a laundering of the cushion covers, a healthy Febreeze regiment and a Scotch Guard bath have failed to exorcise it. We needed some new furniture and we needed it fast. So we made daily trips to the Salvation Army. Unlike it’s U.S. counterpart, the Salvation Army is not just a place where hobos and people who listen to punk buy their clothes. We’ve seen people in three-piece suits walk in like it’s Ikea and purchase a vase and stand to put it on. And it’s actually got a pretty good selection. Granted, there’s the odd sofa that would be right at home on the set of Mad Men (I said it was cool, Stacy said ‘no’) and the desk that’s adorned with Rainbow Bright stickers. Then again, sometimes these are the best bargain. We got a table for ten bucks that harbored spiders, had two wobbly legs, and was covered in a mixture of concrete and five old coats of paint. A few nails, a broken hammer, many hours of stripping and two layers of Colac Bay-colored paint later and we had ourselves a coffee table.
The delivery men from Salvation Army walked down those 65 steps often as we practically furnished our entire apartment with items purchased there. So many items, in fact, that we got a frequent buyer discount on a TV stand. (The guy at the front said pointed to the Yankee-fan Kiwi he works with and said, “He wants to give it to you for $15 but I’ll take $10.” Take that, Yankee fan!) Sometimes, you even get a twofer from the Salvation Army. Hidden between the cushions of our $65 two-and-a-half seat, feather-down, odorless sofa, we also got two used nail files and a pair of underwear. I did not check to see if they fit Stacy or me before throwing them out.
Right down the street from Salvation Army, there are also a pair of second-hand stores where we got microwave that fails to heat anything and a stuffed duck named Chester. I bought Chester one afternoon after a job interview. I had seen him at the store the day before and when I called Stacy after my interview, she was out doing some errands. So I ran by the store and bought Chester. I had to go up to the lady at the front counter and ask, “Excuse me, but how much is that duck over there?” We walked over to Chester and when I told her I’d like to buy it, she said, “So, that’ll be one duck then!”
Chester at the beach.
One small step for duck, one giant leap for duck kind.
Chester checking out Stacy's bum.
I told Stacy I was going to get a haircut so she wouldn’t expect me to be home. I rushed back, set Chester in front of the door with a water bowl, sat on the sofa and waited. She was a little less excited at the prospect of getting a guard duck than I thought she would be. “Did you seriously — how much was it?” “How much do you think he was?” “Seventy dollars?” “Ummm…” “You paid seventy dollars for a stuffed duck?” “Well, we don’t need to buy any food for him and he’ll fend off thieves while we’re gone!”
The next day, when she went to the bathroom, I ran and put Chester in front of the door. He startled her because she apparently wasn’t anticipating a dead stuffed duck to be awaiting her when she came out. She yelled and I ran up to the bathroom. “Awww, how cute. He missed you and followed you.” One of my friends suggested I pee on the floor and then when Stacy finds it, yell at Chester and put him outside. Stacy no longer speaks to Chester. He allegedly creeps her out. I’m hoping eventually things will be a bit more like this:
If what you’re looking for is out of stock at the second-hand store or at the Sallies, there’s also good old fashioned sales. We’ve only been here for seven weeks and one store, Briscoes, has now had three sales in which everything in the store was 20-50% off. They even ran out of names for their sales. The first one was the Spring Sale, then the Labour Weekend Sale, which was last weekend. This weekend it’s the blasé Four-Day Sale. I’m not complaining, just hoping the store’s profits aren’t as bad as their creativity because we got some sweet towels from there. Over at the aptly named Big Save Furniture, we found a queen-size bed and boxspring that only put us back US$500. And it comes with a super-comfortable wool top layer that wicks off moisture in the summer and keeps us warm in the winter. Considering our bedroom is situated in the damp corner of the house that’s dug into a hill and it’s cold and windy almost every week, it’s well worth the discounted price.
Resting my feet while on the phone in the kitchen.
Thankfully, our bed was delivered before we got our washing machine ($115, including delivery, on TradeMe.co.nz, the very useful eBay of New Zealand). Otherwise, getting the bed into our room would have been extremely difficult. The brilliant minds that converted this house into flats decided to put the washing machine in the middle of the thoroughfare from the living room, through the small kitchen and into the bedroom. It’s a serious fire hazard and fire hazards are something we have to worry about since our lights flicker when you plug a computer into the wall. I’m usually worried that doing more than one thing at a time, like reading with a light on while attempting to preserve milk in the fridge, may not bode well for this wooden house. The woodenness of it, however, does allow for me to fulfill a lifelong dream of mine. Since the window frames are old and wooden, there aren’t any places to attach screens and the windows aren’t slats, but open up completely. So I can open a window in the bedroom, climb out, knock on the door, climb back in, walk into the living room and say, “Is someone here?” Or I can knock on the door, leave Chester there, and wait till Stacy opens and finds him. Oh, the fun a pet duck provides.
The kitchen is also home to the all-important Coke bottle, the one upon which the entire structural security of the house relies. Heather informed us when we were looking at the apartment flat that there is a leak on the roof that trickles down through the two stories of the house, into a tube in our kitchen closet, which feeds into a Coke bottle that sits below the world’s smallest and least efficient water heater (Don’t even think about washing the dishes before taking a shower). I am unsure why the leak isn’t just patched up on the roof but as long as we empty out the Coke bottle, an ostensible peace exists between us and the rest of the people in the house.
By far the weirdest part of the whole flat is the bathroom. It’s about as wide as the length of my arm, but as long as half the apartment flat. You could fit about nine people in it front-to-back and no more than one-and-a-half side-to-side. You have to walk through the shower compartment to get to the rest of the bathroom. This region of the bathroom earned it’s name because there are two sets of doors in the bathroom: one between the kitchen and the shower compartment, and one between the shower compartment and the toilet. The shower compartment is home to a closet-sized shower (why couldn’t the leak just drain into there?) that I’m told is not a good place to shave your legs. I have not tried. The original shower head pointed below my shoulder blades, so we decided a removable one would be a good investment. Of course, it didn’t fit because the old shower head was made on Mars by someone who ignored New Zealand standard bit sizes. After a pair of conversion bits, some electrical tape, and more thread tape than you should ever need on a plumbing job, we got the thing to maintain water pressure. Now I can rinse the conditioner out of my hair.
The one window in the house that does have slats, though, is in the bathroom and it is impossible to close it enough to keep the hellish Wellington winds out. We eventually bought a thermal-backed curtain for the draughts. Even after that, the linoleum floor was still freezing on your feet, especially when you wake up in the morning and go from the wool-warmed-and-moisture-wicked bed to the toilet. The long, narrow and crooked shape of the bathroom isn’t carpet friendly, so we improvised. At Bed, Bath and Beyond, yoga mats were on sale. We bought two, did some creative snipping and viola! The bathroom floor is now lined with green, cushy yoga mats. Unfortunately, we couldn’t carpet the whole floor with it; the linoleum isn’t level and the bottom of the doors aren’t cut straight, so it catches in some places if you put anything on the floor. The only place this becomes an issue is in the shower compartment and we just throw down a flowery Briscoes towel on the floor in there. The most important thing is that my favorite sleeping spot after a night of heavy drinking — on the floor in front of the toilet — is now warm, comfortable, and can help me increase my balance and coordination.
Those are the quirkier parts of our apartment flat in a nutshell. I think that trying to explain everything about the apartment could make this post even longer and more boring than it already is, so, with the magic of YouTube and Stacy’s digital camera, here’s a lightning tour of our place:
Oh, sorry, that was the Tour De France. Here’s our place:
(Time Magazine, if you are reading this, that video was in no way intended to be an adequate representation of my journalistic skills or bed-making potential.)
The voter certificate I signed and mailed — twice.
You’d think in a place like South Florida people would be sensitive and extremely careful about handling the electoral process. The memory of the 2000 election is still fresh in all of our memories and the constant trickle of problems we’ve had since then have been a constant, nagging reminder of how much our elected and appointed officials can mess things up sometimes, directly affecting the people of South Florida, and possibly, the entire country.
This year I’m an absentee voter. I’ve been abroad for a few weeks and don’t want to miss the opportunity to fulfill my right as an American citizen, especially in this extremely important election. Unfortunately, it seems that this might occur, and not because of my own apathy or political indolence, but because the Miami-Dade County Elections Department can’t do its job correctly.
At the end of September, I applied for my absentee ballot. I filled out the necessary paperwork, mailed it in and requested my ballot via e-mail. Within a few days, I had three e-mails from the Miami-Dade County Elections Department. The first was someone else’s ballot and the e-mail was for a David Booker. The second was a “Take Back” e-mail, for lack of a better term. The Subject line read “Recall” and the body said, AB Unit (Elections) would like to recall the message, “BOOKER, DAVID #103762279″. The third was my ballot. That the Elections Department couldn’t get their e-mail list straight worried me a little, but I passed it off as a minor snafu, waited till the third presidential debate, cast my vote, and excitedly mailed it off well in advance so it would arrive in time.
Then a few days ago I received a new voter registration card in my mailbox. I’ve received new ones in the past and usually get the same registration number so I didn’t think anything of it at first. Then I realized my new card said it was registered 9/29/2008 and issued on 10/07/08, whereas my old one was registered on 02/09/04 and issued on 02/24/06. Furthermore, my address on it was not my permanent address in the States. Instead, it was 2700 NW 87th Avenue, Doral FL 33172, the office for the Dade County Elections office in Doral. My new card now said I now voted in a different municipality (originally Miami Springs, now Doral), for a different State House seat (originally 111, now 112) and in a different County Commission district (originally 6, now 12). It seemed to me that I had two different registration numbers, meaning, if I felt like stuffing the books for my candidate of choice, I easily could have. However, I was more afraid that I had been registered twice as a voter. Confused, I e-mailed the Supervisor of Elections, who forwarded the e-mail to the Absentee Ballot Manager. This is what she told me:
I have placed your request for an absentee ballot under your original registration number and I have attached your new absentee ballot (according to your Miami-Dade County residential address) along with the certificate envelope and the instructions. Please discard the original ballot sent to you via email on October 2, 2008.
In my original e-mail, I had stated that I already voted. So, unsure if this person just told me to vote twice, I e-mailed her this message for clarification:
I have already sent in the Absentee Ballot that was sent to me on Oct. 2 using my original registration number. Will this vote be counted or will I have to revote using the ballot you attached?
This is the response I received:
Please send the ballot I sent you yesterday- the first ballot you received was under the New registration number. The ballot I sent yesterday was on the Old registration number (which is the one we kept active).
This might seem like a simple solution, problem solved, no biggie. But I still have no idea what will happen with my original ballot. Will they dispatch someone to dig it out, burn it and erase it from public record? Or will it slip by and be counted along with the vote I’ll send in tomorrow? The ballot I mailed in two weeks ago is different from the one I just received, so did I vote for a State Representative that doesn’t represent me? Most importantly, will I cast two votes for my preferred presidential candidate? I doubt he would mind, but doesn’t that undermine the democratic process?
I’m not quite sure the answer of those questions, but as far as I can tell, the motto the people in the Miami-Dade Elections Department sign all of their e-mails with — Delivering Excellence Every Day — seems to me to be as much a bit of political puffery as the people running for president are likely to deliver.
A kind warning: In this post, I will discuss a certain bathroom activity that may offend some and terrify others. Proceed with caution.
You can always make a butterfly with those empty TP rolls.
So, the other day I’m changing the toilet paper roll and I toss it in the trash can rubbish bin where there were, like, four other empty cardboard rolls, and I realize, these things take up a lot of space. They are a few inches long and hollow, meaning they leave an empty volume of space in the trashcan rubbish bin that could be better utilized. An economical person might crush the toilet paper rolls or tear them open to make that fun spiral thingy that provides a few minutes of entertainment if you run out of magazines in the john. However, at this particularly juncture, it seemed like our bathroom trash can rubbish bin was mostly full of worthless, used toilet paper rolls. In all reality, these wound-up strips of cardboard must be one of the least utilitarian objects ever engineered. Like greeting cards and gift wrap, it’s something you use for a finite period of time and is for the most part not reusable. Unless you combine toilet paper rolls with paper towel rolls to make a highly unreliable suit of body armor, they get tossed out as soon as the toilet paper is gone.
Normally, I don’t really concern myself with the capacity of my trash can rubbish bin, but since moving to New Zealand this has moved to the forefront of my domestic concerns. That’s because, despite being socialist, having universal health care and taking 21 cents for every dollar we make, the Wellington City Council makes us pay for trash rubbish collection. This fee is factored into the price of trash rubbish bags, which you can buy at grocery stores for $10 for five of the suckers. And this is where recycling comes in.
At this point you may be asking yourself, “Well, what do you have to pay for recycling bags or a recycling bin?” It’s a question that took us a few days to get an answer to and as we discovered: Nothing. This is the beauty of the Wellington recycling program. Relative to the small size of the special trash rubbish bags, you pay a large amount of money for them, so to make them worth your hard-earned cash, you make that trash rubbish bag last as long as you can. (Don’t worry, we leave the special bags outside and keep a stock of grocery bags for the short term. Our apartment flat smells fine, thank you.) To conserve space, it’s wise to remove anything that could be recyclable. Cereal boxes, bottles, candy wrappers, pizza boxes, egg crates, rejection letters from jobs, anything thing that could take up space and doesn’t have food juices on it: into the recycling bags. Plus, our recycling bags are old grocery bags, making another one-time-use item very useful.
At first it seemed like a pain, but staring into my crowded trash can rubbish bin, I realized the brilliance of the system. No longer are the over-stuffed landfills someone else’s problems, pollution isn’t for smarter people to deal with, recycling isn’t something you do only when the trashcan rubbish bin is a more convenient option because you’re already in the garage and you don’t have to walk all the way out to the bins. It isn’t tied to some larger issue — saving the world — that’s too big for anyone to really fathom or understand. It’s infinitely smaller and effects everyone in a more personal way. It’s about your wallet and finding a free alternative for getting rid of your trash rubbish.
If it comes down to shelling out $10 every eight weeks or so to make people recycle, I’m more than willing to do it, even if it means The Man is controlling me without me realizing it. A cleaner country — and maybe even world — is worth the price.
You know in old cartoons, when a person walks into a room and immediately walks back out wearing something completely different. Like the scene in Anchorman, when Ron Burgundy cleans up good. (It’s some eight minutes into this clip.)
The other night, Stacy and I went to a Mexican restaurant on Cuba Street called The Flying Burrito Brothers, which, I think I remember being told, is owned by a Korean. Having a small fear of heights, my knees wobbled a bit when I walked in and immediately to my left was the basement. When you enter the front door, there’s a kind of bridge that takes you over the dining area below to the host. There was an obvious Mexican/American Southwest influence — plain, Adobe-looking, wood beams, alcohol — and little cubbies dotted the walls, where candles sit dripping wax down to the lower level.
As far as I know, the restaurant has no relation to Gram Parsons.
When you follow the wax down there for dinner, you’ll notice that if you’re not seated below the bridge, it’s incredible loud. The ceiling is low, the room small, with a strange wall (strange because a table goes through it) dividing the high-ceiling dining area from the low-ceiling area, and loads of tables are crammed in that space. All the surfaces make for lots of echoes and a total improbability that the waitress will hear your voice when you ask for a side of sour cream.
But they make up for all this after you place your order. As soon as our cranky South American waitress walked away with our order, she almost immediately walked back into the dining area with our meal. It was like they have some Mexican Jedi ability to know your order before you even sit at the table, then they prepare it to your impending specifications. That or they’re just a high-class McDonald’s and they have every item on their menu cooked and ready-to-order, except they’re faster than the Golden Arches and the meat plate for your fajitas is still scalding hot when it’s brought to your table.
That cranky waitress could take a lesson from the servers at the Mr. Bun’s on Courtenay Place, our favorite breakfast joint. Though not as quick as the Flying Burrito Brothers, when the nice Asian lady brought us our fresh-squeezed O.J. this morning, she thanked us for serving us. “Orange juice? Thank you!” And they don’t even expect tips; that’s not part of the dining culture here. Now, that’s service.
The other day while riding on the bus, I had an epiphany. I realized you should never let yourself get so excited about figuring out the bus routes, thus ensuring you’ll make it to your job interview, without first learning the return routes. This is an important part of the overall “trip” and thankfully Stacy was there to help me navigate back home, which she did by asking the driver, “Do you stop in the city?”
While on that return trip I got to thinking about the earthquakes here (namely, would we be able to feel them on a bus) and I’ve come up with a hypothesis. It goes like this: New Zealand doesn’t get much action by way of wars (until the Sheep Revolution), it’s got pleasant weather, the economy is stable, and it mostly escapes natural disasters, with the exception of earthquakes. There have been a few big ones in its history, however those are few and far between. Knock on wood. And that’s an easy thing to do here as so many houses are made of wood because a) they’re old and cozy and b) they’re safe in earthquakes because the wood gives a bit and doesn’t crumble and topple over like concrete. So with the promise of mostly everlasting peace, prosperity and safety, Kiwis need to spice up their life a little. Enter: Extreme sports.
In the six weeks we've been here, this was the only time I've seen someone use this Bungy Chair. Probably because the winds will blow you to Fiji once you reach the top of the ride.
And what better way to escape the doldrums by jumping off a perfectly safe bridge, plunging head first to the ground, getting yanked up by a rope, then plunging down a few more times at the will of gravity. Legend has it that in the ’80s, two Kiwis invented bungee jumping after watching a video from Oxford University’s Dangerous Sports Club. (Can you imagine if that caught on and we called them Dangerous Sports instead of Extreme Sports? The Dangerous Games just doesn’t have the same ring to it.) The founding company, AJ Hackett, still operates here in New Zealand and recently introduced a new jump site — the tallest in the country — that allows you to do a 440-foot free fall from a gondola hanging over a canyon. Stacy and I would like to go, probably not to that new one, more like a bunny hill version of a bungee jump. As anyone who was at the Rapid’s Water Park in West Palm Beach, Florida on June 30 of this past summer knows, I scream like a little girl when dropped from high altitudes at rapid speeds because keeping my mouth open equalizes my body pressure to keep my stomach from coming out my ass… or something like that.
Naturally, as there are plenty of mountains around, there are ski and snowboard locations as well. Here in the North Island, there’s the active volcano, Mt. Ruapehu. They offer midweek passes and a location that puts it within a six-hour drive to from Wellington and Auckland. Plus, parts of Lord of the Rings was filmed there, so it’s some kind of national monument. Every few years the volcano still shows some activity, most recently in 2007, when a small eruption caused a mudslide that injured someone studying the volcano. If that’s not “extreme” enough for you, there are some two-dozen other resorts you can visit, including HeliPark New Zealand, which flies you up to the top of one of three peaks in a helicopter, then lets you sort out your own run down the mountain.
When it comes to water sports, anything is extreme in this part of the world. The water temperature ranges from 54 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter, to 72 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer. That is cold. Wetsuits are required. Kiwis have grown accustomed to it, though, and sail, dive, kayak and surf their little hearts out. Head down to the harbour on a nice Sunday and it will look like the entire navy has taken the day off to go sailing, yellow kayaks will dot the horizon, rowing teams will practice while a man on the shore yells at them with a megaphone, and you’ll even see the occasional adventurer who gets out of his or her car in a full wet suit, puts on a swim cap, runs towards the beach, swims away and returns long after Stacy and I decide it’s too cold and windy to watch the water anymore.
We’ll get in too eventually. There’s a surf school that, for the low price of $120, will take you on a 8-9 hour beach excursion that includes a three-hour surf lesson, complete with a board and wet suit. There’s another school near Auckland in a city called Raglan and is based out of the Karioi Lodge, a “eco surf retreat.” Just an hour north of Auckland, there’s Goat Island, where you can dive or snorkel, and there are dozens of other diving spots throughout the country where you can dress up to look like a seal and increase you chances of getting eaten by a great white.
Plus, there’s rugby, the popularity of which, according to the father of our polite friend Max, leads to little kids punching each other. New Zealand’s national sport very well could be the most violent on the planet. It takes the endurance of soccer players, the strength of footballers, the intensity of UFC fighters, and no pads whatsoever. Just watch the All Blacks haka. It alone will inspire you to go out and punch someone on the playground.
My hypothesis, however, fails to explain the popularity of netball. Our second week here, the Silver Ferns won an intense international tournament with Australia. As far as I could tell, the internationality of the competition did not extend beyond Australia and New Zealand, though this week the Silver Ferns are playing England and Wikipedia says the sport is played in a whopping 70 countries, so maybe it’s a monthly thing. No matter how many miles the team travels, the sport still baffles me. Originally developed in the U.S. as women’s basketball, it combines the finesse of basketball with athleticism of Ultimate Frisbee, producing one of the dumbest sports conceived. Granted, it takes the backboard off a hoop, making the shooting part a little more difficult. But before you take a shot, if a player has the ball, she cannot dribble, or move with it for that matter, and if she wants to pass she has to do so in the air. Just watch this video and see for yourself.
If you ever talk basketball with someone who knows about the sport (as in not me) they’ll throw out numbers between one and five. As in, “Well, if Ray Allen plays the two, who will play the one?” (I have no idea which guard position Allen plays, so please forgive the previous statement if I’m way off.) They’re not talking bingo. These numbers and positions have meaning, if only to provide some sense of order when the players are running willy nilly all over the court between offense, defense, etc. Fans know the numbers, the positions, what they all do, and they know it off the top of their heads. Netball isn’t quite so challenging to understand. Each player has Velcro strips on their jerseys and on these strips, they firmly attach a piece of cloth with two letters, indicating the player’s positions on them. Needless to say, the sport is decidedly unextreme.
And then there’s marching. Like netball, it’s a women’s sport, though it stretches the definition of the word “sport.” As you can probably deduce, it involves marching. At Te Papa, the enormous museum in Wellington, there was an exhibit that briefly touched on the history of marching in New Zealand. They compared it to “American cheerleading,” despite the obvious lack of spirit fingers, and it began during the Great Depression as a way for offices and factories to keep their female employees “fit and healthy.” This Web site dedicated to the sport says that teams grew and began interhouse competitions. After WWII, veterans returned and restructured the sport “based on rigid military style.” In 1990, it was officially recognized as a Kiwi sport and teams compete in international competitions.
So even if you’re very easily amused or have a serious adrenaline deficiency that needs some boosting, the Kiwis have found a sport to entertain you. At least, until this happens:
Remember that scene in Pulp Fiction when Jules and Vincent visit Brett on behalf of Marcellus Wallace? They talk about hamburgers. It goes like this.
Jules: Do you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with cheese in France?
Brett: No.
Jules: Tell him, Vincent.
Vincent: Royale with cheese.
Jules: Royale with cheese. Do you know why they call it a Royale with cheese?
Brett: Because of the metric system?
Jules: Check out the big brain on Brett! You smart [mammajama]; that’s right! The metric system.
Here’s the scene on YouTube:
That’s a damn lie. That’s right, Quentin Tarantino and/or Roger Avery, I called you liars. Because New Zealand is on the metric system and there are McDonald’s here and guess what they have on the menu. It’s not a Royale with Cheese. No, it’s a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. Not only is it a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, McDonald’s put a little “R” with a circle around it like this ® next to the words “Quarter Pounder.” And that ® does not mean Royale, it means, “We don’t care if you have the metric system. We’re American, we do what we want.” They even serve ketchup there, giving a giant red middle finger (yech) tomato sauce industry.
Mmmm. Roast Lamb Sub.
Subway does the same thing. Jared is still their mascot (a cardboard effigy of him and his pants stands in every Subway) and the bread comes in two categories: Six-Inch of Foot-long. (No five-dollar foot longs, they have $3.90 six-inchers instead.) I think they do this because 15.24- and 30.48-centimeter subs don’t have the same ring to them, or because Americans just like people to be confused. How else could you explain our resistance to adjust our system of measurements? Everyone else in the world uses metric and we decide we want to be like Liberia and Myanmar, the only other two countries in the world that use the American system. This causes problems. Wikipedia says a few years ago, NASA lost one of its spaceships because different engineers used different measurement systems costing tax payers a few jillion dollars; mix-ups frequently occur in pharmacies leading people to get the wrong dose of medication; and a bar of Ivory Soap was once only 99.3% pure.
At the Auckland airport, where we had to collect our luggage from the international terminal and move it to the domestic one, we were told that one of my bags was too heavy to fit on a metric plane. Of course, in the infinite wisdom of airlines, they command that all bags be under a certain weight, say 70 pounds (about 32 kilograms) and even if you have two bags and the sum of them is less than the maximum weight for two combined, you still have to shuffle things around until that one bag is light enough. I had to remove something like 200 grams, or roughly the weight of one winter sweater and my Valentines boxers, from one bag and put it into the other. Stacy lucked out of this whole ordeal because her hairspray can exploded between Miami and Auckland and her bag lost weight. This, however, scared the crap out of me; the chemicals in the hairspray peeled the labels off everything it shared a Ziploc with, leading me to believe hairspray is made out of the same stuff that was in the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders.
Anyways, we’ve done extensive research into Americanization and we have concluded that Burger King sells donuts. And they have a five-dollar menu. Outside of that, it’s mostly similar to its US counterpart. I have to admit, that McDonalds is much improved in New Zealand. All of the ingredients, from the lettuce to the meat patties, are grown in New Zealand. As a result, the commercials claim, and the sandwiches actually taste as if, the food is made fresh. Plus the fries, or chips, are tastier. They were apparently voted the favourite chips of Kiwis. And they serve beer. OK, they don’t, but I thought they did. One night after a few drinks with our friends Mable and Phillip at a fundraiser for Cuban hurricane victims, Stacy and I fought the wind and rain to get a midnight Big Mac. We walked up in front of two registers and stared back and forth at the two guys deciding who we would order from. The guy to the left said, “You can go to either. There’s a beer funnel in this one.” At this point, I really, really liked McDonald’s in New Zealand and moved to the left register. We left the store without having funneled anything and Stacy told me on the way home he actually said, “We have a bet going on.” Wishful thinking.
Oh yeah, they have Cheerios here too, but it's terrible
Also imported are Starbucks, Pizza Hut, Dominoes and the finest example of American down-home-family cooking, KFC. I’m not sure Colonel Sanders ever visited New Zealand, but I wish he had so he could have shown Kiwis how to make some decent Cole slaw. That and the mashed potatoes are prepackaged, stamped with an expiration date, and have been sitting waiting to be ordered since the Civil War. The Kellog brothers are also represented here, along with their Corn Flakes, Fruit Loops, Mini-Wheats and Special K. Other cereals have changed their names. Tony the Tiger now graces the cover of Frosties and Snap, Crackle, Pop are the proud cartoon mascots of Rice Bubbles. (In Afrikaans, “Snap Crackle, Pop” translates to “Knap! Knaetter! Knak!” Is that a Bjork song.)
Lambton Quay, a busy street near the water, is the Fifth Avenue of Wellington, inasmuch as it has a Levi Store and a Nike Platinum Store. As far as I can tell, it gained Platinum status because it’s a shorter distance between Nike sweat shops and New Zealand than it is between them and the U.S. Down the block, you’ll find a Borders and a Foot Locker. Here’s a brief history of Foot Locker (I promise this is relevant). Way back around the time Nixon resigned, Foot Locker appeared on the market. These two events appear to be unrelated, however, Foot Locker was actually a branch of the Woolworth Corporation. In the late ’80s, again, using Wikipedia as my source here, the Woolworth Corporation was incorporated into the F.W. Woolworth Company, of the five-and-dime stores. By 2001, Foot Locker had become Woolworth’s highest selling line, so they just changed their name to Foot Locker, Inc. This is interesting in a place like Australia and New Zealand, where Woolworths still exists and Wal-Marts don’t. In actuality, it’s a different company altogether that just named itself after the American five-and-dime stores. Still, it’s like seeing a dinosaur walking around on the street. (Ooooh, that’s what Sarah Palin meant!).
Come to think of it, for some reason, they mostly import bad American things. On top of fast food, there’s also Ford. That Detroit magnate that specializes in vehicles you can start using a dime instead of your key has made it to Oceania. The car I think I’ve seen the most, probably because it stands out the most, is the Ford Falcon Ute (short for utility). It is half-car, half-truck and has all the class and style of a Chevy El Camino. (Question: Do you say “The El Camino” or just “El Camino”? Because “The El Camino” is a bit redundant.) They also have I-95 here. Wherever I go, I manage to find this road, which in Miami is less a highway than it is a bumper cars ring. When I’ve visited both Boston and New York, we’ve driven on it and it has followed me to the southern hemisphere. Down on Dixon Street, just at the end of Cuba Mall, you’ll find Club I-95, where the party don’t stop from Miami to New York (actual slogan). Painted on the front door of the club is the all-too-familiar sign for I-95. Haven’t these Kiwis ever been to Houlton, Maine? That’s where all the Maniacs hang out. Get it? Maine, Maniacs?
Even if you stay at home, American products are likely to find you. A producer in Miami once told me that telecommunications are one of the few things the U.S. exports anymore and she was right. As I’ve written about in other posts, U.S. TV programs flood Kiwi airwaves. Even if you get tired of that (how could you, though, with Cops on and all), you can always head down to Blockbusters to rent the DVD of an American movie. They often come out on DVD before they hit the tube or silver screen. Disaster Movie, for example, was already available for rental when it hit theaters in October. Or you could just pick up the newspaper, in which you can read Doonesbury, Dilbert, The Far Side and Peanuts. Even in this peaceful country, Lucy still never lets Charlie Brown kick the football.
Whenever people ask me where I want to live when I grow up my answer typically revolve around three talking points:
1. Probably not in Florida
2. In a big city, e.g. like New York, Boston and Chicago.
3. Where I don’t have to drive.
A public Tauntaun
These talking points are all interlinked. In a big city with public transit (busses, trains, Tauntauns) there are plenty of alternative forms of transportation. And I hate driving because I was raised in Miami, Florida, where a you have to drive everywhere. This is because the city is so sprawled out (of course, minimum sprawl compared to L.A.) and because it’s so damn humid all the time, if you even think about the outdoors, you need to reapply deodorant. The worst thing about it is that at night I think it can actually get more humid. The sun burns everything up during the day (especially our skin) and you expect a cool respite from the tropicality of the climate, but then your neighbor does the backstroke by you when you step out to put the recycling on the corner because the amount of moisture in the air makes you buoyant.
So, a place like Wellington is perfect. It’s a small big city, with an excellent bus system, and everything is within walking or at least biking distance. Like in any developed city, if you use your legs as your primary method of transportation, you have to use a crosswalk. There are two kind here. The kind where you push the button and wait for a red man to turn into a green man and then cross. Then there’s the ones with zebra stripes (note: these are not zee-bra stripes, but zeh-brah stripes in New Zealand), in which the pedestrian is God and a driver must stop. If the driver fails to do this, he will — sorry, I just had to get up and flee the computer. We had a visitor. Not many people here have dryers because, as our landlady Heather told us “it dampens up the air.” So when you do laundry, you have to hang it outside on the clothes line or a drying rack.
Fearing that someone may steal our clothes and since it’s a nice day, we leave the windows and door open so everything can dry and so we can watch to make sure no one steals my holiday-themed Old Navy boxers. This is of course an open invitation for flies and other insects to come in. I think the flies enjoy old movies, because I chase them around the room like Charlie Chaplin with some instrument (shoes are the best, pillows are worthless, I have tested both), tripping over furniture, screaming like a cave man and the bastards eventually lead me into our bedroom, where they fly out the window. I’ll go back and sit down in the living room and they’ll come back in the door, starting the whole process again. From now on when people ask me at job interviews what my goals are, I will tell that by the end of our time here, with enough practice, I will be able to catch a fly in chopsticks. So, just now, for the first time, a bumble bee stopped by to say hello. After I ran away screaming like a little ninny, Stacy pointed out that bumble bees, which are much larger than the bees back home, are harmless and don’t do anything but bumble. But at the time all I knew was this creature the size of a Volkswagen was flying directly at me and that it was out for blood. Or pollen. But probably blood.
Note: Not drawn to scale.
Now that the sector is secure (the security of it was checked by me using Stacy as a body shield as I reentered the room slowly and peeked around her until I was certain the bee had bumbled back outside), I have returned. Where was I? Oh, yeah. So, I’ve figured out the art of crossing the street. The obvious and safe way is to wait for the red man to turn into a green man, or, for the color blind, for the man on the top to disappear and the one on the bottom to appear. But if you’re in a hurry or feeling like a wild-and- crazy guy, then there is only one thing to remember: never cross the street alone.
Sounds simple and it is. If you’re standing on a corner and no cars are coming, be a rebel, stick it to the illuminated red man and cross that street. But, first, let someone else cross. You may think, “That’s not very rebellious, doing something that someone else has already done.” Perhaps not, but then at least you’ll be a quasi-rebel and safe. The trick is, you only let the person step into the street a few seconds before you. Then, when you’re both in the street, get next to him or her. Don’t attract attention to yourself by doing anything weird or smelling funny. Your goal is to stay beside this person, on the opposite side of them from oncoming traffic, so that you have a buffer between you and a car in the event that one with malfunctioning breaks careens around the corner full-tilt boogie whilst being chased by the police because its driver just jaywalked to get to his car.
Now, this gets difficult when you’re crossing a two-way street, as dropping behind and catching up with a person on their opposite side could look suspicious. (Also, you have to be careful when crossing streets in foreign countries. Learn the flow of traffic there or you’ll find that your own scream will be the first sign of impending doom for your crosswalk accompaniment when you thought you were safe.) The solution to this is to walk in a group and wait for more than one person to cross. A down side to this is that your chances of looking like a rebel are exponentially decreased, the upside is that so are your chances of getting hit by a car.
But be careful. There are situations in which this strategy is inappropriate. For example, if you are living with a significant other, do not let this person be the one who walks between you and the traffic. Your rent will double overnight.
Even with a population of about 190,000, the grocery stores in Wellington are still overwhelmingly crowded on Sunday afternoons. There are two New Worlds near us. The closest, New World Metro, is crammed in what was probably once a retail store in a business-heavy part of town. The entry port is the bakery, which gives way to a not-much-larger section of aisles and shelves where things are overpriced and you can only buy roll-on deodorant. To leave the store, you must walk back through the bakery to stand in line the queue. Since one queue feeds all the registers, it gets backed up and frequently wraps around the bakery. If you have a sweet tooth, you are screwed.
We tend to go to the larger New World down by the harbor. Conveniently, they offer three different sizes of shopping carts and we always go with the smallest because filling anything larger would make for a painful walk home and trying to maneuver anything else through the aisles would be like trying to do a three-point turn in a Buick. Here, the port of entry is the produce section, so you instantly feel less like a fat ass. Things are civil in this section, probably because of all the green, the flowers towards the back and the strawberries. But after that, it’s every man and woman for themselves.
I think the danger sets in around the meat section. It’s a large wall where people line up in teams and scream at each other like they’re on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. You leave your cart behind, dive towards the wall, and try to grab the cheapest, largest chicken breast and hunk of ground beef you can find. But it gets confusing. They sell chicken claws, which kind of throws off your bearings when you see them for the first time. And people yell back and forth over each other. “Do you want a schnitzel?” “What is a schnitzel?” “I don’t know. It’s yellow.” “Sounds good.” “How many grams is a pound?” I think usually you’re supposed to shoot fingers up or hold signs or have earpieces and wrist radios like the Secret Service. Usually I leave Stacy to fend for herself and go test which bathroom tissue is the softest.
This is a small picture of one of the Wellington New Worlds
That should be a pleasant experience. Of course, it’s not. You have to keep moving while you’re in the aisles. Even though people drive on the left side of the road, no one knows which side of the aisle you’re supposed to walk on, though I think I have determined that the general rule is “DO NOT STOP MOVING”. If you do, someone walking towards you will collide with your front end, someone behind you will clip your ankles with their cart and you will be deported. Instead, you have to move quickly down the aisles and when you spot your desired item out of the corner of your eye, lift your arm quickly and no higher than John McCain would be able to and flick it into your basket. If you pick the wrong item, keep moving and forget about it; you’re having Wasa crackers for lunch for the next month.
If you survive to make it to the frozen food section, grab vegetables and skip the rest. Probably because of the widespread use of organic goods and out of solidarity for local farms, people cook more fresh meals here. There are a few Weight Watchers items; mostly it’s bad Chinese food. So hop over to the deli, where the people are kind enough to clarify that 500 grams is roughly one pound. Crap, back to the meat wall.
Thankfully, the bread and dairy section is more peaceful than the rest of the store. Things are calmer, probably because you have to pass through the cheese section first to get there. Apparently, Kiwis are very indecisive about cheese because people just stand around and stare at it. You have to sneak up, quietly, and grab Tasty cheese. When doing so, be sure to act like a zombie, it keeps everyone else from turning against you.
But nothing, and I mean nothing, is as bad as the checkout line. There are about 90 registers and each one has a line with at least five people pushing fully stocked carts. Occasionally, though, you see the rare nut who has only filled his cart with — true story — nine jugs of Nutella. (I noticed this because they were the last nine jugs that day.) It’s a bit like going into Wal-Mart in Florida, except there aren’t any Haitians and I’m the only Cuban there. Actually, this one of the things about New Zealand I didn’t except. I mean, I knew the population of Cubans probably would be about 1/5000th of what it is in Florida (there is a Cuban restaurant and coffee house and at least one Mexican who dresses up in a mariachi suit and sings for money) but not that the number of Blacks would be smaller as well.
Would you mess with this guy if he was the first thing you saw after sailing for three months?
I’m used to seeing Black individuals everywhere, be it African, African American or Caribbean. Here, they are few and far between, though there are many people of color. There is a large population of Indians, Asians, Pacific Islanders and Other that are accepted both culturally and politically. As our friend Phillip told me, New Zealand might be the most politically correct country in the world. Even the natives, the Maoris, who themselves were actually immigrants that inhabited New Zealand, or Aotearoa, a few hundred years earlier than Europeans, have representatives in Parliament and, as far as I can tell, are an accepted part of society just like everyone else. This could be because the rugby stars are mostly Maori or because, as travel luminary Mary Ellen O’Brien once theorized, they’re similar enough in look to Europeans that colonists didn’t immediately deem them inferior. I tend to think that when colonist first saw the Maoris, which are typically the size and shape of a Panzer, they said, “My God, those guys are huge. There is no way I will be able to make them slaves.”
Interestingly, I have read that in some parts Maoris are often associated with Black Americans because they embrace hip-hop and the lifestyle often connected to it. From just walking around Wellington, I can tell you that almost every white kid under 18 dresses like Rob Dyrdek, but with tight jeans, so hip-hop culture permeates pretty deeply and this theory is outdated.
Anyways, back at New World, everything follows NGP — Normal Grocery Procedures — after the cash register. Things cool down, especially if you have a Fly Buys card, which you swipe just before paying. It was free to sign up for and it gives us points every time we use it. I am unsure what these points are for or even where I redeem them, but my fingers are crossed that I will be able to use them to buy Park Place the next time I play Monopoly.
Back in the States, there’s a “safe harbor” time on television. Between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., shows can be a little dirtier, nastier and less safe for children. It’s how NYPD Blue could show butts on ABC and why nothing on FX starts before 10. I think the safe harbour time starts around 9:30 here in New Zealand. I’m unsure of the reason why, though it could be because kids traditionally go to bed earlier here, or because, like Britain, people are a little more acceptable of nudity and foul language. On a side note, things start on the half-hour here because prime time starts at 7:30.
Our first weekend in our flat, we caught a dating show with five guys and one British girl. They don’t know they’re competing against each other; they think they’re the only guy vying for the girl’s interests. On their different dates they go through tests. They get drunk with the girl’s parents so she can see how the men cope with family under pressure, she sends them home at night without kisses to see how they react, and, in my favorite test, pretends to get mugged to gauge how capable the men are at protecting her.
Maybe not a passing response, but the funniest by far, was when a German suitor, probably a little drunk, chased after the mugger, screaming, “HEY! HEY! YOU MAMAJAMMA! GET BACK HERE!” (Except he didn’t say mamajamma, but a word that starts in “mother” and rhymes with Tucker. I realize it’s a bit ironic to censor myself in a post about the lack of censorship, but my Mom reads this stuff! This is also the reason no pictures accompany this post.) He followed the guy in hot pursuit, screaming and then threw a beer bottle at the make-believe mugger. He nailed him in the back, the actor dropped the purse, and on an interview admitted he was terrified of the German.
All of this went bleep free, from the “mamajamma” to the drunken retorts with her parents. And that was on basic TV, a broadcast we got over rabbit ears. Girls Next Door — or Girls of the Playboy Mansion, as it’s called here — shows on two networks. On C4, repeats air fully censored as they would in the States. During the day on E!, it also runs the same way as it does back home. After 9:30, however, it’s all boobs, all the time on E!.
Along with Girls of the Playboy Mansion, Sunset Tan runs in the raw, unedited form. It only really means something for Girls and Sunset Tan, as opposed to the channel’s other shows, because on those two people curse and get naked as often as they breath. E! even seems to have a nudity hour. At 11 p.m., they show Naked and Funny, which is basically Candid Camera-meets-naked women. At 11:30, a special edition of Wild On airs called Naked Wild On. Unfortunately, it is not hosted by Brooke Burke anymore and it’s really just Girls Gone Wild.
While most of the European programming is like this, not everything imported from the States is so liberal. Discovery Channel leaves their shows entirely as they run back home. When they almost kill themselves on Deadliest Catch, the foul-mouthed fisherman are still suitable for church and Mike Rowe’s dirty mouth on Dirty Jobs is still cleaned up thanks to network censors. When the Jon Stewart lets an F-bomb or two fly on The Daily Show, it’s also bleeped, though I think it’s funnier that way for some reason.
