Things I'll miss about New Zealand, Volume One

1- The birds.  They're so plentiful and musical here.
2- The pies: Savoury pies are a staple of kiwi takeaways.  Every diner, dairy (convenience store), and petrol station (gas station) sells pies as a quick and easy meal or snack. 
3- The coffee: It's super expensive here, but it's worth it. No watered-down drip stuff here.  It's all flat whites, long blacks, mochas and machiatos. Delish.
4- The expressions and the different ways they say things: "fair enough," "Sweet as" "petrol" "wind screen", "rubbish", "mince" (ground beef).
5- The rugby: The World Cup kicks off this Friday and the country is stoked. The Canadian Team has landed and got a cool kiwi reception at the Waitangi Treaty Grounds (where the country as we know it was officially founded) complete with a trip in a waka (big Maori "canoe") and a warriors' greeting.  Damn, I wish I could stick around for the whole tournament.  Go All Blacks!

6- The jingles: It's incredible how catchy ditties can permeate your conciousness without your realizing it.

• "The Warehouse, The Warehouse, where everyone gets a bargain."
• "Briscoes: you'll never buy better"
• "Smith City makes it easy!"
• "Go Harvey Normans, GO!"
• And so on...

7- The "can do" attitude: Kiwis are such practical folk.  They know how to make things, fix things and do it happily.
8- The weather: Even in the middle of winter in the deep South (where it's colder, remember), it's not uncommon for people to walk around in shorts (to be fair, they might just be made from tougher stuff than me, cause I was still wearing my ski jacket around town yesterday.)

Premature nostalgia about New Zealand

I'm headed home soon.  In the coming days I'm going to try and post about things I'm going to miss about New Zealand, and, in an attempt to make myself feet better, some things I won't miss.

Bits and pieces: recovered stolen property, unemployment and possible deportation!

• The Wanaka police called me at 9:40 tonight (Saturday) to inform me that my hard drive and the remnants of my passport and interenational drivers' license have been found in some bushes near my house.  Apparently the passport has been ripped up, which makes these robbers (generally an unpleasant breed of people to begin with) extra douchy.  Gah
• Today was my last day at Treble Cone (TC).  I won't miss many aspects of the job, but I will miss that amazing view and the great people on my team.  I'm mad at myself for not skiing or snowboarding more when I had the chance. 
• I haven't sold my car yet.  I need to sell my car.
• My Visa expires on the 15th.  I still don`t have a replacement passport.  Don't know what to do.  Will call the High Commission and Immigration NZ to find out what to do and when to start panicking (Ha! Start!  How many of you actually believe that I haven't been panicking for weeks already?)
• I didn't get that job at Wanaka Wastebusters.  It would have been fantastic -- interesting, challenging, in an area I love doing work towards something I believe in, and the people seemed really cool.  They told me that they thought I'd have been "a great addition to the team" but that there was a local woman with similar credentials who applied,and as a result, they couldn't have argued my case with immigration to help me get a work visa (you have to prove that there are no qualified kiwis who applied before you can sponsor a foreigner, apparently).  They seemed really appologetic and even said that if I was applying for other jobs and if I wanted to put them down as a sort of reference, I could (not sure how that would have worked, but nice nonetheless).  Needless to say, I'm pretty gutted.  I would have loved to have worked there and had the opportunity to stay here another year.

So I imagine many of you are thinking "now what?" Well, let me tell you, so am I.  Tomorrow being Sunday, there's not much I can do about the "official" things that need dealing with, so I'm going skiing and using my season's pass while I still can.  I'm also going to hopefully meet with someone who might be keen on buying my car (oh please let her buy my car!).  If I do manage to sell it, I'll have some much-needed cash that could help me, you know, get home.  Sigh.

I won't bore you with any more details until I really have some to give. Plus I'm tired, and fighting a head ache, so I'll say ta ta for now.

Oh, one last thing.  It's Fathers' Day here in NZ tomorrow, so Happy Fathers' Day to all you dads who might be reading this.  Consider it a bonus day.

Crouch. Touch. Pause. Engage! * (Rugby and other stuff in Invercargill)

Can you believe I've been here eleven and a half months?  Unbelievable.  What's even more unbelievable, is that during those eleven and a half months I had never seen a rugby match. 


How un-kiwi of me.


You see, rugby is to New Zealanders what hockey is to Canadians; it's basically a religion, and I am a bit of a convert. 


I've never understood why soccer is such a big deal in most of the world.  I think The Simpsons summed my feelings up rather well: "High kicking! Low Scoring!  And ties? You betcha!!" Not to mention the ridiculous fake dives some of the players take to try and get penalties awarded to the other team (tossers).


And North American football?  Gag me.


Now rugby, on the other hand...wow.  These guys are as hard as nails.  They head out there with nothing but a cup, a pair of (tight!) shorts and a (tight!) t-shirt to protect their gorgeous manliness (you really must check out their thighs.  And torsos. They're a sight to behold. Here, let me help. And again! and since I'm so generous, another! And if you're inclined towards the lads, I strongly suggest you google "hot men rugby" Yowsa!) Phew! Where was I?  Ah yes.  So these scantilly clad, well-shaped men get knocked around, pulled to the ground, tackled mercilessly, and jumped on.  If one of them gets hurt, more often than not, he'll wipe away the blood, pop his broken nose back into place, and head straight back out onto the field.  Hard. As. Nails.


I won't pretend I understand all the nitty gritty details of the game, but essentially the goal is to get the ball over the line at your end of the field and touch it to the ground (so you can't just carry it over, or fall over onto your back holding the ball, the ball has to make firm and direct contact with the earth) to score 5 points (they call that a "try").  To get it there, players can pass the ball to each other, but only to players behind them.  They can kick the ball forward, but I think there's some rule about when you can or can't kick it (offside rule, I presume). You can also get 3 points through penalty kicks and simply kicking the ball through the goal posts (that kind of look like the ones used in N.A. football).


So all that to say, I like rugby, and up until last week, I had yet to see a match.  When Dave suggested we head on down to Invercargill, NZ's Southernmost city, to catch a Ranfurlly Shield match between the Southland Stags and Taranaki, I very happily agreed.


It was really great to see.  Unfortunately for the hometown crowd (and Dave) the Stags lost the match 12-15, and not a single try was scored all match. So not the most exciting game in terms of runs or action, but still fantastic.  There are some pictures on Dave's camera, but I don't have it with me, so you'll have to go without for now.  I'll try and post them in the coming days!




*For the uninitiated, those first four words of the title of this post are how a rugby scrum gets going. 


The players huddle together in an organized mass, facing the oposing team.  The ref tells them to "Crouch", they do so.  He tells them to "touch", which basically means the guys on the outer sides of the front line jab the oposing player in the arm (apparently, this is to prove that the players are in fact supporting their own body weight and not leaning on the others...not sure how it does though.)


Then there's the very brief "Pause" portion of the scrum which, again, serves to prove the players aren't leaning forward too much.  Finally, we get the all important "Engage!" where the players surge forward with a big, meaty, muscly, grunty crunch into the players in front of them.  Somehow, a ball gets thrown into the middle of this mess and comes out on one of the two sides, thus determining who has posession of it.


Wow.  Explaining that (and likely explaining it wrong) took about ten times as long as the actual process.

Snowed in and robbed

Today, the country ground to a halt. 

Schools were closed.  Roads made impassable. Even a local ski field stayed shut. 

The reason: Snow.  Now, for a Canadian, the paltry amount on the ground was laughably small.  In Wanaka, for instance, we had a dusting of barely two cm coating the grass.  Nonetheless, it crippled most of the country.

I would post a picture here, but I can't.  As you may have read on Facebook, my cameras are now no longer in my posession thanks to some petty thief (or thieves) that decided to pay my apartment a visit the other night.

It is partly my fault. After having locked myself out of the house once, and learning that many people around time leave their doors unlocked cause it's such a safe town, I had grown complacent about securing the door. Evidently, Friday evening was one of the unfortunate times I neglected to turn the key on my way out, and some douchenozzle(s) benefitted from my negligence.

Along with my cameras, the stellar human being(s) also took my external hard drive, my e-reader, i-pod, a DVD collection (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 5), some cash, (ironically) a bible, and, most devastatingly, my passport.

Ugh.

I'm hopeful that my travel insurance will cover at least some of the taken items, and there's not much I can do now after the fact. It was an expensive lesson that, despite living in a small, safe town where many people don't lock their doors, I should do so nonetheless.  So now, with only a short month to go I have to sort out my documents.  It's especially annoying since without a passport, I can't book any flights, and therefore can't really plan my life. 

Any suggestions would be appreciated.  Nay, invited.

Working in Wanaka

Treble Cone has been open and operational for nearly three weeks now, though it feels like I’ve been working there much longer.  Well, I guess technically I have been under TC’s employment for nearly two months, but have only really been actually employed (as in used…and paid) since mid-July.

So what do my days look like?  Well, for one thing they start off pretty dark.

I wake up at 6:30 or so and walk in the dark to the meeting spot about 400m down the road from my place.  At about 7:05, a convoy of vans of the mini and mega variety pull up and I and the other staffers living in the area pile in.  We finish off “the loop” of pick up points, then make our way along the side of Lake Wanaka to the base of the mountain some 15 minutes away. From there, it’s another 7 km of zig-zagging narrow dirt road with dizzying drops on one side up to the TC base building.

I’m not going to lie; the first few times I made the climb I was frankly terrified.  It’s amazing what can become everyday and commonplace after a while.

This view, however, has not become either of those things:

It goes a long way to helping wake me up when I stumble out of the warm van into the cold, mountain winter air at 7:45.  You see, in town, the temperature usually sits in the high-single digits and even sometimes the low double-digits.  On the mountain however, where the base building sits at some 1200 metres above sea level, it’s considerably colder.

It’s not so bad on the days I work inside selling lift passes, lessons and rental gear – there I’m warm and protected from the elements. On the days I’m outside working the gates however, it’s less pleasant. For eight hours I stand in the cold armed with an iPad to make sure punters are making their way through our automatic gate OK, and to do crowd control.  It’s rather mind- and toe-numbing.  I’ve actually developed chilblains thanks to those shifts.  For the (lucky) uninitiated, chilblains are basically itchy, swollen, painful toe ulcers.  Yum!

At least on those days, I’m guaranteed a decent shift.  On ticketing days I often finish up at one or two in the afternoon, which usually means waiting around a few hours for staff transport down the mountain or hitchhiking down with some of the customers.

Naturally, on those days I can take advantage of the big snowy mountain and my free lift pass, but given that I’ve had exactly one lesson in my life some twenty years ago (man I’m old), and that the hills I’ve skied before were of the small, docile variety, I’m reluctant.

Treble Cone, you must understand, is a great mountain for the confident, skilled skier or boarder, but a daunting one for anyone learning.  It’s big.  It’s steep. Its only “green” run is narrow with hairpin turns and big drops running alongside it.  I overheard an instructor refer to it as the “beginner’s cliffs of doom.”  Charming.

I’ve been spending most of my time on the learners’ slope with the kids and the people who have never been on snow before.  Sigh.

But I’m happy to report that, thanks to the (uncharacteristically) patient tutelage of Dave, a ski instructor I’ve been seeing, I made it down the mountain without killing myself or even crying today! Huzzah!



Base building




Staff waiting for transport at the end of the day.





Dave by the lake.



Lake Wanaka at sunset

My main man, Scruff.

Finally! Snow on the mountains!

A full two and a half weeks after Treble Cone was set to open, we're still shut.

While at first the problem was a complete lack of snow, over the past few days we've been dumped on and there's a healthy 70cm of base on the mountain, 40cm of which fell in the past 24 hours.  This means that the road up the mountain was impassable this a.m. and there's an extreme risk of avalanche up there. 

So closed we remain.  Hopefully though, tomorrow will be better and we’ll be able to get up there and get working and skiing.

You'd think that having had so much time off would have inspired me to write tons.  Sadly, a lack of motivation and a surplus of lethargy kicked in and I've been woefully unproductive of late.

Here are a few pictures of some of the things I’ve been up to.

Snow as seen from town.

Went for a walk to a river by a sheep station near town.

Last week TC organized a walk to the Rob Roy Glacier which is an hour's drive and two hour hike from Wanaka.  There were 57 of us on the walk I believe.  Here's a suspended bridge along the track.

The Rob Roy Glacier -- at the bottom you can see an avalanche.  It was pretty cool.

This awesome fella is a kea, NZ's mountain parrot.  These guys are not shy and are super smart and curious.  They've been known to steal people's boots and bags and anything they can get their talons or beaks on.  There are even some that have learned how to open and close doors by watching people do it, and have locked trampers inside huts and outhouses for kicks. Cheeky buggers. 

My coworkers Aurora, Kirsten, Rick and me near the end of the track.

Pretty!

Sadly, I don't have any photos of my disastrous mountain biking expedition (Not only was I ridiculously slow, but I fell in some mud not 10 metres from the end of the track), the awesome banana cake I made last week, or of Scruff, the dog I've been taking on walks almost daily.