Volume 1 - New Zealand

There were about 100 different ways I was thinking about starting this, the sixth series in my slowly becoming epic collection of travel essays…and then the earthquake happened…and I gotta say, that pretty much takes the cake! In Guatemala, I threw out my back. In Ecuador I got injections in the butt. In Israel, I got attacked by the mystery bug. And now, in New Zealand, I have experienced my first genuine “act of God.” Natural disasters without John Cusack to council me and pretty girls to walk into the sunset with are much less dramatic than I’d like them to be. It wasn’t till I saw the news that I realized how bad it really was, or at least how bad the world must think it was. New Zealand news made it look pretty rough, so I can only imagine what they’re getting in the jewel in the crown of sensationalist news, America. Yes, a few people were injured and many buildings lost walls and pilasters. The downtown is shut down as the fire department assesses its safety, and the water needs to be boiled. My prospects for finding a job may have decreased slightly, unless they need an extra construction worker. The greatest costs, it seems, are financial and emotional. As of yet, I don’t think anyone has died (but there are the coming aftershocks). The last I heard was a cost of about $2 billion NZD (or about $1.5 billion USD). Trouble is, Christchurch is an old, rundown city to begin with. There are lots of old buildings with decorative embellishments of all kinds. It’s these steeples, awnings, and chimneys that fell down. The city is pocked with police tape here blocking off fallen bricks and broken glass, but in reality, it was kind of enjoyable in hindsight. Evacuating the building and standing outside in the bitter ice cold for two hours was far worse that the train ride of an earthquake. The loss of beautiful architecture is a major bummer though, and lots of people were genuinely badly affected. And for the first time in my life, I was on the other side of a soup kitchen.


I actually thought I was on a train. I’ve seen enough of life to not be taken aback by anything anymore, especially after the sun goes down. So at 4:30 in the morning in the middle of a dream when the top bunk on the third floor of the old hostel I was in started to rumble a bit, it blended effortlessly into my dream. In my dazed state, the first thing that happened was that I imagined I was on a train. I had a been on a train for about 5 hours that very day, and the motion of the earthquake on top of a bunk bed is quite literally exactly the same. I could have sworn I had got off the train and checked into a hostel, but I was asleep and the room was shaking, so I just kept on sleeping and assumed I had dreamed the getting off the train part. It slowly dawned on me that I had indeed gotten off the train and checked into a hostel, so my next dazed thought was that my bunk buddy was getting rowdy again. A solid 10% of my adult life has probably been spent dealing with drunk people being drunk late at night. Nothing that happens during these times makes any logical sense, so the idea that my roommate, who had come back this Friday night only a few hours before, would be rustling around in his bed was about the least surprising explanation I could think of. When this appeared not to be the case, I drew on experience. Buildings move in the wind. Many are designed to do so. I knew there was supposed to be bad weather, so naturally I assumed the weather was doing its business on the old building. By this time, I was more or less awake so I got up to answer the call of nature. When I found that I wasn’t the only one out of my room, and that there were no lights on, I became suspicious. But again, I’m quite used to things like this happening in hostels on Friday nights. Then as I’m going to the bathroom, I felt a little wobbly. It seemed like the whole building was shaking…vibrating back and forth. Not up and down, just back and forth. Then it hit me. Holy hole in a doughnut, Batman, we’ve just had an earthquake!

But I get ahead of myself. I was asked recently how long it’s been since I’ve been home. This has become an increasingly difficult question for me to answer. Looking back on my life, it’s hard to find a strain of similarity other than me. Some people question the existence of the soul. Other say the soul is the unity within a series of events undertaken by a physical body. This is kind of like my life. It feels more like a series of lives. There’s Jeremy up to 18, then Etown Jeremy, and Disney Jeremy, and Mojave Jeremy, and admissions Jeremy, and so on. These Jeremys have all been the same Jeremy, but their experiences bear little resemblance to one another and the people from one Jeremy’s life would barely have anything to talk about with the people from another Jeremy’s life. I am the unity among a series of experiences. September 6, 2010 Jeremy is in Christchurch, New Zealand. At about 350,000 people, Christchurch is the largest city on the South Island, the southernmost of two major islands in this tiny anomaly of an island nation. The other island, called the East Island…just kidding, it’s called the North Island, is much more heavily populated but there are only 4 million people in the entire country, which is about the size of California, and 1/3 of them live in one city, Auckland. Four million people is not very many, and there are indeed a lot of really pretty sheep who are hired by the tourism department to stand beautifully in front of rolling hills and mountains nationwide. There are about 9 sheep for every person. If they’re too ugly for pictures, they get served in fancy restaurants. If they don’t smile for the camera, they get shaved at one of the many sheep-shearing shows around the country. “Enzed” as it’s called in its borrowed British alphabet, is somewhat like Australia, except they’re much nicer to their natives and much less 1980s in their fashion. I came here because I missed crumpets and TimTams and couldn’t stand to go another day without them. I seriously had so much fun in Australia those 7 eventful years ago that I had always wanted to visit its neighbor. Anyone who’s ever gone has loved this place, they have a reputation for friendly, relaxed people, a high standard of living, a unique travel-friendly culture, and some of the best scenery and preserved architecture in the world. And I’m flat out of cash after my Year of Living Spontaneously, Authentically, and Peacefully, so I decided to create the Year of Living Off Of More Than Ramen Noodles and get a working holiday visa. The working holiday visa is a foreign concept in America. It’s a special opportunity taken up mostly by Brits and Germans, and a few intrepid Western Hemispherers to work legally in the country for up to a year, not taking any one job for more than 6 months. Most people, in typical backpacker fashion, work at bars. The most desperate are sucked into the slick advertising of the fruit orchards who promise mucho dinero and sunny days. Americans know fruit picking is one of the most physically demanding jobs out there. Mostly immigrant workers doing this work in the US often compare it to indentured servitude and it’s been at the forefront of the organized labor movement since its inception. I was all set to spend my first few months as a sort of British gondolier on the punt boats (native to Oxford and Cambridge) of Christchurch’s River Avon. But a series of unfortunate events (not as funny without Lemony Snicket) have transpired to prevent that from happening. So three weeks in, I’m reacquainting myself with my disdain for looking for jobs and realizing most retail managers are unsatisfied with people whose life ambitions aim farther than their local Starbucks. We all know nothing works out exactly how we plan, but it’s always a bummer to be reminded.

Christchurch is a unique city. I fought with whether to come here of NZ’s other big city, Wellington, the arts and culture (and political) capital of the country. I decided against it because of the punt boat job, Wellington’s awful weather, and the uniqueness of Christchurch. There are lots of artsy cities in the world, but there’s only one faux-British, garden-filled, low rise, crumbling (too soon?) underground cultural mishmash. My first stop was Auckland, universally despised by just about everyone, for no good reason I’ve found. Auckland, in fact is a delightful city that suffers from being in a country people come to visit for “not cities,” for vast expanses of nothingness. And it gets compared to its much larger Tasman neighbor, Sydney, an unfair comparison indeed. It’s like putting Akron up against Chicago. It is sprawling, the fourth-largest sprawl in the world in fact, behind Sydney, LA, and blue ribbon winner Tokyo. It has an interesting and fascinating mixture of old and new architecture in the city center and is very tidy. There seem to be more Asians than anything else, though it also has the largest Polynesian population in the world. The customs agent at the airport was friendlier than anyone working at any airport anywhere in America, and they welcome you with a marae façade (a traditional Maori community building) complete with what my formerly uninitiated self would call “tiki” figures.

New Zealand customs have begun to intrigue me. They love peeing in troughs rather than urinals. They’re so concerned about the environment that some showers only stay on for 5 seconds at a time, requiring you to push the button about 30 times by the time you’ve washed the conditioner out. It’s the anti-Vegas. They serve burgers with eggs and beets (called beetroot here). Burger Kings all look like diners. But they love to nickel and dime you as well. It costs money to check DVDs out of the library. Paying for a library seems to defeat the entire purpose of a library. It is actually quite surprising in a very left-leaning country and reminds me once again of the little things I like about the US. The banks do the same thing. My new Kiwi bank (called Kiwibank and owned by the government…and housed in post offices so that every postal worker is also a banker…how’s that for cost savings?) has won awards for having the fewest extra costs, and they charge you for everything from taking money out of ATMs to writing checks. Transport is cheap though. I flew across the country for the equivalent of $60 USD and realized that I could have got it for $45 if I hadn’t been in such a rush.

They are interesting people, the Kiwis. I met an awesome John Deere enthusiast with an Amish beard who had come to America for a John Deere conference. He wasn’t even a farmer; he was an electrician. This bloke was in my favorite town yet, Greymouth, on the west coast of the South Island. People here are known for being rugged, hard-working outdoorsy people. It felt like West Virginia, very authentic. Lots of gold and coal mining history. My shuttle ride away from Greymouth to the “sunniest place in NZ,” Nelson, was accompanied by a driver who was a tree enthusiast. Many backpackers travel with the “backpacker busses,” a unique budget travel/sightseeing combo that really doesn’t exist anywhere else. You pay more than you would for a bus and less than you would for an organized tour and you get little stop-offs along the way, but no food or lodging or more than a couple activities. I struggled and struggled to see why I would pay more for this than the bus fares, which are always $1 no matter how far you’re going if you book them early enough, and I just couldn’t do it. I felt vindicated when this awesome shuttle driver filled my head with loads and loads of info on NZ and stopped for sightseeing breaks along the way. As usual, getting as far off the tourist track as possible has proven to be the only way to experience actual culture. New Zealand is also peculiar in their lack of centralized heating. It just doesn’t exist very much here. So most places are heated with individual space heaters, making for very cold nights. Individual homes often use coal, since there is an abundance of good coal in the country. Walking through suburbia smelling like a campfire is a memorable experience. There are also zero dangerous animals here. None. Not one. In fact, there are no native mammals in the whole country. There are tons of birds, a few lizards, and a handful of insects, but everything else is introduced (meaning it was brought from outside NZ). It’s so completely opposite of Australia, where even the cuddly platypus is poisonous, that it’s funny. It’s a bizarre feeling to hike through the woods knowing that there is no danger of animals of any kind. I’ve done a lot of hiking, as can be expected. I love it. I decided a few weeks ago to dispense with the handful of Kleenex required to deal with cold weather and get all outdoorsy and work on my farmer snot rocket. Still a little messy, but improving. Food is also interesting. Asian food is king. In downtown Auckland, it’s hard to find anything else. Typical Kiwi food is fish & chips and meat pies/sausage rolls. Every supermarket (or dairy as they’re called here) has “pies” for sale. No apple filling here, just mincemeat. I’ve eaten some local specialties including whitebait omelets (fish used primarily for…you guessed it…bait for catching other fish), fried pineapple with cinnamon, fried mussels, and even (gasp) Marmite. Marmite is the next step down from drinking your own urine, and consuming an entire piece of toast spread with this yeast extract is scarier than asking a girl to prom. But I had to do it. I couldn’t stomach Vegemite in Australia, not even a bite. I had the same luck with British Marmite. So here I forced myself through about a half hour of torture to down an entire slice of Marmite-spread toast. I am victorious!

I’ve taken some awesome trips here. The west coast looks a lot like America’s west coast, rugged and majestic, with awesome mountains running right up to the sea. I also took the TranzAlpine scenic train. I like trains; there’s something romantic about them. This is considered one of the world’s most scenic train journeys, and it goes straight across the Southern Alps, the mountain range NZ is famous for, which rises from the length of the entire South Island. You go from farmland to alpine snow through a 15 minute tunnel and out into West Virginia on the other side. The contrast between the snow-covered rocky eastern slope and the wet rainforest of the other side is quite dramatic. I met a vacationing family from Brisbane on the train who gave me an Entertainment Book for Christchurch filled with coupons. Yea! My hostel in Greymouth was called Noah’s Ark. The rooms were decorated with animals galore and there was a resident dog who sat at the bottom of the stairs all day. It was an old presbytery and aptly named since the town has been flooded about 6 times, and the presbytery was used as a place of refuge during many of these floods. I went to a Pentecostal church there. There was speaking in tongues galore, and not just the Kiwi accent. Anglicans are the dominant religious group where there is religion in New Zealand, and I hope to take in some of that too. I took out a bike from the hostel and cycled about 10 miles out to an old mine sight. It was the sight of the largest mining disaster in NZ history, killing about 350 people in 1898. Today it’s a cool park with loads of information. My Mojave days came streaming back to me as I remembered the myriad ways going into abandoned mines can kill you. Industrial history is so interesting to me. I think I’m interested in the history of work because I like the notion of a time when people actually did something for a living, an agricultural/industrial economy and not a service one. Before marketing people worked. Up in Nelson, I went to the World of WearableArt & Classic Car Museum. What a combo, eh? Housed in an old Triumph (a British car) factory, this museum celebrated both old cars and costume design. Wellington hosts this “wearable art” show every year, but it started here in the much smaller city of Nelson (officially a city and not a town because they have a cathedral…an odd duck that’s a mishmash of architectural styles because it took so long to complete). The show is the costume equivalent of the Oscars and there some bizarre creations mostly made by middle aged women. Isn’t it surprising to realize that people over 30 are involved in entertainment? Watching American TV, you’d think fashion was strictly the domain of women in leggings and men with hair gel and wide-rimmed glasses. Here I learned how a 4-stroke engine works. Engineering and other technical mumbo jumbo has always been a downfall of mine. But I’ve always loved cars, and it was interesting to have something actually explain something that it seems either you know or you don’t. People either know engines inside and out or they have no clue. Now I can happily be somewhere in the middle. I also learned the difference between a fjord (carved by a glacier) and a sound (a river that flooded as the land around it sunk) on a rainy mail run cruise of the Marlborough Sounds at the top of the South Island. It’s a cool concept, getting tourists to pay to ride along on the mail route to houses inaccessible to roads. NZ indeed has mastered the art of tourism.

I also went to New Zealand’s only IMAX theatre in Auckland and reveled in the last giant screen glory I’ll have for a year. The stale corporate hostel I stayed at there had one big plus though…I won bingo! They advertised free pizza at their bar, so I went only to find that it’s free if you buy a drink. But bingo was genuinely free, and while the winner of the first game won 3 free drinks, I won 10 free nights at their corporate brethren around the country. It was at this brother where I felt the ground move two night ago in Christchurch. I may be hooked on bingo now. It’s amazing to actually win something you’ve played so many times and lost. Hostels here are interesting. There are the big corporate hostels where the backpacker busses stop, then there are the YHAs (a worldwide chain of safe hostels), a few other random international chains, and then BBH, the collection of independently-owned hostels. I don’t think I have to tell you my choice. Trouble is, while the corporate hostels have all the party animals, the indies have many people who go to bed at 8:00 and sit around all day doing nothing but reading. I like reading, but I also like talking to other people occasionally. I know the middle ground will be here somewhere. And I lost my Brand New hoodie. The hoodie that introduced me to one of my favorite movies, Say Anything, that I bought at the Brand New show so many years ago. Another lesson in relieving myself of attachment to material things. May its new owner, whoever it is, enjoy its amazing graphics and poignant song lyrics.

And of course women. They’ve been surprisingly absent from my thoughts here, but that hasn’t stopped me from reflecting that most people begin the dating adventure based strictly on looks, not matter what we tell ourselves. I think it was one of the 5 movies I watched on my 24 journey here that put this notion into my head. In doing so, we align ourselves with someone we ultimately know nothing about, except that our id likes what it sees. This creates a bit of universal confusion that leads to issues when the human condition of being awful communicators comes to light. How do we know if we really like someone if we don’t get to know the first? What happens when the looks stop looking so good or are overshadowed by incompatible personalities? What if one person ends up feeling differently about the relationship that they jumped into than the other, when one is into it and the other is not? Of course this exact situation happens to everyone at least a hundred times during the course of their dating life, but it seems so easy to avoid. Just date people who are your friends. Then you know you want to date each other. We start dating before we know we want to date. Bad idea. Just another reason why the “friend zone” needs to be re-categorized as the “dating zone” and the “hey good looking” zone needs to be re-categorized as the “let’s have a conversation first” zone.

Back to an earlier topic. Jobs. I hate looking for jobs. It reeks of competition. Another reason why the days of people actually doing things instead of selling things is so romantic. We worked for ourselves, not for other people. You didn’t have to convince anyone of anything, you just did something and continued doing it. But I know no trades, so I thought it’d be fun to steer a punt boat around a beautiful British garden here in Christchurch. I got the job, but I’ve been so used to fixed-term volunteer programs that when the bossman mentioned not getting off for Valentine’s Day, my mind started saying “I need to be in Napier in February for the art deco festival!” which eventually made its way in one form or another to my words. So I forgot the cardinal rule of applying for part-time jobs – always pretend like you want nothing else in life other than to diligently work for that company till your dying days. But I’d already spilled the beans, and talked myself into a corner of honesty that meant that when I found out there was no way I could work there without either working through February or taking the job and leaving earlier with the direct lie that I would stay for longer. It occurred to me many times that I’m the only person on the planet who would have an ethical issue with doing this, and yet I can’t back away from my convictions, no matter how unpopular or countercultural they may be. This is how I ended up with bumper stickers all over my van in college. Here’s an instance where lying would directly benefit me and telling the truth would directly hurt me. But part-time jobs have become so difficult to come by if you don’t want to give them your whole life, that taking jobs under false pretenses has become commonly accepted practice, so much so that the very idea of questioning the ethical merits of this practice has ceased to be a viable option for most people. It’s a perfect example of rationalizing potentially unethical behavior as a concession to “the real world.” But we all know in reality that the real world is nothing more than what we make it. So here I am, slowly making a more ethical world and refusing to perpetuate a system I disagree with. Finding a job may be tough. Thinking outside the bartender/fruit-picker box is tricky. I’d really like to work at a movie theatre. I’d love to learn the ins and outs of this side of the movie business, and I’ve even emailed some places. Trouble is, I’m now at the opposite extreme. I care too much. Businesses don’t want people who want to learn the trade, they want minions to diligently follow orders. Learning requires thinking and thinking means you can question the way things are done. Here’s hoping for someone who isn’t afraid of the minions. There are plenty of job descriptions I’ve seen online for jobs selling “valuable lifestyle products” (hawking soap at the mall) or “joining a team of self-motivated individuals in a fast-paced, exciting work environment.” America is not the only country to have fought its way out of poverty enough to pay people to write completely meaningless assemblages of letters and claim they have some merit. It’s still shocking to me that we live in a world where people will sign up to sell something or work for someone when they have absolutely no idea what they’re signing up for, and even more so, that they don’t care. This is how capitalism stays afloat – the confidence of the powerful that the weak will always and forever remain apathetic.

So I continue on my journey. To make things interesting, I’m trying my best to be as authentically Kiwi as possible. I want to learn the lingo (zed instead of z, match instead of game, cashpoint instead of ATM), buy NZ-owned, and stay away from American chains. But I do hereby vow in front of everyone to *gasp* abstain from that most Kiwi of experiences, alcohol. Despite the cries of impossibility from my backpacker and American collegiate brethren, it really ain’t that tough, and it saves a lot of money. If I save enough airplane toothpaste toobs, take enough free food and shampoo from travelers who vacate their hostel and offer it to me (even if it smells girly), and learn to love sausage rolls and meat pies, I may just make it out of this country with more money than I came with. And maybe one or two packs of ramen.

Jeremy