I’m getting better at this! It’s only been a little over a month since my last entry, and I already have enough material (and time) to write again! Woo! I definitely have more insightful things to say when I’m traveling than when I’m working. Maybe because when I’m working, I don’t have time to think because I’m working. Unless I get a mindless job that gives lots of time to think. But then that’s not good thinking, that’s angry bored thinking. I hit a bit of a rough spell there for a bit. Largely due to the holidays I imagine. I absolutely hate being away for the holidays. I had to do it once before when I was working at Disney World. They were very clear about the fact that we’d have to work over Christmas, and at the time I figured that would be a small price to pay for the joy of working at Disney World. And here I knew I wouldn’t be home for the holidays, just one of many things I’ve done on this trip that I swore I’d never do again (ramen noodles anyone?). It’s not even conscious. It’s just somehow a more miserable time when you’re not with family over the holidays. The holidays are a time where the important things in life are celebrated. It’s a time of the year where, in America, we stop for a moment and focus on family and love and togetherness. Even if it’s watered down by consumerism, there is a still a powerful voice inside all of us that is telling us this is a time to celebrate love and other people. When you’re in a country where everything is different…the weather, the people, the customs, the food, the prices, and you don’t have stability of any kind to fall back on, you’re reminded of the importance that tradition really plays in your life. All the holiday decorations are understated here. There was one house in Wellington, the capital city, with Christmas lights. One. Don’t twist this around my friends, but this trip has made me markedly more traditional, patriotic, and conservative. Don’t expect me to attend any Tea Party rallies anytime soon or start claiming global warming is a liberal media conspiracy, but do expect me to get vocal next time someone says “you gotta change to keep up” or starts rattling off their reasons why America is destroying the world. But we’ll get to that later.
It’s been an adventurous month. It somehow worked out that most of my traveling came all at the same time, so I saw about 75% of the country in a month just now. It was maddening, but amazing. I saw wild pigeons my friends. Wild pigeons. No statues, no potato chip bags, just big beautiful birds in trees in the woods. Rats of the sky no more. Remember that pigeon is just the common name for rock dove…dove…the bird of peace. New Zealand is also known for its long, scenic, and well-organized hikes, called tramps or treks here. The up side is that people here are really active, hiking is a major pastime, and the tracks are very accessible. The downside is that their remoteness is lost under such a scheme. If you want to hike (and I’m talking multiday) you have to stay in huts built by the government, pay and book in advance, and see lots and lots of people along the way. The National Parks in the US always battle between conservation and recreation. NZ does a great job of conserving their parks, but there are so many people and everything is so strictly controlled that it lacks the thrill of hiking through the Mojave and not seeing a soul for hours on end. I found a good hike here that fit the bill, however. I still had to pay, but not too much, and I got to spend the night by myself in a converted trolley car from the 1960s with beds and a kitchen and a “loo with a view” somehow perched on a ridge overlooking a gorgeous valley. It was incredible. There were lots of sheep, as there tend to be here in New Zealand, but there were cows too, cows with lots of space…and energy. I saw cows run. I’ve seen lots of cows before, but rarely do they do much more than saunter, let alone run. These cows were running. Not like a bull charging, no this was a cow running about as awkwardly as you might imagine a cow would run. It did remind me of my Mojave days. Days spent roaming and exploring all alone with no goal but to enjoy the day and the scenery and be alone with my thoughts. It was peaceful and invigorating and amazing. I sure did a lot of walking during this travel bit. I figure I must walk about three hours a day. You want to keep your New Year’s resolution to lose weight? Just eat lots of ramen and walk three hours a day and you’ll have no problem. Plus it’s free!
From there I made my way to Invercargill, the southernmost city in the world. Strange things happen this far south. It’s light at 5:30 in the morning and isn’t dark until 10 at night. Some people would like this, but it’s actually tough to get good sleep. My biological clock had trouble adjusting to only seven hours of darkness. I imagine in the winter it’s just the opposite. Every city in New Zealand has a beautiful public garden somehow named after Queen Victoria, who might as well be a deity. And they all have statues of Peter Pan. Invercargill was no exception. They also had the world’s southernmost blues bar (they play this thing up well) which was incredible – the soul needs live music as much as it needs wide open spacesI think, and a cool little bit of Kiwiana in the form of a man who has covered his home with random oddities. The ceiling is covered with soda cans from all over the world and spanning three decades. His wife has a doll collection. One wall is covered in magnets, another in shells, all lined with pennants from around the country. The bathroom is wallpapered in calendars and beer bottle wrappers. And there are stone jugs thrown in for good measure. And he just shows you around and talks about it himself while you happen to walk by as he’s waiting or his wife to come home for dinner. I’d read about this stuff in America’s greatest travel guide, “Eccentric America,” but it was here in the deep south that I encountered one of the best examples of this amazing eccentricity. It was a marvel to behold. I also became adept at using hot water bottles while I sleep. They generally have no form of temperature control in NZ, so at night if it’s cold, you fill a rubber jug with hot water and stick it under the sheets. It kind of worked, and for some reason it reminded me of Bert from Sesame Street. Somewhere in the recesses of my memory there was a little book I read as a kid where Burt had argyle socks and hot water bottles. Argyle socks have come back into vogue, but hot water bottles I think can stay in the annals of history.
Despite a strong and cheap public bus system, there are bits of the country that you just can’t get to without a car. So I took the leap and rented and ugly Toyota station wagon (the cars here are all quite hideous). I can report a few things. First, gasoline is unbelievably expensive. It cost me the equivalent of $30 to fill up a little over a quarter of a tank. That’s nuts. You might think this would encourage New Zealanders to be green and avoid driving. True, but it also costs less to fly across the country than it does to fill up a tank of gas, so people fly everywhere and every little town has an airport, which is much worse for the environment. And in typical New Zealand fashion, they nickel and dime you for things that are free at home. You got 150 km free…after that you pay. You really take for granted the things that are free in the U.S. until you get charged for things you would never think of paying for at home. Second, driving on the other side of the road is not too hard, except the turn signal and wipers are reversed. So every time I wanted to turn I ended up with my wipers on. It was great being in a car again. For the first time, I felt like I was living in NZ instead of just traveling around it. Not matter how I’ve tried to blend in and become a part of the local culture, I still continue to feel like an outsider, a traveler. Part of this is because I’ve lived in hostels with lots of international travelers and people coming and going, and not many Kiwis. It’s just way more affordable. But being in a car was invigorating. I felt like I could go anywhere. I was no longer limited by buying bus tickets far in advance to get good deals and checking into hostels when I arrived at my destinations and not being able to go more than a few miles on foot. It’s therapeutic, going for a long drive. Anytime I was feeling blue in college I could always look forward to a six hour drive home a few times a year with great music in a great sticker-plastered minivan. I miss driving. I don’t think the rest of the world appreciates driving the way Americans do. Maybe that’s why they’re okay having ugly cars. The destination this time was a cave in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately, there were other people there and a dead rabbit in the parking lot, but it was still really cool. I love being underground. It feels raw and natural. You didn’t have to pay to get into this cave. It was like a trail underground. You had a flashlight, or in my case a nifty headlamp, and you look for markings on the walls telling you where to go next. Just all underground. There were glowworms galore, which are a major source of tourism money in other places. They’re really just dangly worm poo used to attract food, but they light up in the dark and make caves look like romantic night skies. There was graffiti in the cave though. I like artistic graffiti…but not in caves. A prime example of too many people that I talked about earlier. I did another cave (actually an old mine shaft, another throwback to the Mojave days) later on that presented what felt like the first real danger I’ve experienced here. In reality I don’t think there was any danger at all, but something about being alone in a narrow shaft with just the light on my head, at nighttime, in cool weather, immersed above my ankles in ice cold water for the better part of a half hour made me a bit anxious. My feet were cold after that one.
I did meet an awesome Australian at the hostel in Invercargill, and had the first genuinely engaging, intellectual, meaningful conversation I’ve had with a traveler in ages. The fact that most travelers have a more rudimentary grasp of English makes this unavoidable, but it was so nice to talk about something other than cool places to go in NZ, the difference between America and the rest of the world, and how funny different languages are. I often feel antisocial. I love people and I love genuine conversation. Human interaction is what I live for, but I just grow weary of having the same conversation every day for two years. You can’t make nothing but small talk for weeks on end. Invercargill’s final blessing was the jam roll, an awesome little food invention that rests somewhere between doughnut and churro. The deep fried banana I had hit the spot as well. Fish and chip shops are great here. It’s like a carnival. You can take anything and dip it in a fryer and add sugar and you’re set. While we’re talking about food, I had a sticky bun later on as well. My number one most missed food group when I’m away is Pennsylvania Dutch cooking. It’s funny because I lived most of my life without it and though I liked it when in lived in Central PA, I never considered it something life-changing. Friends, I am here to tell you it is life-changing. This sticky bun, recommended by a local as the best in NZ, wouldn’t hold a candle to anything purchased from a bearded man in Lancaster. DO yourself a favor and buy a woopie pie today. Still, it was a very good sticky bun. As Christmas approached I spent a large sum of money on cookies. The marketing guru’s story says that the founder of this cookie company spent time in the US and loved Mrs. Fields so much that he came back to NZ with the revolutionary idea of making big cookies with big chunks of chocolate in them. Sounds great. You don’t realize what a simple pleasure giant chocolate chip cookies are until you hear someone from another country talk about how revolutionary they are (see, it’s the little things I love about America, not the guns and reality TV). The cookies were okay. The branding was great though. I am a sucker for good branding. Despite being dirt poor here, I tend to shy away from generic supermarket-brand food. Yes it’s cheaper, and ye sit often tastes as good, but the experience isn’t there. No matter how phoney-baloney it may be, the little stories about the history of companies, the creativity that goes into artwork and package design, the impression of meaningful tradition, all these things that are involved with the marketing budget of companies, while intended to get you to part with your money, also lead to a feeling of identification with the company. And a lot of money and work and research goes into it. As long as you know it’s not necessarily true, you can free yourself from the influence of corporate branding and allow yourself to appreciate the effort and artistry that goes into it. Supermarket or generic brands dispose of all of this frivolity. You buy pasta and it says “pasta” on a white background. That’s it. You buy “Giorgianno” pasta (fictional name) and you get a picture of a little Italian guy and a story of how the Giorgiannos have been making pasta for centuries and the recipe came from a family tradition, and there’s info on the company and where they’re based and a number to call if you’re not satisfied, and a big Italian flag in the background. And somehow, your pasta tastes better. It’s the same reason why I read the liner notes in every CD I buy and study the artwork. It’s why I watch all the special features on a DVD. Because everything is a creation. There is creativity everywhere you look. Examples of man trying to make sense of the world around him through storytelling. Generic brands is communism at its arts-suppressing worst. So that’s why I bought a lot of stale-tasting cookies. Because outside the store was a big red monster who giggled when you pressed his tummy. And somehow I wished I had spent less money on the better-tasting generics. If only good marketing and good products always went hand in hand.
Cookies reminded me of home. We always eat lots of cookies at home around Christmas. As I said, the holidays are a tough time to be away. There was a night a few weeks back when I literally sat awake at night missing home. This is one of those things that people talk about, but you wonder if they ever really happen. Do people really miss something so much they can’t sleep because of it? No sugar-coasting the facts here – they do. It was only one night, but that one night after weeks of moving every three days I missed home and family, and Etown, and stability, and routine and familiarity and food from the college cafeteria. I always go back to that darn cafeteria. If I ever work at Etown again, I’m eating every meal at that place. Later in the holiday season I had the bizarre experience of missing things I don’t even like. I missed reststops on the Turnpike. I despise the Turnpike. You’re charged astronomical prices for something that should be free and your food choices are limited and overpriced, and yet I missed their regularity, the fact that every one was the same. I missed chain restaurants. Everywhere you go in America looks the same. It’s a crippling and stifling similarity, and yet I missed knowing that wherever I went I could always find a Denny’s with a pancake instead of a crepe pretending to be a fluffy buttermilk American pancake. There are very few chains in New Zealand. Everything is still the same everywhere, they just have different names. It’s monotony without familiarity. I missed chain hotels with big breakfasts and rooms way too big for one person. I missed Belgian waffle makers and restaurants with menus that include every dish known to man including more than one variety of chicken fingers. I used to eat nothing but chicken fingers when I ate out. Literally. I loved it. I became a world expert on chicken fingers and judged every restaurant by the quality of their breaded chicken meat. It was a simple life. Then I discovered that vegetables weren’t so bad after all, and a world of culinary possibilities opened up to me. But in the process I lost my passion for chicken fingers. I became a generalist instead of a specialist. Is there’s one area I knew well, it was chicken fingers. I need to get that back. Make new friends but keep the old. I missed free dipping sauce too. You pay 50 cents here for a packet of ketchup and it’s not enough, even for me, a conservative condiment user. A certain member of my immediate family will be lost when he comes and can’t use an entire packet of ketchup per French fry. I miss Hot Pockets and Pizza Hut and KFC Sunday lunches with the grandparents and homemade pumpkin pie and locally-made potato chips that I don’t have to explain to British people are called chips and not crisps. In Wellington, the culinary and cultural capital of the country, with all its fancy cafes, I missed mall food courts. They’re so democratic. Any kind of food you could want is available to you right there for under $10 in generous portions. There’s no pretension. It’s okay if you don’t know what a latte is and you don’t care. It doesn’t matter if that meat on top of your Chinese rice is chicken, pork, or cat, there’s a lot of it, and it tastes good. When I didn’t miss mall food courts was when I learned that “church picnic” in NZ doesn’t mean “potluck dinner with lots of free home cooked casseroles” but rather “the pastor’s going to the food court at the mall and if you want to go and buy food too, maybe he’ll say hi to you.” In the end, there’s nothing better than a home cooked meal.
So traveling does strange things to me. Much of it is wonderful though. New Zealand is known for jaw-dropping beauty. Many of the places I have seen have made me realize how lucky we are in the US to have such an abundance and diversity of absolutely beautiful places accessible to us in our country. We have everything and we can get to it without any legal hassles or expensive flights. Lots of what I’ve seen here has reminded me of places I know from the US. But Te Anau was the first place I’ve been that really did make my jaw drop. Maybe we have places like it at home, but I haven’t been there yet. Te Anau is a typical small NZ town with typically small NZ verandah-clad architecture and yet its lakeside setting is such that even me, Mr. I Love Architecture All of a Sudden, was astonished by it. For a city to beautiful even with bad architecture means it must be a gorgeous place. My love of architecture isn’t really new I don’t think. It’s been under the surface forever and just now has boiled up and given the light of day. I just named something that’s always been there. But I know I do have a tendency to become absolutely passionate about and completely absorbed with something for a stretch of time, become completely immersed in that topic and make it my life until I feel like I’ve exhausted it and move on. I once subscribed to three car magazines at the same time. Nintendo was once my life. I couldn’t get enough of film. After visiting the Cadbury factory, I spent hours looking up the history of chocolate companies. I have a book now on the history of Nestle in NZ. I’m just an exhaustive person I suppose. When I go to museums, it’s tough for me to be with other people because I move SO slowly, reading and comprehending and thinking about the implications of every little detail, appreciating the artistry and work and thought that went into it. I’m an all-in kind of guy.
Next stop was Queenstown. Queenstown is the biggest tourism destination in NZ. There were lots of Americans there, as opposed to the rest of the country where there are almost no Americans. And they were typically loud, on their cellphones, and more focused on the work they’d left behind then the beauty around them. Queenstown bills itself as the adventure capital of the world. A local guy invented bungee jumping here 20 odd years ago, and since then the town has gained a reputation for offering any kind of crazy activity the human brain can dream up. When people have a limited time in NZ, this is usually where they come. So naturally I thought I’d hate Queenstown. Loud, showy, expensive, party-hearty, and popular are usually not my cup of tea. Perhaps it was the shock of being in a city without verandahs, of being in a place that appeared to be world class, but Queenstown was indeed awesome. It was too expensive though, and like Orlando, great to visit, impossible to live in, so I moved on fairly quickly. I did do some adventure activities. I swang on the world’s highest swing, and that was cool, but there is nothing in the world like skydiving. I bought the pictures at the end…and they cost a lot of money. A lot of money. But I bought them, because all my life I’ve had dreams of flying, of soaring and leaping through the air, and here I actually did it. And the look on my face in the pictures is of such pure joy that I needed to get them. I can’t really describe skydiving except to say that it’s easily the most amazing thing outside of love that a human being can experience. It’s unbelievable.
After skydiving came every traveler’s worst nightmare. The card goes into the ATM. You ready your hand to accept the cash. Except the cash doesn’t come out. Instead is a message on the screen. Insufficient funds. At this point you don’t believe it’s possible so you take your card out and try again. Clearly there must be a mistake. But it happens again. And your heart starts to sink. Oh man. I shouldn’t have bought those pictures. It was a roller coaster day. Pure exhilaration falling through the sky and a few hours later realizing you have no money and no job. So I spent a few days eating nothing but cookies and chocolate I had bought on my Cadbury and well-branded cookie binges until I realized that I’d probably be diabetic rather quickly if I kept it up. And while I did buy new toothpaste when my old tube was sufficiently empty because I have a dentist for a grandfather, I did wear dirty clothes for the next month. Still my next stop, Wanaka, had what many have called the best theatre in NZ. I’d call it the quirkiest. I realized something that day. I love eccentricity. But when it comes down to choosing between offbeat and good, I’ll take good. Yes they served delicious cookies, yes they had an intermission, yes it was incredible to see a full cinema for once, but this oddball movie theater with sofas for chairs (and the shell of an old car) and seating for a few dozen felt more like a living room than a theatre. It didn’t feel like a movie. It looked homemade. The picture quality wasn’t as good. And the intermission broke up the continuity of the narrative on screen. It was a clever novelty, but I think at least as far as film goes, I’m a strict traditionalist. I want my movies as big and loud and high tech as possible, and I prefer them shown in big old purpose-built auditoriums with fancy decorations and ceilings painted like skies. And 3D. 3D is the next revolution. It’s like color. It’s changing the world.
I also hiked on a glacier, which was similar to hiking up an active volcano except here they were obsessed with safety and in Guatemala they may never have known if someone had fallen in. The glacier was really cool though. I even got sunburnt on the bottom of my chin from the reflection off the ice. That’s a new one. By this time it was time to bid adieu to the South Island and head to the big city. Wellington, despite being only the third largest city in NZ, is the cultural and political center. I stayed in a creepy old art deco hostel with a great view of a 1930s train station across the street that none of my roommates appreciated because they spent Christmas Eve getting plastered. By this time I had landed myself a future job, so I allowed myself to go a little wild in the big city, figuring it would be the only time for the foreseeable future when I’d have the kind of resources at my disposal that a big city offered. And it was Christmas, and Christmas is not a time to eat ramen noodles. I had a number of cool experiences here. I went to the Reserve Bank Museum where I was shocked to learn that NZ money is all printed abroad – bills in Australia, coins in Canada. 98% of the money in NZ is held by foreign-owned banks. After WWII, they hid al the nation’s money in a safe underground…and covered it up…with a house…so no one would know. The coins look almost exactly the same as they did in the ‘60s when NZ went from British money to the dollar and the bills are identical to how they looked in 1992. NZ didn’t even have control of their own money until 1989 (I’ll never understand how the British Commonwealth works). And in the midst of all of this, I realized why New Zealanders are so self-deprecating all the time. For their entire existence, they’ve been completely dependent on other people. Even their economy isn’t really theirs. Along with all the benefits that the lack of rampant individualism provides, it also misses out on all the good things. And this is a huge difference between America and the rest of the world. We are a nation of individuals, emboldened by a fictional American dream of self-sufficiency bred largely by the fact that we successfully stood up to the strongest power in the world and won. This creates a lot of problems with American society, but it also instills in us the accurate belief that anything is possible. That with enough hard work and opportunity, we can do something. This is noticeably lacking here. They don’t print their own money!
I did get a free bag of shredded Australian-made New Zealand money though, just by chatting with the museum security guard. I love visiting underappreciated sites and chatting with people who don’t get to chat to people much. Not only do get great insight and meaningful conversation, but sometimes free stuff too. I’ve noticed other big differences between America and other parts of the world. You end up thinking about these things a lot when you’re the only person from you country you see for months on end, whether you want to or not. The most notable noteworthy note, is that religion just doesn’t matter to a lot of people. This is very sad. The first world needs love just as much as the third world. More than ever, I believe in the importance of retaining religion as a central part of society. The result of not doing so is a descent into post-Christian nihilism. I’m sure the rest of the world would not be terribly happy with me calling them sad post-Christian nihilists, and I am not advocating a realignment of church and state. But I am saying that allowing and encouraging religious freedom as a vital trait of the culture is crucial to maintaining meaning and relevance in a society. The lack of religious knowledge or concern for anything deep, meaningful, or otherwise beyond the confines of the immediate and the physical that I have seen is shocking. People just don’t know or care one lick about anything other than the moment, and they haven’t the slightest lick of knowledge about religion or spirituality. America not by any means a Christian nation, nor was it ever a Christian nation, no matter what the Right may try to make people believe, but it is a place where it is accepted and common to believe in spirituality and where diversity of religious thought is encouraged. A society run by specific religious ideals doesn’t work well. We see that in the world now, but a society run without any mention or notion of religious ideals also doesn’t work. It leads, in my experience, to cultures without any frame of reference to draw upon and with an aging population ill-equipped to deal with deep philosophical questions. African Christians are, in general, much happier than European atheists. Faith doesn’t automatically bring happiness, but it does bring peace of mind, a faith in the existence of reality beyond the temporal, and that is something we cannot afford to lose, and it seems that as the world currently stands, the United States, with all our guns and wars aside, is the only world power to uphold that. We should think more carefully about the mixed message that all those guns and war are sending.
New Zealand, though religion exists on the outskirts of society, is of course still capable of heartwarming acts of caring. I came across the Free Store in Wellington. The idea was developed in the US not by the church but by an artist. The idea is simple. Set up a little shop staffed by volunteers, for a just a few hours a day for one week, in a donated store, giving away donated food. The end. Anyone is welcome. No one is turned away. Any amount of food can be taken. It’s not a soup kitchen, it’s a tiny supermarket in the middle of a town of overpriced coffee shops giving away boxes of food for free to anyone who wants them. The complete selflessness and nondiscriminatory nature of the Free Store was shocking. I’ve never seen anything like it. It made so much sense. It was unbelievably inspirational. And it made me angry that it wasn’t the church doing it. This is the church’s job. To be generous and loving without discrimination. The church is generally very kind to the poor. The Free Store is kind to all. I’m not poor. I went skydiving. But I was touched in a way that I can’t describe by the Free Store. They offered even me, an American who’d run out of money from too many adventure activities, a pack of granola bars while he was away from home for Christmas, for free…no strings attached.
And New Zealand is, in its own way, quite endearing with its staunchly DIY approach, laid back attitude to everything, and quirky inventiveness. It’s not better or worse than anywhere else, just different. It’s an unassuming, anti-legalistic approach to life, and that is a good thing indeed. And the history of NZ is radically different than our own. Whereas the United States enjoyed unmatched prosperity in the 1920s after the end of the War, NZ was in bad shape. They had lost a huge chunk of their male population fighting overseas, and as soon as the war ended, they were hit with a major flu outbreak that killed thousands of people on the homefront. While we were dancing the Charleston, they were just trying to stay afloat. In America, our big Hollywood players are in massive guarded and gated complexes. Here in NZ, Weta Workshop, the guys who did the visual effects for Lord of the Rings and the Narnia movies, among others, and who are the center of the NZ film industry, are housed in a small very typical looking warehouse building in the middle of houses in suburban Wellington. There couldn’t be a better example of the difference between our two cultures than this. Or perhaps the choice of New Year’s entertainment would fit too. We open the night with a cover band singing Hotel California, Sweet Home Alalbama, Rocky Mountain High, and other such goodies that have nothing to do with New Zealand. (New Zealand genuinely loves cover bands…they’re cheered with as much vigor as actual genuine music acts get at home.) Then the headliner is the legendary John Rowles. The Rolling Stones were legendary 30 years ago and still are. John Rowles was struggling to complete sentences, and while his voice was still strong, it just couldn’t compete with the prerecorded background music. Napier, New Zealand’s entertainment for New Year’s Eve was a glorified karaoke singer. He had a great voice, and wrote some lovely songs, but even for this genuine lover of diverse musical styles, he was a snoozer and a half on a night that usually tends more toward the exciting. But the fireworks were cool. And finally…pizza sizes. The rest of the world just doesn’t understand that “large” means the pizza should actually be large. If you can eat the whole thing by yourself in one sitting and still be hungry, it ain’t a large pizza.
The holidays were a fun time to be here though. At church we sang Joy to the World, which promptly shifted to “joy to the fishies in the deep blue sea.” The old department store in downtown (a lovely thing to see, and a common sight in NZ, these old independent downtown department stores that aren’t owned by major national chains) had cool Christmas displays in the windows. So now I’m in Napier, the little city that rebuilt itself in mini Art Deco after the town was completely destroyed by an earthquake in 1931, in the midst of the Great Depression with almost no help from the government. Kiwis are great at helping one another. After a few days of trying to convince managers of part-time jobs that my college education has adequately prepared me to do the same jobs as high school kids, I finally found work. It’s a humbling experience for sure, going from straight A student to college administrator to world traveling volunteer to walking into coffee shops and being told that only professional baristas need apply. I remember a time when coffee was something you paid 10 cents for at a gas station. Cigarette smoking may be on the decline, but addiction is still thriving. Only now it’s served with milk, muffins, and cushy chairs.
Napier is a big part of why I came to NZ. I discovered the city while researching styles of architecture that interested me (art deco included) so I could write applications to Masters programs in architectural history more intelligently. There I discovered this little city in New Zealand that held the world’s best collection of this high class building style of the Jazz Age. It ain’t the Hoover Dam or Rockefeller Center (remember they didn’t have all our rampant prosperity), but the small scale subdued brightly colored buildings here shine through from under their verandahs and lend the city a charming air. It’s a nice place to spend a summer. I think Disney has ruined me forever, though. When I walk around Napier, with its genuine art deco buildings, refurbished and repainted, but still the real deal that was built 80 years ago, I can’t help but think of Disney’s Hollywood (formerly MGM) Studios, the fake and idealized art deco Hollywood. Hollywood itself doesn’t look a whole lot like Disney. And Napier, in trying to build in the style of Hollywood, looks a lot like a small Kiwi version of Hollywood would have looked in the ‘20s. But neither of them are half as nice, with half the “aura” of Disney. Except Disney isn’t real. It’s all an act, and the buildings are just shells and only ¾ size. But they’re perfect. And I realized that in a way, that’s okay. I fact it’s good. It’s an opportunity for us to create our own reality, a little romanticized, idealized utopian past unencumbered by building codes or economic realities or any of those other nasty limiting factors of reality. It’s fantasy, but it’s the absolute height of creativity, completely unhindered by anything but imagination. I love animation so much because it is, I believe, the best medium that exists to create entire worlds limited by nothing but the bounds of imagination. It beats live action any day because it doesn’t have to deal with the confines of reality. And so Disney World, for all its evils, will always be providing a valuable public service, the promotion and fantasy and imagination. The creation of a mini-reality a bit more beefed up from the real deal. Except for Europe. Europe really is better than Epcot.
Jeremy
