it's april, fools.

friends. for the month of april i'll be totally out of communication and touring the countryside. doing a couple of the 'great walks' which are 5-6 day tracks a piece and then some casual milling about. mom, i'll take lots of pictures and try and find phone booths. beth, watch heavenly creatures, it's not as good as invisible mom but it's set in christchurch and kate winslet is really intense. we've picked up a stray cat and it really looks like a lemur and the flat mates call it daniel day-lewis. it's pretty good with a tennis ball and so far is surviving pretty well on a primarily couscous diet. kisses.

puxatillie paul

listening to my ecology professor trying to explain the concept of groundhog day to a roomful of apathetic kiwis today has most likely been the highlight of the week. desperately searching the faces of his pupils for some sort of recognition when confronted with "bill murray? puxatillie paul? they have the movement of a rat but the cute of a rabbit? they're weather forecasters in the states." blue powerade is huge. locals bleed it i think. this weekend i went south south to the college town of Dunedin for the extended easter break. part of the reason it's taken me so long to post is because i believe this excursion to be more or less a bust with only a few minor notable or writable hiccups. nothing to write home about, so to speak.

one would think a largely agnostic country like this one would proceed with little more then the obligatory pleasantries of the rebirth of christ within the public sphere. logically, when maintaining a population as diverse as new zealand's one would assume it would be in the best interest of the government to try and stay away from the forceable celebration of any sort of exclusionary holiday. however, the one thing i've come to realize with relative certainty about this place is that hardly anything is handled logically, methodically or efficiently. new zed is in it's awkward teenage years, lanky and oily and snapping girl's bra straps at the lockers. still very much in it's colonial phase, this laid back culture seems to be caught in a timewarp and seems to still be resorting to a more or less 'trial and error' approach to life. not that i'm complaining. the mountains are close, the skies are sunny and to someone who often felt out of place in the drone of the great machine us of a, a more informal approach is most often welcome. man that was a doozie of a tangent. apologies and we press on.

so yes, the whole of dunedin was shut down upon our arrival. groceries, pubs, restaurants and all stores were closed in this party town 2 out of the 3 days of our stay. food was scarce and we were left to our own devices for most of our stay. lots of pidgeon watching. and kiwi watching. one interesting perk of our misadventure was that it is on these national holidays that the locals come out of the woodwork to do the same touristy things i've been enjoying since my arrival, including the cadbury factory and speights brewery tours (pride of the south!). these were a huge part of the experience and included a chocolate waterfall and 20 minute open-bar taste-test/pillage, respectively. so overall, the town was cute with interesting (volcanic) architecture, the world's steepest street, and i'm sure a lot of local flavor when it didn't look like a zombie town, but the true worth of our journey wasn't apparent until we ventured out onto the otago peninsula the following day.

The otago peninsula boasts and hosts the only northern royal albatross colony in the world, as well as yellow-eyed penguins, little blue penguins, fur seals and sea lions. unfortunately what they don't tell you is that you is the only way one can actually see the whole of these creatures is to pay copious amounts of shrapnel to the corporation that privately owns the beaches of Taiaroa to take a separate private tour for each species. so that comes out to: $35 for a tentative albatross sighting, $30 for yellow-eyed penguins and $30 a sea lion, so much as i can gather. we blew the whole thing off and took a hike to the edge of the world and i got to stand next to a few sheep on a cliff side staring out to pacific abyss. my god the sites! windows down arms out tiny dancer golden slumbers.

'happy girl COME SWIM'

welly welly wellington. i feel as though i've aged five years in the past four days, so many faces so many stories. my flatmate sam and i flew up to the north island this weekend for the Beirut show at a little venue that was spooky similar to the black cat, down to the extreme air-conditioning and coat room. more on that later, the show was amazing but as i'm experiencing more and more frequently here it seems as though the destination is never really what makes the weekend. the hostile we stayed at the first night provided a host of colorful characters to welcome us into this beautiful city. i bunked next to a beautician from liverpool and above an older chinese woman who talked to herself in the night and left us caramels just like your chinese grandmother is supposed to. she smelled like tobacco and peppermint! haa.. the next morning sam and i took a ferry out to Day's Bay, a little island off the coast of wellies. there we hopped on a bus until the driver wouldn't go no mo and jumped onto a rather inconspicuous hiking trail behind the bus depot. we climbed for most of the day winding amongst tropical switchbacks and loony amounts of silverfern, which seems to be the logo for all things nz born and therefor all things rubgy,beer and souvenir. summit was at the golden hour, and the light played sweetly off of the cutest little owl i've ever seen whos eyes followed mine and stayed as long as we did. dinner was kiwi juice down palm and wrists with feet dangling into a valley where dinosaurs live. that night was drinks with hostile kids, very diverse and outgoing group because at least we have the packs on our backs in common. met up with a group of gambleshark irishmen here on a worker's visa for a year and 'living the dream' they wanted to talk about Burning Man and st. patty's plans and claimed their home version of paper scissors rock was foot cockroach atomic bomb. day two was the zoo, cute but pretty unimpressive because zoos are depressing unless life of pi is true. unimpressive save the kiwitalk at 1:15. here, the zookeeper (american, i'll have you know so it can be done!) brought out a one-legged kiwi saved from a possum trap years before. it hopped around and even had a prosthetic leg, which was molded carefully by Weta Workshop (ring any bells?) fit especially for it's little stump. kiwi solidarity at it's finest.so it is the evening of this night that i was able to embark on a hike through wellington's nature sanctuary after sundown. thus far, the most important and fantastical portion of my trip i think. this is getting on, so i won't go as far into it as i'd like...but this hike did a tidy job of reaffirming my choice in career direction, a welcome relief to any undergrad to be sure. tucked into a rolling jurassic nook between two mountains, one by one each nocturnal species would reveal itself to us through it's own specific call. we were confronted by some parrots (kaka) and a couple of mockingbird-like tui birds on our treck, the birds of this region quite brash because it has no reason to fear humans due to extremely strict protection laws...birds, stoats and all other mammals are another matter entirely. as evening settled in i caught my first look at the southern cross and an upside-down orion as the call of the ru ru, a tiny little pigwidgeon-like owl floated out of the hills. ten mintues later, we were delighted with the "weep weep" of a female kiwi bird. the air was quite electric, and as we proceeded down the path we were slowly surrounded by tiny little light prick constellations of glow worms, and a short time later a male kiwi stomping and snorting in the trail in front of us.

the last day was a trip up mt. victoria, which availed to me a 360 degree view of this fair city and a number of lord of the rings filming locations. you can imagine the hilarity that ensued the hours after i found a 6 year old cracked sign in the mud with an arrow pointing to the general direction of these fabled glens. thank god for self-timers and relatively vacant trails, or things would have gotten awkward quick explaining to the locals exactly why i was looking for a specific root with a maniacal grin and a hint of desperation between the brow. so yes, blackriders take flight. the performance that night was amazing, the my fellow general admissions were actually waltzing along with this fantastic horn/uke get-up on stage and the band played well into the night and finished with a serenade of hallelujah. i melted, life is lovely and to the four of you reading this i miss you dearly madly.

no-name girl in jelly shoes

what they say is true, i believe they keep the rawest kinds of beauty here at the bottom of the earth. at the end of all things? this weekend i was lucky enough to experience a sort of scenery that was so effectively unhinging...i mean no words. i've tried to write this thing on like seventeen different occasions with the intention of conveying the particular sort of newglee i felt in these mountains, almost giddy. i don't want to be tired and overdramatic and i don't want to downplay this thing, but i think it's a personal sort of affirmation you'd feel when you make you really nail knitting for the first time or have just successfully cooked a dinner from start to finish with only minor third degree burns. So to set the scene; a german engineer, an aspiring film producer, a self-described woman's rights activist/hip-hop choreographer and i walk into a bar...and then the next morning all pile into a rental car named "sunny". steering on the wrong side where left is right, we set off across the country through wildly winding/jutting/plummeting mountain roads negotiating our way through some seriously stomach droppingly stunning scenes, too surreal to really comprehend. it was a kind of setting laid out in front of us that it would not have been surprising at all to have to break for an orc riding a t-rex around each prehistoric jutting cliff-face bend in the road. "new zealand....it's not just part of Australia!!!" Four hours and half a tank of gas later, it's sunset on the west coast over a slice of the weirdest pizza i've ever experienced (when placing our order, we were asked if we wanted apricot or barbeque sauce with our broccoli pie). We had arrived in Punakaiki, known for it's beach front blowholes and pancake rocks...intriguing. It was here I had my first mountain-cliff-beach-rainforest collision and still haven't fully recovered. A short hike spat us out onto this rocky outcropping overlooking this canyon of an ocean setting, giant rock faces emerging out of the sea like the remnants of some kind of ancient city. "new zealand....rocks!!!" i can't describe this scene adequately, and the pictures never do it justice, but i got that adrenaline rust taste in my throat and my chest kind of closed up and my pupils dilated and words weren't ready. after sunset we retreated back to an adoreable beach hostile thing and bunked with two french mons who picked out various django reinhardt battles until the wee hours. It's weird not being able to fall back on the same cheap cultural references for jokes or having all puns or word play fall flat. i find myself thinking about half a dozen times a day 'bummer, that would have killed back home'. humor with a language barrier is diminished and oddly enhanced with exaggerated facial expressions with no throwback inside jokes to fall back on. we laugh at phrasing, these guys nearly burst a blood vessel when i used the phrase "wailing on it" when attempting to describe how to really obliterate someone in foursquare. so yes. the next morning we loped along the beach and then got back into sunny and drove the rest of the way to hokitika, a small town where this annual Wild Foods Festival is held. It's interesting being in such a small country, the entire region has this sort of small town community type feel. no one has as last name on the south island, folks here on the east were talking about going to this festival like it was some theme party down the road, and it was known that very few would be left behind. some took party buses, many hitch-hiked (notably quite safe here, and a common practice for much of the starving youth of the nation) but one way or another the majority of Christchurch and everywhere in between set out on this weird kind of pilgramage to get their hands on some whitebait and mountain oysters. It should now be noted that this festival ended up being completely lame, the food was pretty tame and expensive...we were done with it in an hour and spent the rest of the day tramping around in the mountains we had seen the day before on the cross country drive that was easily the highlight of the weekend. in this case the journey truly was the reward. except the earthworm in a shot of redbull. that was pretty sweet.

wickets in atlantis

terrible at updates. much has occurred! but for the interest of sound bites and my vastly expanding audience (har har har) brevity is king. when i left you, i was preparing for my first cricket game with a girl i had met the night before who calls herself claire-lyne. she is french and witty and speaks in a kind of english that is far more eloquent and accurate then my own. we traveled to the stadium, purchased tickets from a fellow dressed as a giant caterpillar in a neighboring alley and made our way to the stands. we were immediately surrounded by masses of 'fans?', all boasting various types of disguises, full grown men dressed as babies, 15+ groups of students with gas masks, hula skirts, butterfly wings, etc... this is part of the cricket experience, as well as having the opportunity to drink uninterrupted for 6+ hours (more if you don't leave at halftime as we did). Claire-lyne did her best to explain the intricacies of the sport to me during our lengthy stay, but it was near impossible to pick up on the subtleties of this absurd game while the group behind you is competing to see who of them can alternately ingest the most spf30 and bacardi. sunburned again, for the hole in the ozone is directly above us. the most direct evidence of global warming i've witnessed in my young life. tell your friends! the day after, my flatmate sam and i traveled with a jane austin-obsessed/stiff upper lip sort of kiwi new friend fellow to the mountains for my first real day of newzealish scenery. we used the gondola to reach the summit, where a 360 degree view of christchurch was unveiled for us. astounding and breathtaking, and only made me want to see everything else this land has to offer so much more. not yet brave enough to mountain bike down the mountain, we made our descent on foot hiking through some very dense and elvish forests and rolling gold hills all around. we were spat out in a small sea town called lyttleton which provided for us a street fair and it's own harbor dolphin. i think this was the best day yet. something about that altitude makes your soul all jumpy and hungry for more, enough to push the silly fears and insecurities away that have resurfaced since i've arrived in an unexpected package of freshman year regression. the week following classes began, though they don't seem to be much of a priority around here. alcohol continued to run through the streets this week, part of the enrollment experience the locals tell me, complete with local music performances/toga parties/dance parties at the university pub every night. through this week we sort of acquired motley assortment of regulars around our own respective flats and began to make nightly potlucks and city walks a habit. Claire-lyne and sam have been showing me some cooking tricks, the pride of the week being green-lipped kiwi muscels and sushi. and a few nights ago we were all able to experience risotto prepared by an absolutely and unknowingly hillarious young german who is known as sebastian. these are the nights i miss blacksburg most, but also the times i can begin to understand how many of many friends who were already lucky enough to begin traveling can't seem to stop. there is so much to learn, folks! so much more then i ever thought possible! the days passed with classes, job hunts and club openings. i joined a tramping club with the usual goal of meeting more people and a promise of exploration of surrounding south island hot spots. somehow i also found myself signing up for more information in association with a local ninja society (putting the 'sass' back into assassitation). on Wednesday i was really able to explore the nitty gritty of the christchurch bus system though traveling to the farthest reaches of this city's public transportation to pick up a bike i purchased off a sketchy kiwi craiglist-type site. after about an hour of wandering around the outskirts of town into batch after batch of disintegrating suburb, i arrived at my destination. all the doors were all open, and there was the sound of about a dozen or so screaming children pulsing out into the driveway. i could see my bike from the road and feeling as though the I had reached the extent of my taste for adventure, really had to fight the urge to leave my money in the mailbox, grab the thing and run. as it turned out, the bike's owner was an amazingly jovial and kind fellow who proceeded to tell me all the wrongs of america, stories his beverly hills movie producer sister told him and he shuttered to believe were true. (i promise you, he showed me a picture of her in front of her mansion clutching three emmys.) here in front of me in his lazy boy with three small children scrambling over his considerable girth was another kiwi who promised me that there were, indeed no sharks around new zealand...a claim i still refuse to believe holds any merit.

so from here came another weekend of more of the same. saw some more local musics...as far as i can tell, all kiwi influence is originally derived from some kind of ragae/smashing pumpkins fusion. fashion mullets are very much the rage around these parts, and the phrase ("it's all g, boi" is considered fresh and edgy. and all the pubs play beyonce. constantly. including destiny's child favorites. i went to the beach today and had a surfing lesson. it was a hillarious failure, definitely can't wait to go back for round two. i miss you all more then i can say. it's proving more and more difficult with each day to resist the urge to start my senteces with "well back home, we..." i'm sorry if this dragged on, if i were you i'd use the speed reading method mr. gillespie taught us for Paul Revere's ride , and skip everything but the first and last sentences of each paragraph. i watched gross pointe blank last night, and will always love john cusak.