No Shoes ... Service!

What's wrong with this picture?

If you said that the boy in the white shirt isn't using the scoop to pick out his dried fruit mix, you're wrong.

HE ISN'T WEARING SHOES.

Yes, no shoes. Oh and his friend also is not wearing shoes. Luckily, Chris had his camera with him while we were food shopping at the supermarket. I've been itching to post about this barefoot phenomenon, but I had to gather photographic evidence so that you would believe me.

It's quite a conundrum. It seems as if the style in New Zealand, well at least in Dunedin, is for young people to abandon their shoes. It's still quite warm outside, so it's perfectly reasonable to wear flip-flops (or jandals as they call them). I can't figure it out, really.

And it's not just the bright young men who are walking around sans shoes, it's the young women. I can't quite distinguish whether it's just the Kiwis who go shoeless or if it's a phenomenon that spans nationalities?

What's even more disturbing is that the shoelessness is not only reserved for supermarkets. You can walk down the busy city streets on any given day and see people without shoes. In my opinion, it's a) gross, b) dangerous, and c) gross. There are bits of glass, gum (or chuddy as they call it), trash, cigarette butts, you name it in the streets and yet the shoeless do not seem to notice. We even saw some guys running the GutBuster (see previous post) without shoes!

Even more funny is that it's not forgetfulness or like there was an emergency and you had to leave your house so quickly that you go shoeless. These people are walking around for long periods of time without shoes. How do I know? Their feet are stained black with dirt! Take a look:

Okay, so this isn't the best photo of dirty black feet. But at least you can see that a third shoeless boy has decided to join his mates in a leisurely day of food shopping. Magic! (ETK)

Land of the Long White Cloud

The Maoris call New Zealand Aotearoa, which can be translated in English to Land of the Long White Cloud. It's a beautiful image really. We really didn't know what it meant until we'd already been here for a few weeks. In Dunedin, the clouds are everywhere. Like a constantly changing and unpredictable dimension to the city, they gather everywhere, form quickly, hide parts of the city, change shape, break up, and then disappear again. It's as if the city is evolving and changing all the time. Maps are useless here.

This photo is taken from our house, looking across the Wakari valley toward Dunedin. Do you see the thick white band of cloud?




Sometimes we drive from bright sunlight into a thick rolling bank of clouds. I hold my breath.

Half the time, clouds hide the top of Mount Cargill, which rises into the sky north of Dunedin like a bright green cone. It disappears. In fact, when we first flew in over Dunedin, the only thing we could see (although we didn't know then what we were looking at) was the top of Mount Cargill, its television transmitter sticking up mysteriously through the carpet of clouds below it.

Sometimes, in the afternoons, when the temperatures start to drop, clouds move in from the sea and fill all the valleys, marching into the mouth of the harbor, slipping over the city. It happens so quickly, you can sit and watch the clouds advancing, across roads, swallowing up cars, houses, and schools full of dirty foul-mouthed little feral children (it's true). It's like a bad 1950s B-movie: Attack of the Killer Clouds!!

Last Wednesday, we walked across Logan Park by the university to our second wine appreciation class (French, Italian, and Spanish: It was a frenzy). Between one part of town and another was a huge white solid-looking wedge of cloud. Immovable. It was like a building.



I've watched the clouds gather a couple of times now, filling the cooling valleys that sit between the sunny hills, and it always reminds me of scenery clouds being brought on stage, sliding smoothly into place on well-lubricated pulleys. Yesterday, we sat in our living room and watched a thunderstorm pass across the Wakari valley. Afterward, the sun came out, and between the trees on the hill below us, just behind our backyard, the clouds were rolling and churning and moving so quickly that they looked more like smoke. Ten minutes later, they were gone.

I suspect witchcraft of some kind. Maybe the neighbors, who seem to watch the TV 20-hours a day. Emeline thinks, perhaps, Hobbits are responsible. (ck)

Our Grill.

No joke ... this is a photo of the grill that sits on the deck outside. Capt' n Cook. Get it? (ck)

Wine Tasting in Central Otago

We've just spent three days in central Otago, tasting wine in searing autumn temperatures, standing in wineries, just feet away from rows of plump grapes ripening on the vine, swilling pinot noirs and chardonnays and pinot gris and reislings and sauvignon blancs around our mouths, squirting them between our teeth, gurgling them noisily over our palates to oxygenate them, and then, always, without fail, without even thinking, 'But it's not even 11 o'clock in the morning yet,' swallowing them with a gulp.

Then pausing with a practiced air, our heads cocked to one side, as if listening very carefully to something in the distance, while we pretend to appreciate the afterfinish.

And then driving half a mile down the road to the next winery. And repeating. And then driving a little farther and doing it again. And again. As the sun climbs higher. All day.

Driving through the goldfields, along tight dusty passes that thread between imposing mountains, next to deep gorges cut by cataracts of bright blue, glacier-fed rivers, to the next winery, with its well-tended vines looking in the distance like a green tabletop, half-hidden by the peaks, made pale by the early morning mist.

Heaven. (ck)

A Road Trip!

So, a little primer on Dunedin: It's a (usually) rainy city on the east cost of the south island of New Zealand, settled in the mid-1800's by a bunch of crazy Scots who, although very far from home, had somehow managed to wash ashore in a place that looked just like Scotland. Gold was found in the remote hills of central Otago in the 1860s, and Dunedin sprung up almost overnight, funded by the sudden wealth, which explains some of the imposing, solid-looking and completely over-the-top Gothic revival architecture here. They likes they gargoyles.

Anyhoo, we sit behind a modest harbor, formed by a little infolding in the coast. Stretching away from us to the northeast and jutting out into the cold Pacific is the Otago peninsula, a rumpled and windy place. There are no gas stations out there. Plenty of people live on the peninsula, but they've found a way to live that doesn't impact the wildlife and there's penguins, albatross, sea lions and whale sightings. Here it is.



You see? So, yesterday, with our new (to us) wheels, Emeline and I headed out to the peninsula, on a road with sharp hairpin turns and absolutely nothing stopping you from driving straight into the sea. We visited Larnach Castle, the only castle in New Zealand. It's amazing that this wilderness, and also this crazy castle perched on top of it, sits just 20-minutes away from where we live. The views were amazing. Here's Emeline, banished to the tower for making jokes about Hobbits on the tour.




And then, driving back to Dunedin along the hill road, with a storm blowing in from the sea, we stopped for a moment in one of the windiest place I've ever been. (ck)

A New Family Member

I suspect we might end up calling him Squeaky, or The Gurgler. He's 14-years-old, and teenagers can be temperamental. (ck)

Don't Drink and Fry!

New Zealand is a drinking culture, which is hardly surprising when you consider just how much wine is produced here. Even so, we're constantly surprised by the level of drinking. On St Patrick's Day, we stood outside the central library at 5pm and watched a very drunk student stagger past us down the street at an angle that defied physics. Dressed in green, and squinting into the sun, he stumbled around like a cowboy in an old Western movie who'd taken a slug to the gut. The entire town was drunk.

In fact, there's someone here at the university whose responsibilities include hosing the vomit from outside the Medical School every Monday morning. Imagine what it looked like the morning after St Patrick's Day! It looked like it had been raining pizzas! Deep-pan, too. If aliens visited Dunedin, their report would conclude that St Patrick's Day celebrations involve regurgitating on street corners.

So many people go home after a night at the pub, cook themselves a midnight snack, fall asleep, and then die in house fires that there's a new safety campaign on TV. It has the slogan: Don't drink and fry.

In the central Otago valley, just an hour or so west of Dunedin, grape vines grow in ordered rows all over the hillsides. Order from disorder. Some of the world's best pinot noirs are made there. This long Easter weekend, Emeline and I are planning to drive there (in our new {to us} car) to sample some of them (because we can't afford to buy a bottle). Last night we got into the spirit (hah!) of things by attending our first wine appreciation class, offered through the university. At the start of the class, the instructor (hilarious, red-nosed man) made us stand and repeat an oath, which gave thanks to Bacchus, god of wine, and included promises never to drink from plastic and to attend as many wine frenzies as possible. It was a blast. It was a frenzy. Here's a photo I took of Emeline after the class. (ck)