A Global Election

Proof, once again, that the 2008 US elections in November are on the mind of every single person living in the free world. Talk about clashing cultures: this billboard was in Invercargill, about 20-km north of a place I like to call the end of the world, a.k.a. the Devil's armpit or, more accurately, Bluff (see previous post).

Tui is the brand name of a New Zealand-made beer. It has a ubiquitous advertising campaign, with billboards that present an unlikely proposition on one side, and the words, "Yeah, right," on the other. There's one near work, by the medical school, which seems particularly apropos to me, and reads, "I'm going to give up pies this semester," to which I can respond emphatically: "Yeah, right."

A tui is also a species of bird indigenous to New Zealand. More on that later ...

Anyway, in case you can't see it clearly, this particular billboard, in the implausible location of Invercargill, Southland, reads: If Hillary wins, Monica gets her job back.

Yeah, right. (ck)

The Bluff Oyster Festival

Last weekend, we drove about 250-km south-west to Bluff, on the southernmost tip of the south island. Every year around this time, Bluff holds its annual oyster festival. We drove for about three hours in steady rain. It was like driving through a white tunnel, under a gray blanket. South. Farther south. To the end. The next stop, as this Google Earth image shows, is Antarctica. Bluff is marked with a little gray box in this image. In this hemisphere, only Tierra del Fuego is closer to the south pole.

Every autumn and winter the fishing fleets head out from Bluff to dredge oysters from the impossibly deep and cold sea floor of the Foveaux Strait. The oysters: they grow slowly down there, and come up looking like sharp-edged, barnacle-encrusted little rocks. Something about the conditions makes them taste very good, and the meat is hard and flavorful. One of these guys told me that they'd shucked 500,000 oysters in three hours. They were selling them for $2 each, so they'd managed to shift a million dollars of oysters in a morning.



In a crowded waterproof marquee, there's an oyster shucking contest, with several different categories: Men, women, blindfolded, relay, etc. There are trophies. It's sponsored by The Southland Times.

Bluff is one of the coldest, most windswept, remote, desolate, depressing outposts of humanity in the southern hemisphere. It's the saddest-looking place I've ever been. The people here -- Bluffies -- haven't managed to shape or tame the environment at all. It's shaped them instead. It's brutal: the gray sea quickly disappears in a sheet of fog; dirty little fishing boats tethered to rotten jetties; a cluster of dirty, one-floor buildings crowded around the harbor; the trees bent toward the buildings by the wind; the hills on the other side of town also lost in fog; wet wind; rain; fat teenagers with wild hair roaming the streets; old frayed rope; empty shipping containers; oyster shells by the side of the road.

Inside an 18-wheeler, a band is playing 1950s standards: Three Steps to Heaven; La Bamba; Twist and Shout. And in the background, just more fog. Whiteout. But, the Bluffies are all dancing in the stinging rain, holding their beers aloft, eating their oysters, clutching each other, laughing, drunk, celebrating. Right there, at the end of things, in the last town in New Zealand before Antarctica. In this challenging place I'm sure there's a lesson to learn from the Bluffies.

It's either:

A. Don't live in Bluff; or,
B. Celebrate, wherever you are.

Right now, I'm going with A. (ck)

The 24-hour Book Sale

From noon today until noon tomorrow, the art deco Regent Theatre downtown is filled with thousands and thousands of books for the 28th annual 24-hour book sale. Emeline and I have been waiting for weeks, slowly counting down the days. New books are much too expensive to buy here. The new Salman Rushdie book The Enchantress of Florence is $60NZ.

Again: the new Salman Rushdie book The Enchantress of Florence is $60NZ!

After conversion, that's nearly $50US, or more than twice what Americans are currently paying for exactly the same thing. The written word is such a strange commodity, isn't it? What's it worth? Are we paying double for them to ship the books to New Zealand? Do only rich people read new books here? You can get it from the public library, but you get charged $5 for borrowing new books! That's weird too.

So, I earn less here, but some of the more important things cost more. We've been excited about the book sale since we heard about it. Dunedinites have been dropping their unwanted books off at the theatre and at local BP gas stations for months.

But ... wow, disappointing. I mean, how many copies of Lorna Doone and Wuthering Heights can one city collectively possess?

It was: Lorna Doone ... something by Danielle Steele ... Wuthering Heights ... Lorna Doone ... a Stephen King book ... Wuthering Heights ... Coma by Robin Cook ... Lorna Doone ... Shakespeare ... Jaws by Peter Benchley ... Wuthering Heights. Both were published pre-1900 and, at some point in the distant gloomy past, Dunedin City Council must have decided to issue everyone with their own copies at birth. There were lots of other bad books too: James Michener, Wilbur Smith, James Clavell, Mario Puzo, Jackie Collins, several metric tons of pulp romance fiction, old books on flower arranging, medical textbooks in Chinese, cookbooks in German, dusty, smelly, stained, ripped books.

And there were plenty of other bargain hunters too, even at 10pm. There's an unusual mentality here in Dunedin that we haven't really talked about much. I've heard it kindly described as being, "very down on the farm." This is code for: They don't wash. The smell of some of these people! It follows them around like a nimbus. In the same way that a cheese takes months to ripen and develop, so do the bouquets of these farmyard types. The men wear the same clothes for weeks at a time. The women proudly show off their bristly unshaven legs. Dirty hair. Human smells. Holey shoes. Dander. Glasses held together by tape. Hiking clothes. Extravagant dermatology. Sometimes, you'll be in the grocery store and you'll smell a wet dog, or a yeasty farmyard smell, and, when you turn around, there's just a person there. No dog. Just a wet and smelly person. A fifty-year-old man with thick dreadlocks. Or an old lady wearing all of her clothes at the same time. Or a student with no shoes on.

And so I complained about wet, smelly people to a coworker today, who responded, "Well, it is raining outside." (ck)

Living Things

At the beach, sometimes, you can see living things too. It's not all dead penguins and fish, you know. Here's a living thing, hunting for shellfish in the breaking surf, or trying to catch a wading bird for dinner. Actually, that brown bag has cake in it. (ck)

Shoeless Controversy Continues

Okay, so I said in a previous blog entry that it was weird that the Kiwis in Dunedin like to walk around barefoot. Weird and gross. Well, take a look at what is happening to feet these days. Apparently, there is the idea that shoes are actually making our feet hurt. Or so says Adam Sternburgh in a recent story on NPR and article he wrote for New York magazine. Are the kiwis up to something? Read for yourselves:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89830802

The Japanese, however, are moving in quite the opposite direction. Here is a photo teaser from an email that a friend sent to me just the other day. You can check out other available styles by clicking on the link below. My feet hurt just looking at these pictures!


http://www.alltipsandtricks.com/latest-fashion-shoes-in-italy-and-japan/

Oh those crazy Japanese! (ETK)

Dead Things

We went to the beach today and found some dead things. We waited for a while and they didn't move. That's how we knew they were dead. One of them was a bird, and the other one was a fish. The bird was definitely deader than the fish. (ck)

Wildlife

The gray squirrel. Sciurus carolinensis. They're really everywhere, aren't they? Except in New Zealand. It's taken us a few months, but we've slowly realized there are no squirrels here. Not one!


Back in the United States, squirrels are such a ubiquitous sight, occupying every tree, overtaking parks, nesting in roofs, running along telephone lines. Everywhere. And they're just vertically-inclined rats really, aren't they? And then a week or so ago, I finally said to Emeline, "Have you seen a squirrel lately?"

She hadn't. Neither have I. Squirrels.

So we checked online and, sure enough, they're probably everywhere else in the world but here. In fact, they're probably on the moon, running lightly along the rims of craters, looking for nuts. Now that we haven't seen a squirrel for nearly three months, I think I actually miss them. On a lighter note, we saw a New Zealand possum tonight. It ran across the road in front of us, with it's baby clinging tightly to it's back, it's bushy tail sticking right up in the air. So we can add a new equation to all the others that we use to measure our move to a new hemisphere: We lost gray squirrels, but we gained common brushtail possums.

Okay, okay ... I know there are possums in the US too, but they're not as cuddly as the ones here. Compare for yourselves. Here's a New Zealand possum, chewing on an apple and waiting for a hug.


And here's an American possum, hungry for human blood, an agent for all that is evil. (ck)

I'm a winner!

I'm so glad I didn't have to demand a recount. That would have been a bother. But, no. The people have spoken. And the people are wise. And good-looking. So, this week a copy of the cartoon, signed by the author, with my caption at the bottom, will be sent to my sister in Arkansas. Hopefully, she'll look after it for me.

Right, Deb?

As wild as the land around her ...

Like a virus, rushing unchecked through her vascular system, poisoning her cells, infiltrating, metastasizing, hijacking her organs, Emeline's New Zealand assimilation has gathered speed. It has now reached threshold, as the virologists say. Her case, as the pathologists might say, is terminal.

For months, we've walked among these people, these Kiwis, these simple rural folk, and laughed at them as they do their shopping in shorts and muddy wellies, with their wild unkempt hair, their mud-streaked faces and their crooked, medieval teeth. We've nudged each other when they've walked past us in freezing weather, wearing only T-shirts, shorts and flip-flops. And then we've laughed again when they've told us what they call flip-flops: Jandals.

There's a version of Extreme Makeover on the TV here. It's very different from the US version. First, they give them new teeth. Then they give them new shoes. That's half the show.

Kiwis. They are a strange people; as wild as the land around them. In Queenstown a few weeks ago, as we tasted wine, I spoke with an upper-class American girl attending graduate school at Lincoln University in Christchurch. Lincoln is a well-known center for agricultural research. "The students," she said dryly "are positively feral."

A perfectly-weighted description. Holly Golightly couldn't have said it much better.

Last Sunday, I was drinking my morning coffee in a breakfast place we go to every weekend, when Emeline decided she wanted some milk. In true Kiwi style, she simply grabbed the milk jug and started chugging. Feral! And there was no one for me to nudge. Once it began, it progressed quickly. It was so quick. She didn't feel any pain. And now she has become one of them. Them. One of the Others.