Katie's Input
Although I'm having a lot of fun here, I will be glad to get back home. Things here are always just a bit different than the way I am used to them, and that gets a bit unsettling.
Lately my friends and I have been talking a lot about travel. My friend Pecky's mom manages a hotel in Thailand and says we can all come and stay if we want. Anna's aunt is giving her and a friend a trip to Australia after graduation (tickets for me not paid). And last but not least, I would love to go to Germany/Denmark next summer to visit with Karen and Drew and Mark and Katja. If only we all had unlimited money to travel.....that would be the life!
Anyways, a few weekends ago Grandma Ruth and I went to the Wellington Zoo for the close encounter with the red pandas! It was seriously incredible. The pandas were so sweet and they just came up to you and jumped on your lap and ate from your hand. I really had a great experience. Here are some pictures of me with the red pandas:
Thats Ed--named after Sir Edmund Hillary. Isnt he sweet?!?!
Nothing else much new is happening here in Wellington, although our family is embarking on a trip around the North Island in about a week and a half. That should be lots of fun!
Love,
Katie
New Zealand
By Megan Steen
Coming here to New Zealand has been a very fun and educational experience,because I now have two new friends,a cool new school,and some great new stories to tell everyone when I get back to America.All in all,I am very happy that my mom took us here on sabbatical.
Napa in NZ
Ruth (my mother-in-law) leaves today after a three week visit to NZ. It’s been lovely to have her here, though we haven’t gotten her to as many places as we would have liked (life and work seem to have gotten in the way). So yesterday when we awoke to an absolutely miserable day (foggy, rainy, icky), she and I decided to throw caution to the wind and just go somewhere. We drove north to Martinborough, Greytown, Featherston not knowing what to expect. Of course, as with almost every drive here, the roads were windy. We drove up and over beautiful mountains, and down into the most rural of landscapes. We did some wandering in other towns (we discovered PuzzleWood, which I’ll take the family back to some weekend) before happening on Martinborough. It is a lovely little town and seems to be the center of all things wine in the south part of the north island. Standing in the town square, we thought we could see vineyards at the other end of every road we looked down. It was a no-stoplight kind of town, and just about every store seemed to be all about wine. We had a lunch of kumara (sweet potato) and corn soup, warm bread, and fancy cheese and fruit. Twas strange and wonderful to just be two grownups and not have to worry about whether we had the right snacks, when naptime would hit, whether the restaurant had chicken nuggets… It was just lovely, rain, fog and all.
Kia Ora Khalid
[This is reprinted from Thorndon School’s weekly newsletter. Megan and her classmates were asked to write about their experience during a field trip to Capital E, a children’s art festival here in Wellington. Meg’s teacher liked her article so much that she gave it to the principal, who printed it in the newsletter.]
Yesterday my class went to the Capital E Festival. Of all the shows we saw, the opera “Kia Ora Khalid” in the Opera House was my favourite. It all started with a game of Touch. The girls Titiana and Tre were winning 3 to 1 to Tom. Just then, Khalid, the new boy, came over and asked if he could play. Tom said he couldn’t play and the girls said he could. Finally, Tom gave in and said Khalid could play if he told them why he came to New Zealand. Khalid told them of the bombs that killed all his beloved ones. Tom said it was just a sob story, but Tre believed him. Titiana asked why she believed the sad story, so Tre told them of beautiful Cambodia where her grandfather had almost died. This reminded Titiana of her favourite uncle, Sio, who was killed by a suicide terrorist. Then Tom remembers that his grandfather was a refugee, just like Khalid, and they realise they are all the same. This was an educational, well-acted play and I loved it.
By Megan Steen, Room 8
Labels: Megan, School
Driving…
After my idyllic posts, I thought I’d add a rant so that people don’t get the impression that life here is perfect. I HATE driving in Wellington. On top of the whole “wrong side of the road” business, they have this weird rule that the person on the right has the right of way. I’m not even going to get into it, but it’s incredibly hard for me to wrap my head around. Dug had an epiphany a couple of weeks ago—the rule is based on every section being an imaginary roundabout (there are loads of roundabouts here). It’s a moderately helpful observation, but I still freeze up when I’m at a corner and someone other than I also wants to make a turn.
The real reason I hate to drive here, though, is that the roads are hilly and narrow. There are an awful lot of places where people park along one side of a road making it into a one lane road, and with the twists and turns it’s often impossible to tell whether someone is coming the other way. There are several spots like that on the way to Ali’s daycare (the only place we have to drive on a regular basis), and I try to get Dug to do that errand as often as possible. People here are, of course, used to this, so they drive quickly and boldly, neither of which I seem to be able to convince myself to do.
This morning I caught myself fantasizing about those wide straight roads back in the place we call Boulder… Maybe we will come home after all.
Learning to Lie
Looks like someone needs to learn how to keep quiet when it would suit her:
Me: Alison, is that a sucky [pacifier] in your mouth?
Alison: Mommy gave it to me! And I’m not poopy!
Labels: Ali
Katie's Exciting Kiwi Life
Hello Everyone! I keep forgetting to write, but I'm writing now.
Lets see..Updates Updates...
Well, as you know, I'm attending Wellington Girls College and I'm having a lovely time. I have made some great new friends, and I am enjoying my classes (although they are mostly too easy for me).
They have a strange system here called NCEA which awards credits for assesments throughout the year and you pass the year with something like 80 credits. (End of the year exams are like 40 credits alone) So, I proudly announce that i have TWO WHOLE CREDITS!! Yes....I passed an exam in Physics. I got every answer right, but that doesnt seem to matter, because it was a Pass-Fail Test. But anyway, i was proud of that achievement.
For music class I have to do a solo performance and I've been practicing my two performance songs with my in-school vocal teacher. She is very nice and her name is Ms. Reynolds. The two songs i'm singing are "Salti di Terza" or "Interval in Thirds" (creative name, i know) which is a very pretty Italian piece that I am required to sing. The other song is "How Could I Ever Know" from the musical the secret garden. My solo performance is in April (i think) and i reckon dad and mum will take plenty of photos and videos when the time comes. :)
Last but not least, this friday is the year 11 dance with Wellington College. That should be fun!!
Ciao,
Katie
P.S. I am picking up new Kiwi phrases everyday!
Wahine Memorial Park
Sara asked me to post a few pictures of our trip to the shore the other day, so here goes. But first, some context.
Wellington proper (or “Wellington CBD”, which stands for Central Business District, as they call it here) is in the upper part of the pic above; we live in Thorndon, which is at the very far north of this picture. As is pretty obvious from any overhead map, the big blob to the right, Miramar, used to be an island until one of the late 19th century earthquakes (and, I believe, some bull-dozing help) turned it into a “peninsula”. The airport is located on the connecting land. We took our lovely walk in Wahine Memorial Park, which is at the southern tip of Miramar (near the Googly “A”).
Below is an overview of the whole area. You can see the meadow, the rocks, the water … even a few visitors you might recognize (click the picture for the large version).
And here’s a little wildlife. Sara thinks the bird is a “shag”. I do not think that word means what she thinks it means.
Here’s a (very short) video of the waves. I love the way that the water cascades off the rock.
To see all the good pictures from that day (with captions), you can check out the album at Picasa. Or just watch the slideshow below:
Labels: Wellington
Writing in the garden
I came to write (an academic paper), but I am in such a blissful spot that I thought I should share it. As Dug has mentioned, we live five minutes from the Botanic Gardens. The Rose Garden is on the closest corner, and last week we discovered a small cafe here. This morning I wandered over with my computer and am now sitting at a table outdoors under a canopy of greenery, looking out over fields of roses. To make it even more idyllic, there is a fountain going, ducks wandering around underfoot, and I have a lovely hot mocha at my side. The greenery overhead reminds me of Lori, and the mocha reminds me of Amy, and I wish one (or both) of them were here to share this with me this lovely morning.
A walk on the shore
It is a stunning day here in Wellington, and it’s Sunday, so we headed out to explore new territory. We went to Moa Point, which is the South east corner of the city. While it is only ten minutes from the heart of downtown, it feels like a national park. The ocean is on one side, green hills on the other, not a house in site. The road around the peninsula on which the point resides was filled with bicycles today, and the few cars that wandered out that way went slowly and were respectful—it seems like the road belongs to the bikes. We saw some beautiful birds, found an assortment of Paua shells, and Ali played in a meadow right next to the shore. Meg suggested that a sheep belonged there, and that felt right. Apparently you can sometimes spot penguins there, so we’ll go back at dawn or (more likely) dusk one of these days. The ocean crashed up on some of the beautiful rock formations just off shore. It was a perfect morning (hopefully Dug will post some pictures to accompany this entry soon so that you can enjoy it as well).
Labels: Wellington
US v NZ: Food
It would be crazy to try to compare the national cuisine of a nation of 4 million people, which I’ve only experienced for a couple months, to a country 60 times its size in just a few short paragraphs! So this post will be several paragraphs long and will include bullet points. Can’t say we don’t give everyone a fair shake around here.
=> American Fare
A coin has been flipped, and the American side wins home field advantage for the first round. So let’s start with some quintessentially American food, like pizza, burgers, hot dogs and ice cream.
G. W. Bush’s grand effort to reduce American importance and goodwill around the world notwithstanding, Kiwis are no strangers to American food. But there are a few subtle differences: For example, the standard, go-to pizza in these parts is not pepperoni, but ham and pineapple (Pacific island influence, perhaps?); in fact, the choices for take-home pizza at the grocery store do not even include pepperoni … or even plain cheese, which I find odd. Burgers are burgers, but here they like to season theirs with aioli, a sort of garlicky-mayo-like kind of condiment. (And in my book, “garlicky-mayo-like” can only be perceived as positive.) As far as the burgers themselves go, I am pretty sure that grass-fed goodness makes the meat especially yummy, even when dining at a chain. (BurgerFuel is my personal favorite here.)
On the other side of the spectrum are the New Zealand hot dogs, which are just horrible. The joy that I felt when I realized that almost all of the hot dogs here are corn dogs was matched only by the despair I felt when I first tasted one. I honestly never thought anyone could keep me from loving my corn dog, but good on ya, NZ: you pulled it off.
So how about dessert? Since we’re talking about BurgerFuel, I’ll admit that their shakes aren’t really up to snuff. Too much like a malted and not enough like drinking ice cream. Of course, there’s good ice cream to be had at specialty shops here, just as there is in the states (though it’d be hard to find a place that matches the incredible experience of a Kaffe Eis cup of almost-but-not-quite-gelato). But when it comes to your basic store-bought ice cream, the Kiwis have this one cold (heh, heh). Cadbury Creamy Vanilla is the kind of ice cream that you’d pick up if you were just grabbing a gallon (sorry, liter) for home, but even so, it tastes like Ben & Jerry themselves churned it for you. I’ve been thinking that I could lose a few pounds if I just cut out dessert, but it looks like that’ll have to wait until I return to Boulder.
=> New Zealand Fare
Okay, the US had its chance, what about standard New Zealand cuisine? Frankly, I have no idea what that is (and I don’t feel like taking the time to look it up). There are definitely some “Kiwi as” foods, and certainly some foods that we’re enjoying here which we’d have only rarely or never back in the states, though I’m not sure how many of these are really Kiwi instead of just British or Aussie imports. But hey, we’re talking four million people here. There aren’t too many Colorado-specific foods out there either.
But when I look back at our time here, I’ll definitely remember the meat pies. Generally any corner dairy (that’s Kiwi for “convenience store”) will have a variety of frozen meat pies available, much like the same kind of stores in the states would have hot dogs (oh, hot dogs, I miss you). And they’re just as yummy as they are incredibly bad for you. Which really makes me wonder why they’ve not caught on in the states; we’re like the perfect target market. Another example: crumpets, which we now have regularly for breakfast, are obviously superior to toast or even English muffins. America could learn a thing or two from the buttery goodness of crumpets.
As for desserts: I probably shouldn’t have been so blasé about Kiwi cuisine before. There is at least one Kiwi-born food that I’ve tried and loved: pavlova. It’s a fluffy mixture of egg whites and sugar with whipped cream and fruit and, well, need I say more? Sara made one for Katie’s birthday (see left) and even as a family we couldn’t finish it; though we all ate as much as we possibly could. And if you’re going to pick a food to call your own, a yummy dessert sure beats “American cheese”, eh?
=> Neighboring Cuisines
One thing I sort of expected down here in the SE quadrant of the world was that our proximity to Asian countries would mean better Chinese or (woo hoo!) Indian food. Maybe the perfect restaurant is hiding, or maybe the Asian food in the states is hard to beat, but so far I’ve not been impressed. And the lack of good Mexican items in the supermarket (something that’s plentiful in Colorado) is heart-breaking.
Final Decision
I suppose I could say that each national cuisine has its merits; or I could enjoy the new experiences here without comparing them to my home country; or I could even admit that I have neither the experience nor the expertise to make a final judgment… but where’s the fun in that? Somebody’s gotta win. And after weighing the different sides, I’m afraid I have to give this one to the Kiwis. True, they’ve not figured out pizza exactly, and I can’t for the life of me find anywhere that sells blue cheese dressing, but between the aioli and the Cadbury Creamy Vanilla, I’m afraid they’ve outdone the Yanks yet again.
Current Score: USA 0, NZ 2.
Labels: US vs NZ
