I am in an office on the 4th floor of a ChCh CBD building using LINUX (Mandrake)! I am happy. Saying ‘no’ to Mr. Bill Gates and Mr. Steve Jobs. No Netscape, no Internet Explorer. Give me Mozilla! It is fun being in the company of computer nerds again, and Dave (the guy who’s letting me use the extra computer) is cool indeed. w00t! Here comes two weeks’ worth….

Indoor soccer was tiring. 3 11-min thirds, but nothing but sprints. I overworked myself during the first third and spent the other two trying to remember how to breathe. During the second game that immediately followed, I paced myself more and had fun. My team was playing in a higher league, so we got sufficiently creamed, but it was good to hit the ol’ bucky ball again.

Before soccer was mountain biking (with said Dave, and swing instructor Jeff). They took me to Bottlelake and I had tons of fun trying not to fall off. I hadn’t ever mountain biked before, and so I was scared about losing grip with the gravel on turns. But by the end I was doing sort bunny hops and pushing Newton’s Laws.

I’ve been a socialite this past weekend as well. Friday, I went to a touchy-feely theatre thingy called “Playback”. The MC of the stage gets someone to talk about their feelings about this winter, and 4 actresses get up and do a short improvised ’sculpture’. Many of the feelings were silly at best, but I may have been put off by the MC’s overly “and how did you feel next” attitude. After that, I went to a microbrewery and ordered an alcoholic ginger beer. Very nice. Then I jumped over to a jazz bar and danced to funk for a couple of hours. The Lindy crowd decided to have a small Lindy bomb, and ti was fun.

Saturday eve I made spring rolls for the swing instructors with Dave (and he made Tamarind chicken), Sunday I went for a drive in the hills with Rachel of the swing folk. And I also played more arena ubersoccer - this time I scored a point.

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

After soccer, I ate with the Rachel and her friends from med school - a good homemade Indian dinner, and watched “Mambo Italiano” - think My Big Fat Greek Wedding, but go over the Adreatic sea, and make the daughter a gay son.

Monday, I made Thai green curry for the swing instructors - and they loved it. Is good. Tuesday was dinner with Rachel, her friend Archie, and her little brother Ashish. Rachel made a great Chinese cabbage and fish soup, and a noodle stir-fry. Last night was my last swing night here. It was good, and they gave me a good-bye dance.

This weekend looks to be full of last hurrahs - dinner parties, more soccer, maybe more mountain biking.

Uf. I go home in under a week. I have so much to organize. It has the potential
to be stressful, and I don’t want that.

I’ve been really busy recently (even tho I haven’t done that much), but haven’t gotten a chance to write.

The 10 days have been spent in front of the computer - updating the website and converting from old to new. Over the weekend, I did take a Collegiate Shag workshop and learned a routine to “Man with the Hex” by the Atomic Rythms (the song apparently was on the Scooby Doo soundtrack. Huh. I first saw the Jive Cats in Fort Fun perform to that song.

On Tuesday, I went to a cafe’s open mic night because a few swing dancers were going to play there. They had a 6 piece band (well, 6 if you count the throat) stuffed into a couner accustomed to providing for a singer/song writer. They covered great songs (many of them danceable, which makes sense).

This weekend looks nice as well - Deb and Jeff (the swing instructors here) have invited me to skill share with them. They’ll make dinner if I show them a few moves. Sweet! And rumor has it that I might play on their soccer team on Sunday since they’re drastically short people on their team. HUTTAH! I haven’t played soccer in ages. It will be different, tho: it’s indoors.

Oh, and I’ve moved my flight dates: I’ll be in Denver at 7pm on Monday, July 5th.

Dunedin was great!

I went out that night to see the final round of a battle of the bands with some others that jumped off the bus. After that was over, we wandered over to the Robert Burns Pub. They had a jazz night and a talented quartet playing dixieland era music. I was dancing in no time and stepping on toes of everyone else. They were all sitting or standing. Oh well. BUT, I did run into a hitch hiker the bus picked up near Fox at the pub. That was cool! Finally, we made it to the hip hop club. The DJs played proper hip hop, no thug or gangsta muzik. I danced until the fashionistas showed up and left because I wasn’t cool enough.

The next day I toured the art gallery which had amazing German video art. One artist transmitted a video signal across the room in a clever way. He took two small palates and put copper tape on two of the cross members on each palate. He soldered a tradtional co-ax cable to each palate and used the copper tape as antennas with the palates as the framework!

Another installment was called “Take me down to your dance floor.” An artist took a room in the gallery and installed a dance floor for people to move in! Plus, there were a few scheduled performances. I went to a hip-hop demonstration from a group called Nu Ztyle, who recently were granted $40,000 to perform in Adelaide’s festival next summer.

That night, I went back to the Arc cafe for “Tainted Love” - an off-kilter disco - all the 80’s indie and punk. A great group of people showed up, and it reminded me of the hipster joint Illegal Pete’s turns into on the weekends.

The rest of my time in Dunnes was relaxig. I went to the library and read a few books - one on Japanese culture, and another Ancee Min (Wild Ginger). I also saw Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, another Kaufman masterpiece benefitted from a superb Jim Carrey performance. This movie did things in imagery that I’ve never seen before. Go see it now! I know it’s been out for a while in the US, but go anyway. Maybe it’s at a cheap theater near you!

Now I’m in Christchurch and looking to cruise here for the rest of my time in NZ (which is under a month now!). I’ll go to the mid-week swing dances here, and take weekends away in the surrounding area (if I can get everything organized).

I’m getting excited for Japan. And I’m still eagerly awaiting more information about it. I only know my region, not my city/town or school. I’m crossing my fingers that comes through in the next week.

I’m also getting tired of NZ. There are heaps of young travellers here. It’s a nice and safe place, so a lot of first-time travellers come here (ie me). But also a lot of greenhorns - kids that haven’t left Mom or Dad before, kids that grew up in a country where the drinking age is 21, kids that are only here for a week or two to snowboard or ski. You quickly pick up if someone is traveller or a holiday maker.

Plus, not working means you have a lot of time on your hands. Staying in one place makes you bored and lonely rather quickly. You can only go to tourist places in an area for so long: soon you’ve been to all of them. Travelling in a country whose main industry is tourism also breeds another kind of disposable culture that sours after a few months. To stay here and enjoy it, I would need to get a job and then make friends and get a community. That’s what I’ve learned makes a place a good one: the people around you.

I went off the map for a while on the West Coast of the South Island - by far the most undeveloped aread of NZ. Tho, I did feed a wild pig some toast. And I saw a possum, and the bus ran over a few. Some of those towns are frontier era - wood fire stove for heat, a whole town with only 5 telephones (a few with none), places running on a generator (and the generator is shut off at 11pm, so it’s lights out for everyone). The people in this region are similarly joked about like the Appalachian regions of the US: six-fingered hands.

I’ve pretty much been doing a nature tour of NZ up until now. I went to Abel Tasman Nat’l Park and did some walking on the shore and sea kayaking. I spent four days there, a few with rain, but I stayed on a farm - roosters sounding early in the morning, ducks walking around and laughing, llamas nibbling away at the lawns, peacocks parading around! The place was very calm, tho not quiet; but I did learn quite a few new card games!

Uh, James the driver took us (the bus) to Westport for a brewery stop (cheap good beer! 2L = NZ$7!); he also took us to an Op Shop where we could get anything we wanted for $1. We decided to cross dress and go to tourist places. The guys all looked like knitting grandmas, and the girls dressed up as lumberjacks (”and that’s ok!”). We got some great faces, some good smiles, and even the rare (but most rewarding) look of embarassment. The best spot for embarrassing tourists was Punakaiki - a place on the coast with pancake-like rock formations. We saw the sunset there as well (which is quite early down here - 5:20 or so).

I walked all over the Franz Josef glacier the next day. The guides gave us special cramp-on metal spikes so that our shoes could grab the ice! We walked through ice caves and ravines, negotiated tall and narrow ledges, and had a really long and exhausing day. The glacier moves about 5m per day; it’s one of the fastest glaciers in the world. It also gets about 10m of snow each winter.

I jumped off the bus for a day and met a German with a car. He drove me to another glacier (Fox) and we walked up to it (tho not on it - pieces of ice and rock were falling all over the place). It was a great experience - meet a guy at breakfast, and hang out with him in the afternoon.

I got on the bus the next day and went to Queenstown, the adventure capital of NZ, and maybe the world. Heaps of bungy jumps (from 43m to 138m), skydiving, and other death-tempting silly things. But before hand, we stopped in Wanaka to check out the Puzzle World: home of the first 3-D maze. It takes about an hour to solve, so we didn’t do the whole thing. We also went into other illusion rooms and saw stunning holograms. There was a hologram of a microscope. If you ‘looked’ into the microscope, you saw the what the scope was magnifying (a computer chip). One room was built on a 15 degree angle and really confused your sense of balance. They put in water falls that appeared to flow uphill (thanks to the incline).

Once in Queenie, we went out for a nice Thai meal (the first proper meal since leaving the beautiful and untouched West Coast). And then dancing in a club to bad music. I just don’t dig top 40 pop. Oh well. I had a full day in Queenstown, and while my bus friends threw themselves off of ledges, I took in a few walks and sights. I went to the highest hill around and saw the Remarkables and the lake of Queenstown. Once again, a stark constrast of scenery. The West Coast is often called the Wet Coast because it receives so much rain. The forests are temporate rain forests (like Oregon), and the sky is mostly silver all day. But in the hills of Queenstown, I was taken back to Banff in the Canadain Rockies. The differnce, tho, is the lack of soil. The mountains in NZ are so rocky and exposed, that soil cannot stay anywhere close to the tops. Thus, you see a tree line at about 400m, and the mountains are 2000m high! The ridges look just like saw blades.

We continued on to Milford Sound the next day and took a short cruise in it. More rugged mountains - they almost felt normal because we had been seeing them so much recently. But the sound was very quiet and serene. Temporary waterfalls were everywhere along the sides because it had rained the previous day. We saw seals and a few native birds as well.

The next day was a short travel day - to Invercargill - the southernmost city in NZ. We drove out to Bluff, which is nearly the southernmost tip of the south island. Just look out to the sea, knowing that over the horizon is Antarctica! It was the furthest I’ve been from the equator - 46deg south.

I pushed off to Dunedin, which is a uni town, so that means there are cool cafes and cheap restaurants and entertaining clubs. I’m rather surprised there’s no swing here. There’s a cafe called “the Arc” which has everything! Free internet, cheap food, good chai, poetry nights, concerts, the works. It’s so cheap because it’s subsidized by a not-for-profit trust! A cool idea, and it appears to be working rather well.

I went out last night with some people from my bus; we toured a brewery
(Speights), sampled beer for an hour, went to a pub for dinner. We moved onto an Irish pub where we met some locals who brought us to a student night club where they played top 40 crap music (there’s a theme here). But I danced anyway and had a good time. Poppin’ and lockin’, yo.

Two of the lads on the bus that went along were Irish and we got along well. They were incredibly funny and quick witted. Always laughing and playing pranks on each other.

But I’ve jumped off the bus, so all my friends are gone. I’m in Dunnes for a few more days before returning to ChCh. I’ll check out a few of the more arty cafes and dance to some proper hip-hop tonight (fingers crossed).