Kiwis

Monday, 2 March 4:39 pm

It’s actually warm today. Windows open, jacket-off warm. I think when we first got here Christchurch was just having a cold spell. Although it’s still been cool (until today, that is), it hasn’t been bitterly freezing (that said I don’t think it ever got below 7 degrees Celsius, which is about 45 F).

D left Thursday for Florida, so now it’s just my mom and me in this big house. I miss him, but M and I are having fun. We have a routine now, which is nice. We wake up, at about 9:30 go into her office, get lunch around noon, leave around 3, go to the grocery store and get dinner (which includes standing in front of walls of vegetables being completely indecisive, getting a little snippy at each other, then buying way more than we actually need. We’re getting better on that), take a walk (sometimes we walk to the grocery store, which is only about a 20 minute walk), have dinner (now that it’s my mom and me we watch ALIAS while eating. It’s so much fun. TV and dinner are only in the same sentence at home when we’re talking about silly Americans, being that the table and the television are on opposite sides of the house, and my dad would veto it anyways. It was so amazing we found ALIAS at the video rental store (which took us about a week to find). Amazing), go to bed.

This last weekend we took day trips: Saturday we went into the city, and Sunday we went to the Banks Peninsula. They were both very fun.
We drove the three kilometers to a parking garage on the edge of downtown. We walked around, in the overcast/drizzly air, stopping at street fairs and a few more permanent attractions, such as a science museum and aquarium. At the aquarium, there were two Kiwis (don’t ask me why, I have no answer why Kiwis are suddenly classified as aquatic) that we got to see in a dark room with spider webs and tree stumps behind a glass wall (Kiwis are nocturnal, so I think the aquarium just switched their nights and days). They were neat to see—big and fat, with long sleek white beaks that picked up the light from the few dark spotlights attached to the ceiling. One of them spend a lot of time running around near us, and for awhile was sitting right in front of M’s nose. She loved the Kiwis.
We also went to the science museum, which was relatively fun besides the fact that there were swarms of loud 8-year-olds playing with every toy in the museum. There was also a sign at one of the brain teasers that said “Scientific research has found that men are better at spatial reasoning than women.” I asked my mom for a black sharpie, but unfortunately she didn’t have one with her.
The best part of the day was the art fair that happens every week in a courtyard in the old University of Canterbury buildings. It was a similar idea to Saturday Market in Eugene, but slightly more art-based, smaller, and there wasn’t a requirement that the person making the objects is the person selling. I love markets like that, though, so we spend awhile walking through the rows of booths, admiring jade jewelry and longing for the tailored sweatshirt/jackets with a price tag of $175. I was carrying a shoulder bag I made before we left Eugene that I had sewn and then painted intricately with designs. One woman with long red dread locks and a pierced nose who was sitting at a stand with burlap hats complemented me on my bag. At the same time I had been looking at her hats, noticing that she made them out of similar coffee bags that I’ve made bags for T and B out of.

The next day M and I drove on a 1.5-hour journey out to the Banks Peninsula. The last part of the main road to Akaroa, the touristy old French settlement at the end of the peninsula, is thin and snakes through the mountains. We were stuck for awhile of it behind a car going 40 kph, consistently driving in the very center of the road. It was terrifying every time a car or truck would come barreling around a bend and the car in front of us would swerve back into it’s lane.
When we finally got to Akaroa, we were surprised by how warm it was—we had thought it would be cold and rainy, as it always is out there and because of the storm we had at home the night before, but we were actually hot in our jeans. We wanted to take some hikes, and decided it would be too unbearable in jeans, so went on a search for shorts. The only ones we could find that were under $60 were beige men’s shorts that smelled like the couch at an under-staffed nursing home. They worked, though, and M and I took a lovely walk around a point by the main almost fjord-like harbor. We then drove up a road to the tops of the central mountains, to a less frequently used “tourist drive”. The drive itself was gorgeous, through majestic grass peaks speckled with sheep. The walk we wanted to take turned out to me incredibly muddy, and by the time we got to the lookout half way up we were so mudded out we decided to turn around. We did stop for about 20 minutes though to sit on the rocks on with 100-foot cliff on three sides, in wind so strong that every time we couldn’t stand up without losing our balance and almost falling off the cliffs. We sat in the wind, eating canned peanuts we had left from Fiji that we sheltered in a space between us and the backpack. The wind was cold, but not too freezing. From the lookout we could see the whole peninsula—both the harbor and the ocean on the other side that we hadn’t seen yet. It was beautiful.
The drive back was even more beautiful than the drive there, because we took the longer, windier, thinner road along the ridge of the mountain range. Eventually we got back home and had a relaxing evening.
Wow, was that just yesterday? It doesn’t feel like it was that soon.

I can’t believe there are only three weeks left of our trip—it feels like we just left. It feels like we spent just five minutes in each of the places we went to in Fiordland, and maybe an hour or two in Australia. I want to rewind and go back to the beginning. I was a little homesick a few weeks ago, and although I still miss Eugene and it’s people, part of me wants to stay here longer. I especially want to go back to Fiordland, and take a trip to Straddie and go on a hot, sweaty, buggy walk then a refreshing dip in the crashing Pacific waves.

The leaves are starting to fall here. I do love the feeling of autumn, especially being that I don’t have to go from summer break back to school again. This trip has been such the perfect arrangement of weather—I love every month weather-wise in Eugene so much except February through April, when spring starts to tempt us with flowers and hints of warmth but takes three months to actually develop into petals. I got my favorite month of December, and even got the feeling of winter with the week-long snow. Then I left, missing January (which was okay because of the snow in December), missing February, missing March, and having another summer and fall in return. Then I come back for the heart of spring which will turn into the rustling warm breezes of the beginning of summer. And then I get another summer, full of warm weather, no school, and weeks of working at imagine That.

I never want this trip to end!