The Easter Games

Happy Easter, gang. Hope you're spending a wicked holiday with friends and family, wherever you are and whatever you're doing.

One of the things I've noticed about New Zealand is that no one asks, “Do you play any sports?” The question is always the subtly different, “What's your sport?” For a Kiwi, the idea of going through life, or any portion thereof, without getting moderately good at at least one thing athletic is kind of like when Stephen King decides not to make one of his main characters be a struggling, alcoholic writer living in rural Maine – the thought literally never crosses the mind.

I've actually been pretty amazed and impressed by the emphasis the schools place on physical education, and feel real inadequate as kids a lot younger than me rattle on about the tournaments and excursions they've taken. They do a lot of things in New Zealand, pretty much utilizing all of the space around them to push the body to the limits, but by and large the main sports are rugby and cricket. Every field has wickets and goal posts, everyone follows the scores, and not everyone is good enough to play for the All Blacks, but it seems like most people have this inherent sense of where to stand on the pitch and what to do.

Friday night, after an afternoon of lugging compost and pruning trees, a small crowd of us went to a rugby match at Forsyth Barr Stadium, the 30,000 seater here in Dunedin that was only opened in 2011. There weren't 30,000 people flocking in to see the home team, the Highlanders, take on the Queenland Reds, but it was every bit as big as a rock concert (Aerosmith is here in a few weeks, we'll see who draws the bigger crowd), with a huge student population coming out in Speights one-piece jumpers (the Dunedin-based beer company happens to flaunt the team's colours). Just so we're up to speed, the league we're dealing with is Super Rugby, or Super 15, which is the main professional rugby league for the Southern Hemisphere, made up of 15 teams from New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa (the All Blacks, the official country team and unanimous source of Kiwi pride, plays in a different league altogether – their season hasn't started yet).

That's about all I knew about rugby, herded into the open air stadium that night with the fanatics. I only know the basics of football because we threw in a toonie on Proline one Sunday afternoon last year, and besides, saying, “I don't know rugby, but I know football,” is the kind of thing that would get one of those guys with the facepaint to turn away from the game just long enough to punch you.

Suffice it to say that it's totally different, and there are a hundred other places where you can find an explanation of the rules better than I can explain – to simplify, just know that the b'ys are trying to get the ball to the other end of the field, and it's real physical. People from New Zealand like their teams – fire shoots out from stacks at the endlines when the Highlanders score, and one guy in front of us ended up with his voice gone and kicked out by security for repeatedly yelling (from Row X) that Reds' player Quade Cooper was a homo (“What? I'm trying to throw him off his stride!”), but at the end of halftime we heard him again, from another perch a few rows away.

It would have been cool to see the home guys win, but at the end of the 80-minute match, the Highlanders marginally lost 33-34. Still, they closed the gap considerably near the end, scoring a try in the final minutes and giving them a fighting chance that made for an exciting ending. I didn't know the rules when I came in, but even I could appreciate that.

Yesterday was a busy one in the domestic sphere, tidying up for Easter around the house. I joined the girls in painting eggs – I didn't do any of the cool ones with leaf silhouettes, the result of attaching plant bits to an egg and adding it to boiling vegetable dye, but bonus points if you can spot the one that was my handiwork.

Today, Easter Sunday threatened to be a cool cloudy one, but the family was still up before the crack of dawn – not because the girls were excited (but, incidentally, they were), but because we were driving up to the top of Mt. Cargill, overlooking Dunedin from nearly 700 m, to watch the sunrise. It's a bit of a family tradition, signalling new beginnings at this time of year, and we weren't the only ones who thought so, meeting a steady belt of traffic on the winding dirt road. 

Most didn't stick around for the actual sunrise, with a layer of low-lying cloud obscuring the valleys and the horizon slightly. Still, it was a cool perch to welcome the morning from, and that nice loaf of sugary bread was waiting for us as soon as we made it back home.

And then came the egg hunt. Indoors and outdoors, two baskets going at top speed as their respective owners dashed around corners, under sofas, and in any nook they thought a bunny might have dropped an egg or two. There was no shortage of caramel and chocolate this morning, with some 60 eggs turning up.

Part of the family roster is Kieran, the 18-year-old son who works during the days and is gearing up to go to university in Germany in a few months time – his buddy next door invited him to join his youth group on a beach outing this afternoon, and the invite passed on down the line to me. So, just about lunchtime, we drove out along the Otago Peninsula, a strip of land jutting into the Pacific with plenty of little scattered beaches (and Larnach Castle, a 19th-century vanity project that's the only bonafide castle in New Zealand). Sandfly Bay is about a half an hour's drive away, and a cool sheltered strip of sand, sand, and more sand (and Yellow-eyed penguins, if you come at the right time).

Naturally, you don't just trace shapes in the sand. This is New Zealand here, people – get a sheet of plastic and slide down the steepest parts, and if you end up with the equivalent of a sandcastle in your pants, it only means that you're doing something right.

A bit of sliding and a picnic lunch later, the half dozen of us left the sand dunes for the flat part of the surf, in the wake of the massive Lion's Head Rock, and set up the makeshift beach cricket pitch.

“I don't know cricket, but I know baseball.” Did you see that? That guy from the rugby game just lit your car on fire. Ok, this wasn't proper cricket, with everyone shuffling through the positions, but I still had to get a general sense of what was going on (a bowler pitches to one of two batsmen, and once he whacks the ball, the two scores runs by bolting back and forth between the two wickets, which in our case were imaginary. Meanwhile, the fielders are trying to catch the ball and get it back to the players positioned along the wickets). That was enough to go by – but if I didn't have a clue how to play cricket, there's a good chance I wasn't a born master of the techniques.

It wasn't so much the cricket manoeuvres that were tricky, to be fair. It's more that insignificant stuff, like hand-eye coordination. But I didn't need to play cricket in New Zealand to tell you that I fumble with a tennis ball. Whatever, it was a good laugh, the sun came out, and we spent the last part of the afternoon whizzing down more sand dunes and playing a breathless game of hide-and-seek that made me totally forget that I'm turning 24 in two weeks.

The chicken and wine from dinner are all gone now, and there's a relaxing day of no school, no work, and no plans ahead as March goes out like an Indian summer lamb and I reach my two and half month mark.

Cheers,

rb

Ooey Gooey Cream-Filled City Centre

I usually aim to avoid the rush of 8:00 breakfast, because on top of muesli, it's a school lunch preparing, hair styling, screaming, bawling haphazard orchestration of family craziness. That, and I usually like to sleep in a bit. Today though, a clear sunny morning, I plunged right into the current, to be out the door by 9:00, and at the University of Otago by 10:00.

There's no real reason for wanting to sit in on an undergrad English lecture, other than the novelty of sitting in on an undergrad English lecture in the southern hemisphere. That, and I was at least mildly curious as to how the subject is approached, especially considering England is a lot more geographically relevant in Newfoundland than it is here, in New Zealand. Turns out they still do all the English classics, with only two professors of a dozen tailored to New Zealand lit. So, I ended up in a lecture theatre of English 121, a first year literary survey course.

Chaucer was the topic today, in particular the second half of The Miller's Tale from The Canterbury Tales, one of the great (and unfinished) masterworks out there in Middle English, a well-written, literary cross-section of medieval society. Wicked. I gave a paper about Chaucer at a conference once, and I made the bold/stupid decision of quoting the text. “What's so bad about that?” You ask. “That's a pretty normal thing to do in a paper, isn't it?”

Yeah, it is. But would you get up in front of a room full of people smarter than you and try to read this:

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote

And bathed every veyne in swich licour,

Of which vertu engendred is the flour

Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth . . .

That said, I could actually listen to someone else speaking Chaucerian for longer than is socially acceptable. This particular li'l story centres around a scheme every bit as zany and sophisticated as an episode of According to Jim, a reminder that even ivory tower literature manages to sneak a few fart jokes in.

 The Tom Green of the 1380s

The crisp morning was now a hot day by the time the class let out, and I went along towards the city centre, and the Cadbury chocolate factory. 

Once upon a time, chocolate was a delicacy, a secret that the Spanish first picked up on overseas trips to South America that eventually made it across Europe. That was when the cocoa beans were just being processed into a drink – one that, incidentally, was touted as being really healthy. Knows that wouldn't be a sweet time to be alive, if you didn't get the bubonic plague or something. Anyway, milk and cream was added to the mix, and pretty soon you had a recipe for solid chocolate. The factory in Dunedin has been around for over a hundred years, with Cadbury taking over in the mid-20th century and pumping out a whole lot of Dairy Milk, Chocolate Fish (chocolate covered marshmallow, a sweet Kiwi staple), Jaffas, Creme Eggs, and a slew of other delicious things to rot your teeth. 

 

The tour of the factory doesn't have all the glamour and sheen of Willy Wonka's factory – I don't think Charlie Bucket had to wear a hair net, and Grandpa Joe didn't get a snood. But still, as you walk through the industrial, fully functioning factory, past the workers in white (taller than Oompa-Loompas), you are hit by the smell of chocolate.

We went through the whole process, from the bean (we got to taste the raw stuff – turns out, before sugar, it's real bitter), through the fermenting and grinding process (all that is done in Singapore, with the cocoa powder coming into the Dunedin factory), up to the mixing, moulding, and packaging, and distribution. It was kind of like a live taping of How It's Made, with one of the coolest parts being a demonstration on how hollow Easter eggs are made (two halves of the mould are sloshed together to create a solid consistency, although it's a lot more interesting when you've got something inside of it, which requires a divider, or when you've got a bunny with some buttons of flourishes added by hand and glued with a chocolate syringe). Chocolate keeps for a year, so that seasonal operation runs from June to January.

Just in time for the season though, we got a Creme Egg. Along the way, we got a few samples of Cadbury chocolate, most of which you can't actually get in Canada (what in the hell is a Pinky?). When we were all finished, I had to just walk right through the retail shop – all this untested chocolate at reduced rates could have led to me selling my socks.

Before that though, we ended up in the top of the purple tower (the official colour of Cadbury, an English company, was adopted in commemoration of Queen Victoria, and was actually the crux of a three-year legal battle with Nestle, which totally ended with them owning that particular shade), for the grand finale: the chocolate waterfall. Any idea what a literal tonne of liquid chocolate looks like? Something like this:

We never tried any of that chocolate, because it gets recycled through the tower for about a year (the whole stairwell down is covered in dried on milk chocolate, since that much goopy chocolate tends to splatter a bit), but we did get some little cups of thick, creamy, liquified Dairy Milk. Most groups have about 20 people in it, but some weird timing luck put me in a group of three – which meant our tour guide had no qualms about giving us seconds.

Did I mention you shouldn't read this on an empty stomach? I probably should have at some point, probably closer to the beginning – I had to stop mid-writing and have a Caramel Chew I picked up today.

After the indulgence of Cadbury World, I felt I should work some of it off, so I walked up past the First Church of Otago (from 1873, all Gothic and European looking) along the High Street, up to the Admiral Byrd Lookout in Unity Park, for another stunning, sweeping view of Dunedin.

My looped path ended up back in the city centre, and to the Dunedin Chinese Garden. This is a pretty unique spot – Chinese gardens are these spaces that recreate natural landscapes in miniature forms, and the one in Dunedin is the first one in the southern hemisphere (and one of only a few outside of China). Shanghai is a sister city of Dunedin, and to mark that Chinese connection, which has existed since the Central Otago Gold Rush in the 1860s, the garden was constructed in Shanghai and transported here, officially opening in 2008. With Chinese architecture and building materials, rock gardens, and tranquility pools, there's a lot of spiritual significance to a place like this, which lies in the downtown core but is positioned in such a way to block that noise and city confusion. 

Harmony, balance, yin and yang, all of these ideas pop up as you wander along the path, and I'm not going to make some insane hippie comment like I found spiritual enlightenment here (I don't want to make anyone throw up), but I had the foresight to bring along a book and a sandwich, which made for a nice way to spend an hour in the afternoon with a few clay pots of flowery Ginseng Oolong tea.

I spread a map of New Zealand out on the bed last night, and started seriously looking at the time I've got left, and the way the highway traverses this place to get me where I want to go. I absolutely won't go into any of those details, because I'll definitely be turned into a liar, but it should be fun either way. First off though, the weather forecast is looking good for the upcoming Easter weekend, my palate has been primed for some goodies (lollies they're called over here), and I'm comfortably staying put in a Kiwi house that the Easter Bunny still visits.

Cheers,

rb

Up She Rises

The first thing that you see, as you climb the main stairwell in the Otago Museum, are some of Sir Edmund Hilary's personal accessories behind glass displays: his tea mug, gloves, camera. He was a Kiwi beekeeper back before the Second World War, and in 1953 he said, “Well mate, this job is sweet as, but I fancy I'd rather be the first guy to climb to the summit of Mt. Everest” (citation needed). So he went and did it – part of the entrance display are two small rocks that he brought back from the top of the Himalayas.

I imagine he must have climbed the hills around Dunedin as practice for Everest. Maybe even the other way around. I've been here for a week, which means I've probably climbed up the sloped driveway on Grey Street half a dozen times or more. Fortunately, the stuff at the bottom of that hill make the coming back easier.

For the most part anyway. I went to another fringe show on Thursday evening, again at the Globe. The play was In Absentia, a life-sized puppet show centred around a mother's daily battle with dementia. For an intimate, alternative theatre experience, the visuals were nice: it opened with a single illuminated leaf blowing across the stage, and once you regained your composure from literally being slapped in the face by a metaphor, you had the frail, puppet woman (the puppeteers were dressed all in black behind her) slowly wake up and go through the objects in her room, her voice coming through the speaker system.

After you look up what the awesomely underused word “sacrosanct” means, but before you thrash your computer around and scream out that some things, like fringe shows about Alzheimer's, are sacrosanct, let me tell you why this show didn't work. Ultimately, it was too disjointed and muddled.

STOP. Don't yell out, “That's the point!” especially if you're in a public place, because that's weird. I'm in New Zealand, I can't hear you. I get that that's the point. But it needed to go a bit farther. The play had a lot of good elements, like warped versions of her family (a rolly-polly, Tweedledee-esque puppet bouncing around as the child, and then a smaller model of him as an adult, leaving with his suitcase – I said that the visuals were nice), but it didn't tie them together to give the play its emotional impact. I heard someone in the audience say that the show really hit home to them – which is a great comment, but an even better one would have been if it meant something to me, who has never been in the situation.

If nothing else, the fade to black at the end, as the quivering form went back to bed, was well done: “I remember . . . you. I remember . . . me. I remember . . . me. Remember . . . me.”

Friday was another artsy kind of afternoon. I went to the Octagon in the morning, where an outdoor stage had been set up for the lunchtime “Fringe Picks,” a short sampler of a bunch of Fringe shows. First up was the Vaudeville, circus-style ensemble Porcelain Punch and their Traveling Medicine Show, which felt like I'd come out of a songwriting session with Jim Morrison onto the set of The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. The gang from A Play About Space handed out their paper airplanes, but the out-of-context, open stage setup didn't do their show at the Globe justice. At least I still got the jokes. 

 

There's a Fawlty Towers dinner show during the Fringe (spelled Faulty Towers, I assume to avoid the inevitable suing), so Basil, Sybil, and Manuel did their thing, comedians Nick Rado, James Nokise, and Mark Scott ran through some standup, the singing comedy duo from Gobsmacked treated the crowd to a few songs, and two gals from the In and Out of Context troupe did some strange, flexible street art acrobatics to finish off the eclectic (but entertaining) afternoon.

As if I wasn't feeling cultured enough, I sauntered over to the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, on the outward bend of the Octagon. Of the top five most visited art galleries in the world, I've been to four – don't let yourself be fooled though, I'm functionally clueless when it comes to art galleries. Since 2011 when I started this writing, I've made exactly one poop joke, and it was about the Tate Modern in London, so there. But still, I'm that guy who wants to see everything, so I had to take a quick spin through – and, to be fair, the landscapes of New Zealand were cool, and something you're not likely to see in such prominent display anywhere else in the world. And in the “Pleasure Principle” exhibition, the prints from Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji were arranged in the presence of porcelain vases and oak furniture.

That was enough high society for one day. The evening was relaxed – I helped make my first pavlova for dessert, and learned a German card game before an early bedtime.

After a morning Farmer's Market in the city centre, Saturday night almost ended up being as quiet. It was the part of the night where I'd opened my book (I found a well-worn copy of 'Salem's Lot in Christchurch) and had taken my contacts out, when I got a text from two members of a very exclusive group who I've bonded with over sheep shit. Anaïs and Michelle made it off the farm in Kaikoura, and a few minutes later I was running down the hill to catch the next bus to the Octagon.

An acoustic band was playing at Craft, but we soon steered to the drink specials and more lively crowd down the street, at Brimstone. There was music, a fog machine, and a weird, black and white projected screening of the dance floor. And Katy Perry up on bust – this is a university town, and we'd arrived.

It's some things, like popcorn at 2:30 in the morning, that makes that friggin' driveway hike bearable.

On Sunday I was up at the crack of noon, and piled into the family van to go to the girls' school for a Harvest Picnic. The school is a Rudolf Steiner school – what that means is an approach that adheres to the national educational standards, but fosters a lot of creativity and personal development. Class sizes are tiny (and in yurts, how cool is that?), the curriculum personalized, and you get the overall sense of a community, right from the smallest kids in the kindergarten playgroup to the network of parents. 

It's the kind of place I thought that I'd like to send my child someday – right before I remembered that I made a poop joke about the Tate Modern and that I'm nowhere near ready to have a child. That's a whole other story, let's save it for later.

It was another German game with some visiting friends that night – this time Carcassonne, which is actually nothing like Settlers of Catan but that's still a surprisingly decent comparison somehow. Anyway, it involves farm, monasteries, tiles, and roads, and it took the shortest four hours ever to play.

Once you get past the mini Edmund Hilary display, there are plenty of cool things throughout the Otago Museum on a Monday afternoon. Like an assortment of tribal masks, weapons, and instruments from scattered Polynesian islands – tiny little places, just specks on a world map, with their own histories, cultures, and political systems that I know next to nothing about. You can spend a lifetime studying the scope of Western history, easily (arrogantly) neglecting these other nooks in the globe that are just as intricate.

The coolest display was the Animal Attic, a wall-to-wall of skeletons and taxidermy. The museum's first curator happened to be a zoologist, and a lot of these skins are modern, but a number from 1868 are still on display as well. There are some weird animals in the world, and it was cool to walk between the apes, leopards, kangaroos, rats, penguins, and a hundred other things, some familiar and some totally unimagined before now.

Now that I'm back at the top of the hill, I'm going to give my book another try before falling asleep. And if I end up dreaming about Dunedin and the spots I've still got to explore in the city, I'll try to wake up before I get to the part about coming back up.

Cheers,

rb

More Eden than Dun

When I arrived in Dunedin and my host family asked if I was any good in the kitchen, I told them that I'd lived away from home for a few years, without a) splurging on too much Kraft Dinner and b) dying, so I was in the moderately decent category. I didn't know that it would include making mud pies – lucky for me, 5-year-old Ariana had the recipe down pat.

I could get used to this.

The North East Valley is just on the outskirts of Dunedin, a suburb built into the hills. I got some funny looks when I said (based solely on the 120,000 population) that the city must be a nice walkable city. In terms of land area, it totally is, but there are plenty of hills. And not just rolling ones either – they're good and steep. It's no small task, making the final climb from the main North Road to the top of Grey Street, where I'm staying, but Baldwin Street does take the cake. You wouldn't want to be the newspaper boy, and if you were, you'd expect a good tip from the ones at the top of the hill.

Rising about 100 m above sea level, Baldwin Street is the world's steepest residential street, according to the crowd at Guinness. It's only a short little jaunt, but at its sharpest angle, you're climbing 1 metre for every 3 metres you travel horizontal – even when you take the average, it takes just 5 metres to make that climb. To put that into perspective, on that Jeezler of a hill in St. John's, Long's Hill, it will take you about 20 m walking before you climb 1 metre. 

Naturally, it's a major cultural draw tourist trap, with a couple of souvenir shops at the base offering to sell you an official certificate of accomplishment for hiking/running/biking/whatever the world's steepest street. Back in the city planning days, they never meant for all the attention – the city was laid out in a grid by overseas planners, who never gave a passing thought to the terrain of the area. There's also the annual Baldwin Street Gutbuster race in February, a race up and back (the record is just under 2 minutes). 

By and large though, you can walk around Dunedin, once you get out of the hills. And it's a nice city to walk through, not just because of the university vibe, but because of the way it looks. To get to the city centre, it takes just under an hour walking, a bit longer if you include a detour through the Botanical Gardens. Historically, there's a big Scottish connection (the original settlers in 1848 were from the Free Church of Scotland, who chose the Gaelic word for Edinburgh to name their new city), and whether you're strolling through the University of Otago campus, or along the central city Octagon (so called because that's where eight streets converge in a roundabout) beneath the statue of Robbie Burns, that's pretty evident.

From the top of Signal Hill (wait, where am I again?), you've got a bird's eye view of the city at 400 m, from the houses clinging to the heights to the shores of Otago Harbour. And up here on this perch, there's a little chunk of the rock beneath Edinburgh Castle, just to remind you of the link that was forged in those auld lang syne, and continues through to 2013. There's a European-ness about this New Zealand city, a place where you can hang out in old churches and read outside. 

 

One of the first signs I saw as we drove down into Dunedin the other day was for the tenth annual Fringe Festival, underway until Sunday. Fringe theatre is the oddball stuff that usually defies easy categorization – not necessarily weird for the sake of weird (although that works), but different from what you'd pay a hundred bucks to see on Broadway. If you've heard tell of a Fringe Festival before now, chances are (surprise surprise) it's the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the world's largest arts festival that brings over 2000 performances together over the course of two weeks – the Dunedin festival is a baby by comparison, but there are still 60 different events from local and international companies, including cabaret, theatre, and dance.

I got a ticket for the opening night of A Play About Space – all I knew is it's a sci-fi show that includes a bounty hunter and robots. Deadly.

The little Globe Theatre (on London Street, of all places) was a little house off the main road, like a cozy, basement theatre, where the first thing the cast did was hand out red paper airplanes and tell the audience (about 30 of us) we'd know when to use them.

There's a scene in How I Met Your Mother when Ted talks about the absurdness of Off-Off-Broadway productions, and Barney goes ahead and stages his own one-man play dressed as a robot that's about as weird as it can be. You watch it and you think, “This is pretty funny, because it's only the second season, when this show still worked, but there's no way there's anything like this out there for real.”

Well boys and girls, it's a thing. A Play About Space was awesome, but it was so over the top and ridiculous that it has to go in the fringe category. The program synopsis brings us up to the beginning of a second intergalactic war between humans and the Khalkalari, and war hero turned bounty hunter Florence Dreggs on a recon mission. Four actors jumped around playing a slew of roles, from aliens to killer lamps. There were gunfights with “Pew! Pew!” noises, speaking into fans and glass bottles to give the sound of radio contact, and a whole lot of deep space shenanigans. Oh, and the scattered zombie.

Check out My Accomplice's Facebook page for more weirdly wonderful production pictures.

After the actors wove circles around each other, holding up paper spaceships to simulate a battle, one of them turned to the crowd and said, “Uh oh, it looks like a bombardment!” I imagine this is what a screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show is like – just have fun, because there's no sense in taking any of this too seriously.

Walking back, it felt like a fall night, and I was glad I brought my jacket. I guess I should expect that – New Zealand designates March 1st as the first day of autumn (I know, I know, that's weird), and even by North American standards we're on the downside of the equinox now. Just the same, it was a nice walk – Dunedin is a cool city by day, but by night it's friggin' gorgeous. 

Whether by those fleeting sunny days or the crisp nights, there are still plenty more old buildings to explore and mud pies to bake. Here we go.

Cheers,

rb