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