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