Haha, first, I'll note that I am very attached to my music. I almost never leave the house without my iPod, just in case. The morning we were leaving, I was going to load a few last minute songs onto my iPod. I went to turn it on--and nothing happened. I tried again. Nothing. I frantically went online and looked for what to do. I figured out how to reset it and finally got the little apple to come up. I was unbelievably relieved until it started making a strange noise and the saddest image popped up--an iPod with "X"s for eyes and an unhappy smile with the apple support webpage URL below it.
I tried everything I could find on how to fix this, and finally came to the sad conclusion that my iPod had died on me. Right before a 30 hour period when I would be only in airports and planes. I was not pleased. But, the show went on! I left for the airport.
So, to save the misery of the flying, I'll (mostly) skip it. Just know that we flew from Atlanta to Dallas to LA to Auckland to Wellington to Christchurch. That's five flights, plus a 5 hour layover in LA. That's inhumane. The bright spot is that our flight across the Pacific was only half full so we could spread out a bit and actually sleep.
We left Atlanta around 2 in the afternoon on the 6th, and arrived in Christchurch sometime in the afternoon of the 8th. Damn the international date line stealing my vacation days!
It was so nice to arrive and find family waiting in both Auckland and Christchurch! My dad is from a large family, so I have a healthy set of aunts, uncles, cousins, and cousins once removed (children of my cousins) scattered around New Zealand and the eastern coast of Australia.
We arrived in Christchurch, as I mentioned, in the late afternoon. It was great seeing everyone, but we hadn't eaten anything real in WAY too long, and so basically growled that we needed food and were immediately offered fish and chips. DELICIOUS fried goodness.
Then it was on to Ashburton, where my Dad's oldest sister and husband live, as does one of their daughters and her family. The drive was interesting-we hadn't been to NZ in seven years, and a lot had stayed the same but a lot had changed as well! First, there were drastically less sheep and more cows. Apparently the only way farmers can make money anymore is through dairy, not sheep. And from what I've always seen, NZ is more livestock than crop oriented.
They also have something called "lifestyle blocks" which, to us Americans, looked like incredibly compacted neighborhoods. Another thing about NZ is that the houses nearly all have fenced in yards. Good fences make good neighbors, I guess! But these lifestyle blocks have the fenced-in houses fitted together to take as little space as possible, leaving very little personal space. But kiwis seem to like them a lot. Something new.
My aunt and uncle have a great house that is fenced in with vegetation instead of, uh, a fence. They call the vegetation boundaries fences or hedges (which led to an interesting story when my parents, still dating, first visited down there, and my dad's mom told them that Dad's father had gotten drunk and cut down the fence. Mom though that was strange until Dad replied, "Oh, that's ok, it'll grow back). But anyway. The house is very cool, and the garden is amazing--lots of roses and other cool flowers, as well as fruit trees, including a plum tree I nearly harvested all by myself, and this cool prehistoric monster plant! I'm short, but otherwise human sized, so you can tell that's a big leaf.
While in Ashburton (a small town about an hour from Christchurch, the largest city on the much less populated South Island), we visited a random man-made lake, went to my dad's nearby hometown, visited my uncle's farm in Darfield, where we got the amazing view below, and really got to see a lot of the family which was great. It was my Uncle's 77th birthday while we were there, so we had a great meal of TWO roasted lamb legs, and then had another great dinner the following night where my dad and his four surviving siblings got together. My awesome cousin Michelle hosted both dinners, which is amazing. Keep in mind there were 18 people there the second night! Oh, and I learned to drive a dirt bike without harming myself or anything/one else!
We also split up one day, sending the boys down to Dunedin so my brother could check out the paleontology program at the University of Otago (I hope he goes so I can visit!) while the girls did some damage in Christchurch. We wandered, shopped, ate, shopped some more (there was a craft fair, come on!), and checked out the cathedral. The cathedral was pretty nice, but then we noticed something strange. There was an enormous fake seagull/albatross hanging from the ceiling in the front. We were very confused and asked an usher about it. He told us that that was Gilbert, and that he had had something to do with the previous Sunday's service, but that they had forgotten to take him down...
Though most of my dad's family has stayed near Christchurch, his youngest sister headed up to Auckland, so we flew up there for the weekend to catch everyone while they were off from work and school. Their family is fun and matches ours pretty well in terms of ages of the kids (except for their fourth, a nine-year old), so we always have a good time together.This time was no exception!
Our first full day we drove north out of the city through beautiful hills. We went to a farmer's market in Matakana (aside: I love Maori words, and it seems like everywhere in New Zealand either has a really English or Maori name). The farmer's market was awesome-really it was more like a food fair, with every stall cooking something, from pork buns to whitebait fritters (small whitefished cooked with egg and served on break with lemon, salt and pepper-amazing!) to chocolates and coffee. We ate ourselves to death and then had to run to our lunch reservations :) We ate up at a brewery in the hills, which was really pretty. We then went to the beach. First was a rocky one we had to hike a bit to get to, but it was beautiful!
The next day, we went to downtown Auckland. We shopped on Queen St for a while and then got on a ferry to Devonport, across the harbor. It was a lovely little place to wander around on a Sunday afternoon-we got meat pies and ate in a park by the beach. Then it was home to watch Charlotte (the 9 year old) play flipperball, which is water polo for younger kids. That inspired her and so she dragged us older kids to the pool to play real water polo, which none of us Americans had ever done before. The kiwi cousins beat us soundly, but we all realized together quite how out of shape we were! Water sports will do that...
After dinner that evening, someone demanded we play SingStar. I didn't know what it was, but the title gave me reason for guessing that I wouldn't like it. My voice is something best used for speaking and singing in the car. Alone. With all the windows up. But no, this was family karaoke, and I was a participant. A forced participant. It was funny and terrible. I was awful, as expected. To punish the people who made me sing, I did "A thing called love" by the Darkness though :) That was fun. We played SingStar for two nights. At one point, my cousin got a text from a friend five houses down asking what on earth was going on!
Then, suddenly, it was our last full day. My sister went to school with a cousin, and the rest of us headed to Muriwai beach-a beautiful black sand beach that we visited on a cool and misty day. We then got some absolutely amazing fish and chips and headed home. Our final dinner was another roast lamb leg! Oh so delicious...
Alright. There's more than that, and I'll do more NZ posting, but for now, that's enough! This is an essay!
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