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Haha great pictures Twinky. familiar west coast Too bad we missed each other. I left Christchurch like two days before you got there. Beautiful country. Go thou to Queenstown, then north to glenorchy then to paradise and check out the chinamans bluff(paradise) track it's awesome. Or at least check out the Routeburn or one of those other tracks in that area I'm pretty sure they'll be awesome too. Country like you have never seen before, and unless you come back, won't see again- and this is coming from an Alaskan. Also reccomend the Otago peninsula and the Oamaru area for penguins and stuff. Maybe check out the art galleries in Hokatika, they're really pretty neat. Two hot sping places going over the Lewis pass rd, hear they're awesome, and that the one further west is the better of the two. And Te Anau and milford sound are super awesome. Likewise Mt Cook and the lakes on the road going to it. And if you get back to Christchurch area go to Belfast and the willowbank wildlife sactuary and see kiwis and heaps of other stuff.
Posts: 1103 | Registered: Apr 2002
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Today my dad taught me all about cricket. We watched a bit of some tests going on at a local park and he explained some of the game to me.
I might get to play a guitar later this week! (I've been slowly going crazy because I presently do not have access to any musical instruments.) I'm looking forward to that. Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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Wow... it's amazing how much New Zealand reminds me of Montana. Um, except for the whole ocean bit.
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I may look silly with the massive headphones, but boy do they ever sound good.
When I get back to Canada I'm going to get myself an NZ passport. Once I've worked for a little while and accrued some capital, if I still want to move here and the country will have me, I'll see about finding work 'round these parts.
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I can't believe I forgot to mention this earlier, but one of the first days I was here we were in Sumner and we stopped at a park that we'd visited 20 years ago. Much of the playground equipment was still there, so dad took some shots of me on the slide and swings and stuff. Of course, last time I was there I was just shy of three years old.
It was really, really cool. Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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And when you get back, you're going to scan the 20 year old pics and post them with the new ones, right? Posts: 7954 | Registered: Mar 2004
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Mum said she would dig them out when we get home, but I have no convenient scanner access... I'll have to look into that.
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Dude, Goatee, me too. I didn't know you'd been to Denali (or maybe you told me and I conveniently forgot, heh). I worked at the Denali Park Resorts last summer with the Holland American tour company after visiting the summer before *that*. Posts: 1595 | Registered: Feb 2003
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My aunt and uncle used to live right around there. My aunt (and cousin, I think) worked there, too. They've recently moved to South East Alaska, though.
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The laws are different depending on the country, I think. Like I know in Switzerland you can become a citizen if you can trace your ancestry back there (with proof, of course). I don't know how many generations back they allow the connection to be, though. I guess New Zealand is something like that?
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quote:If you were born overseas on or after 1 January 1978 and one of your parents was a New Zealand citizen, your birth must be registered through the Citizenship Office, Documents of National Identity Division, Department of Internal Affairs or at one of New Zealand’s overseas posts before your 24th birthday or your citizenship will lapse.
So you might want to check that out twinky, since you're 23 and all. Posts: 1431 | Registered: Aug 2003
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Oh man, this is complicated. I don't speak legalese and I'm kind of sleepy... but I will muddle through! Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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Today we went on a road trip to Akaroa (about an hour away from Christchurch). As with pretty much everywhere else in NZ, it was staggeringly beautiful.
What was really neat about it, though, was that we stopped at a small cheese factory and a tour bus of tourists came in. The bus driver came up to dad and said he knew who dad was. Dad looked perplexed until the fellow said his name -- turns out that he was a former captain of the Canterbury rugby team while dad was on the Canterbury rugby union.
(On a related note, Canterbury beat Auckland the other day in a very exciting match. I actually have my own Canterbury uniform at home, though I'd most likely get broken in half on a rugby field.)
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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ooh is there any place where that (the Haka) is written out with word divisions? I know the first bit... but I'd love to see what a translation actually is, especially where they start grabbing their crotches.
I like it the best when NZ plays Samoa and they do the opposing war chants. You can visualize what a real pacific islander battle would have been like.
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I just finally got around to reading this. It sounds like your trip is going well. I love the pictures. They remind me of B.C. The mountains remind me of the Okanagan Valley and the Ocean shots are very much like Vancouver Island.
I have received my copy of Idolatry and I will be posting a track by track review soon (and yes, I am still working on my album but I am a procrastinator).
Enjoy the rest of your trip dude.
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He led that haka, but not for the All Blacks (it doesn't belong exclusively to them). He led hakas in Japan when he took an NZ team on a tour there, and also at the national swimming competitions. He also played for Canterbury for a long time (and later served ten years on the Canterbury rubgy union), but I don't think they did hakas in provincial rugby at that stage (they certainly don't nowadays).
This is why we can do stuff like show up for a game and get free seats in the committee room with free food and drinks.
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It actually showed up a couple of weeks ago but we have been really busy with getting my daughter back to school, buying a new car, renovating our bathroom, and helping my inlaws put in a basement floor so I haven't really been around too much.
I posted a review here last night.
Posts: 1336 | Registered: Mar 2002
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In NZ news, this morning we went out to a high school to see my brother Peter's motivational speaker show. It was actually astonishing. I'll post more about it when I have time. Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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Okay, here's the more detailed version of what happened yesterday:
We went to see my brother Peter's motivational speaker road show (I'm not sure how else to describe it), which I was half-expecting to be kind of hokey in that "lame high school guest speaker" way. Anyway, a bunch of high school kids packed into this auditorium for the show in front of what was actually a very well-assembled audiovisual setup. They carry it (and all of their props, more in a sec) around in a snappily-painted 18-wheeler.
The most notable prop was John Britten's fastest motorcycle design. He built ten bikes, and this one was the one that broke three world speed records. What's crazy-cool about Britten is that he was a high school dropout and had no formal training.
Anyway. The three speakers were: 1) a Fijian netball player (whose name I can't spell, sadly) who came from shooting coconuts at a wire loop her father stuck in a coconut tree to playing on the New Zealand netball team that recently won the World Championships, 2) Jeff Knight, a dropout-turned-gang-member-turned-opera singer, and 3) the 4'11" Kiwi who was Gimli's stunt double in LotR (and who is actually IN the vast majority of the shots featuring Gimli, wearing a kilogram of makeup and 29 kilograms of padding and armour; every time Gimli looks short in the movies, it's actually this guy). Oh, he's also (IIRC) a dropout, but has a black belt (not that I remember which martial art it's in).
For me the most powerful story was Knight's. When he finally decided to get out of the motorcycle gang, his former mates called him up and told him that if he didn't surrender his bike they'd kill him (just so we all know this isn't hyperbole, one of his best friends, who stayed in the gang, was murdered a couple of weeks ago). So he gave up his bike, which was quite literally all he had at that stage in his life, and went to drama school. He acted for a while and worked on his voice, and when he was telling us about this he gave a stirring rendition of Ave Maria -- unaccompanied. Crazy.
There were some interludes, like the short clip about John Britten, and some other notable Kiwi inventors and innovators. Obviously, the basic message was "you can do anything you set your mind to" with a dash of "don't let what other people say get you down," but rather than being hokey stuff like "only you can prevent forest fires," the stories were so moving that it was impossible for me to stay cynical. For a moment I actually caught myself thinking about dropping this whole engineering thing and starting a rock band.
Then at night we went to visit one of dad's old Canterbury Rugby Union mates. It was great because I got to sit and listen to all of these cool stories, but I don't think anyone other than AJ would be interested in any more detail than that
Also, two nights ago we had dinner at a restaurant on the summit of one of the big hills near Christchurch. You can only get there by gondola. Sadly we didn't have any cameras suitable for taking good nighttime pictures, so the only good shots were the ones from the upward trip. Also, the food wasn't anything special -- certainly not $50 a head special. Ah well.
That brings us up to today. Mum and dad are heading off to Hanmer either today or tomorrow, while I am departing on a solo adventure. Woo!
quote: He led that haka, but not for the All Blacks (it doesn't belong exclusively to them).
No it sure doesn't. It's actually basically only the last few(albeit by far the most dramatic) verses of a Haka called Ka Mate(hehheh means "it is death" funny name for a dance, no?) I've seen the translation posted, and I think that's fairly close but maybe not really quite literal. It's more like tis death tis death tis life tis life. Invented by a guy a couple hundred years ago right after he got out of hiding from his enemy to inspire people to go kick a lot of a** and take over the all of the south island or something(or was it all NZ, lotta land anyway). I also heard a Maori contingent in WW1 ran out of bullets and so got up, did that haka, and charged the Germans, who then commenced to run like heck! Truly a very impressive dance- if you can call shouting and stomping and splatering and muscle tensing and fist shaking a dance!
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yeah I didn't realize that "Haka" was a generic term that applied to all war chants and there are different kinds. That link RRR googled was quite good.
And twinky I expect a full accounting of your rugby conversations later!
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AJ, my dad taught Fergie McCormick how to kick goals. That's the vintage of the rugby gossip.
Turns out that tt&t found herself in Christchurch this weekend and so I got to hang out with her on my "home turf," so to speak. We explored "downtown" Christchurch a bit (kind of a disappointment, really, there isn't much of anything there) and took a bunch of buses to the shore at New Brighton, which is the site of the long pier and really cool library that I mentioned earlier. The library was closed (whoops) but the pier was still fun. Or at least I thought so.
I was really glad things worked out such that we could hang out again, especially since we weren't so rushed this time with trains to catch and whatnot. Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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I was glad to get another chance to meet up too.
I'd actually never been to Chch before, so twinky the tourist got to show me around part of my own country. *grin* However I feel I need to mention that he had his map upside down the entire time, and tried to blame it on us making our maps the wrong way up. You should have seen his face when he figured it out.
He also neglected to mention that exploring meant miles and miles and miles (and miles) of walking, and several bus trips. It was fun and we got lots of time to talk, but my legs felt it the next day. Sigh. Clearly I am terribly unfit. At least I didn't complain about how heavy my backpack was.
Also apparently we can't get through a day without injuring each other. The worst of these was probably when I turned around too fast with arm upraised and my elbow collided with twinky's jaw, causing him to bite his tongue or cheek. I'd probably feel worse about that had he not already smacked me in the eye causing me to see stars. So it's probably for the best that he's going back to Canadia.
Anyway, it was fun. I almost ended up having to stay in Christchurch for an extra day though, because the weather was so bad in Wellington when I got back there that we almost couldn't land, and nearly had to turn back to Chch. We flew around above Welli for over half an hour waiting for it to clear a little so we could get down, and when we got into the airport, flights were being cancelled left right and centre. But I made it home safe and sound, yay!
Posts: 1431 | Registered: Aug 2003
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You should have been here today. The weather is absolutely glorious. I do not relish the prospect of returning to Canada just in time for frost.
Also I discovered that when we were pub-hunting downtown we really should have gone the other way. I was down there with my parents today and passed about a jazillion more suitable places than we did on our extended hike. This may have had something to do with my mental map being reversed. I like north to be UP on my maps, not DOWN. Anyway, everything worked out okay aside from the injuries, though I suppose that next time I'm in NZ you'll be avoiding me like the plague.
Today was a low-key day. Dad and I took a kayak on the Avon river for half an hour, which was a relaxing excursion. The ducks were kind enough to get out of the way. We said adieu to the last group of family and friends, so we've covered everyone now and tomorrow can be pretty much reserved for packing and travel preparation I suppose. Tonight we're out for dinner with the folks whose houses we've been using, which should be a good time.
Hopefully I'll feel rested by Wednesday morning, just in time to spend the entire day flying.
It looks like I'll get home just in time to nab The Music's second album, Welcome to the North, which is already out here in NZ but costs a whopping NZ$30. I expect it to cost C$12 (which is what their first album cost me) or maybe $14-$16 if it looks like a hit. I have been resisting the temptation to buy it while here, even though I want it quite desperately. Nonetheless, when I get back to Canada I only have to wait four days; the North American release is on October 19th. Huzzah! Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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In another thread tt&t called me "Dan" for the first time and totally without ever having really spoken to me. Which, of course, leads me to believe that your conversations were dominated by discussion of yours truly.
I just want to say that, while I'm not at all surprised, I'm still flattered. I'm glad to be cool enough to be a conversation piece when the little details of your own lives prove unsatisfactory as conversation pieces
It'll be good to have you back in the country, Dude, even if you are a stupid number of klicks away. I expect all the unsavory, sordid, unfit-for-Hatrack details upon your return I'll try and swing you an E-mail this weekend, I'm all alone for Thanksgiving and just about done with my work for Tuesday. I'm glad this trip rocked Posts: 3243 | Registered: Apr 2002
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It would have been nice to have been there today.
Alas for the pubs being the wrong way! I liked the ones we did find though - even if it did take nearly all night to get there. Perhaps you should turn your mental map the right way up? (Also, north is down on our maps? o_O I never realised... clearly I hold my map upside down ALL the time.)
...Yup, like the plague. Definitely. You'll have to drag Dan along with you next time so we can talk about him behind his back in front of him. When I'm not busy avoiding you, of course. (Yes, Dan, he told me allll your dirty little secrets. *grin*)
Also, there are unsavory, sordid, unfit-for-Hatrack details? I wanna know! Tell me quick! >_>
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Too bad we missed each other. I left Christchurch like two days before you got there. Beautiful country. Go thou to Queenstown, then north to glenorchy then to paradise and check out the chinamans bluff(paradise) track it's awesome. Or at least check out the Routeburn or one of those other tracks in that area I'm pretty sure they'll be awesome too. Country like you have never seen before, and unless you come back, won't see again- and this is coming from an Alaskan. Also reccomend the Otago peninsula and the Oamaru area for penguins and stuff. Maybe check out the art galleries in Hokatika, they're really pretty neat. Two hot sping places going over the Lewis pass rd, hear they're awesome, and that the one further west is the better of the two. And Te Anau and milford sound are super awesome. Likewise Mt Cook and the lakes on the road going to it. And if you get back to Christchurch area go to Belfast and the willowbank wildlife sactuary and see kiwis and heaps of other stuff.
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