First public entry.  Recap of the last couple weeks!

I liked Christchurch.  It’s a pretty, downplayed city with a lot of hidden treasures, hip little cafes and bars and restaurants, once you dig a little deeper.  There really just weren’t that many people around though. Considering that the population of the whole country is 4.25 millionand 1/3 of them live in Auckland on the north island, it wasn’t a surprise.  After a few days I got used to it and actually kind of liked it.  It added to the whole chill, laid back feeling about the town and the country in general.

I met up with Joat aka Adam while in Christchurch for an afternoon.  I have to credit him for helping me to see a lot of the cool sights in town.  We took a walk through the city, checked out the Botanic Gardens, went to Dux de Lux (awesome bar that looks like an old classic fraternity house with a different bar in each room) for a really good seafood BBQ pizza, had beers at a Belgian pub on the Avon River (great patio seating there as well), and walked through the city’s art gallery.

I bought a car in Christchurch at a backpacker’s car market.  They were only asking $1500 NZD (about $1100-1200 USD!) at first but there were some repairs that needed to be made.  Still, all in all the car itself cost me $2300 NZD only. It’s an old beat up Subaru Legacy 4WD.  The car’s definitely a piece of shit but for some reason I’m already oddly attached to it. :)

Learning to drive on the other side of the road really was a challenge though.  As I described it to Jeremy,

Learning to drive on the other side of the road has been the most bewildering endeavor I’ve undertaken within at least the last 4.5 years.  You wouldn’t think it’d be that hard but you are literally overriding 10+ years of conditioning.  It takes a lot of thinking to do the most normal things.  Reversing is the worst.  Not only are you in reverse but then everything is backwards.  It literally took me like 30 seconds to strategize on how I was going to back out of this parking spot at the Pak n’ Save the other day and then which direction I was supposed to drive and which side of the road I am supposed to be on.  It’s almost more than my brain can handle.   

Good thing I figured it out in time for the six-hour drive to Queenstown, which was very pretty.  The scenery reminded me a lot of the wilderness in North America.  I kept thinking Alaska must look like this, or maybe some areas of Canada.  The trees were still all different colors.  The part that was very distinctive were the giant mountains and also endless flat plains just covered in smooth, unmarred snow, like powdered sugar. I’d never seen anything like that before, just total uninterrupted snowy expanse.  It was pretty amazing.  We drove past wineries as well and one of the more stunning scenes I saw was a vineyard planted along the edge of a really deep canyon cut by the Kawarau River.  Really incredible.  I kept thinking, I wish I could capture this somehow and share it with people at home.

The World Cup started while I was in Queenstown.  I went to a sports bar to catch the England v USA game at 6 AM.  It was crazy - I thought I would be one among a handful of people there, but the bar was totally packed.  And everyone was facing the screen watching the game with total focus.  In an American sports bar people are like eating, drinking, talking and watching the game.  Not here.  I saw the same type of total focus when rugby was on too.  Speaking of rugby, I watched my first All Blacks game the other night, and I think I could get into this. It’s like football but with non-stop action.  Really fun to watch.  And I saw the All Blacks actually start a game off with the haka challenge, like in Invictus :)

I made friends with a couple of Kiwi guys who have sort of “taken me under their wing”.  They work at one of the local bars that plays live music and their favorite thing to do is drink a shit-ton of “piss” (beer) and smoke a shit-ton of weed and jam out on the guitar until the sun rises.  Which I saw for myself on Monday night.  One of them is half Maori, which is the indigenous people here, and my conversations with them about New Zealand and American culture and race relations in the two countries have been really interesting…more on that later though.

That’s it for now, I’m tired of typing :) 

Some photos:

From the Savoy Brown cafe in Christchurch:

C1 Espresso in Christchurch:

Driving to Queenstown:

Queenstown: