Tuis, Wetas & Milkshakes

Less than a month till Christmas and enjoying the (sometimes sunny, usually windy) weather! We've been checking up on the temperature in all the places we've lived and so far Wellington is by far the nicest! I guess it being the start of summer here has something to do with it. At a glance as I write this, the weather in Wellington: +18°C; Glasgow +7°C; Cork +3°C; Edmonton...-28°C but as always with prairie weather, you have to factor in the wind chill which makes is -40°C (yikes!). While the temperature is steadily improving, the New Zealand wind gusts are still ominously impressive. Often, before you feel the wind, you can hear the massive gust coming through the trees and the buildings, roaring down to you. When it arrives, it is like looking into the eye of God. There is almost enough warning to hide, but not quite, just enough to grab a lamp pole, or leap down from your bike if you are lucky. And there is a very obvious difference between the wind from the north: warm winds from the Pacific, and the chilling winds from the south, blowing over from Antarctica. For the first time in living memory, there are Antarctic icebergs floating down (or up) New Zealand's coast!
And the hole in the ozone layer effect is bizarre. On the really, really sunny days, instead of feeling a warm glow on your skin from the sun, it feels more like being rubber with cayenne pepper! Always a good reminder to reapply the sunscreen. I guess we always had an awareness of the ozone layer issue before, but never really thought about where this seemingly abstract "hole" actually was, and what that meant for the life below it. Typical NZ political critique paints a picture of the ozone hole above New Zealand, shaped like North America.
Mike's job at Fidel's cafe is going very well. He has joined the ranks as defined by our Lonely Planet travel guide: "Fidel's is an institution for caffeine-craving, left-wing subversives, watched over by images of Castro. Terrific eggs are miraculously pumped from the itsy-bitsy kitchen. Pierced, tatooed staff are studiously vague, but friendly." It might be the busiest café in the city so he's run off his feet, but the time flies by and the perks are very good. The huge selection of food is excellent, and no one cares how much free chow he scoffs between (sometimes during) pot scrubbing! Some rough calculations, adding up the multiple daily lattés, milkshakes, samosas, lunch feasts, cheesecake and fudge brownies show Mike's weekly café grub intake to be around $150NZ! He is valiantly attempting to avert the standard grandma cheek-pinching and exclamation "Why are you so skinny?!" on our return to Canada in August.
To avoid any inequality, we both made sure that Mike had only been at work two shifts by the time Carli-Ann started her new jobs. I'm working as a Support Worker/Personal Assistant again part-time with a software engineer, Jon. His wife, Sarah, is 5 days overdue with their first baby, so once they get over this waiting period, my shifts with their family should have an entirely new dynamic! I spend early mornings at their house, and quite a bit of the rest of the day at Jon's office. Mostly I am just an extra set of hands as Jon has Cerebral Palsy. http://www.supportpeople.blogspot.com We attended their "fancy dress" baby shower, here's a photo of them dressed up as babies, "the unexpected twins". We dressed up for the party as a jelly fish: bits of bubble wrap dangling from an open umbrella.
That was the third costume party we attended in a week. We attribute it to one of three possible causes:
New Zealanders are crazy for costumes
Wellington, having hosted the filming of "The Lord of the Rings", "Narnia" and "King Kong", is crawling with bored costume designers
We arrived Halloween-time
Speaking of big budget fantasies, we have yet to do Mike's planned cycle around all the "Lord of the Rings" locations near our house. Our Lonely Planet warned us that every New Zealander we meet will claim to have worked on the film. As predicted, we have met at least six people who have, including our Auckland friend, Monique who worked in the hat and glove department, counting Gandalf's floppy wizard hat on her costuming résumé.
My afternoons are all centered on a delightful little girl named Tess, a bright 3.5 year old who loves swimming, crafts, and going to the playground. Tess has some special needs, so we get to spend our time together smearing, sprinkling and general messing about with food, leaping around outside, and seeing the city's sites. (sigh of contentment) While I have joined a terrific couple of yoga classes a 45 second walk from my house, I have decided not to join a gym here because I hike more than 10 kms almost every day up and down Wellington's famous hills between my shifts, so I have decided that this should be sufficient exercise. An example to understand the extent of Wellington's hilliness: during the initial leg of my morning hike, I climb up 105 meters, past three cliff-perching houses that have their own, private cable cars to transport them to their front doors!
On a recent trip to the Wellington museum "Te Papa", we learned that the city experiences about one earthquake per week! Almost all of them are too small to be felt, and we would probably mistake it for a truck rumbling by. Click here to see a real-time seismograph drum for the past 24 hours in Wellington. We're hoping to feel a small earthquake while we're here. Just enough to wake us up, nothing frightening please. We figure that if our little house is about 80 years old, then it has withstood over 4000 earthquakes in its time! So, we're pretty sure it will hold together until our departure in June.
On our recent visit to the world's first urban predator-free Bird Sanctuary near our house, we learned all about the fauna with which we share New Zealand's lush forests. One of the many interesting endemic birds is the Tui. It has a double-voice-box, so its call includes all sorts of sounds including clicks, cackles and wheezes, and is said to be able to imitate human speech. As in many countries, being a common and admired animal, Mike was delighted to discover that the Tui has a beer named after it, much like Canada's "Moose Head", or Britain's "Speckled Hen". Tui is one of New Zealand's most popular ales (south of Auckland anyway), and his favorite over here.
The Weta, one of the world's heaviest insects, is one of New Zealand's more infamous animals. "Demon grasshopper" in Latin, the giant weta can weigh more than three mice at 70 grams (2.5oz)! It looks like a cross between a cockroach and a cricket, but with longer legs. We just saw our fist "cave wetas" last weekend in a disused goldmine at the wildlife sanctuary. It was pitch dark in there and we walked through it slowly with one dim flashlight. Once we stopped and pointed the flashlight here and there we realized there were dozens of Cave Wetas, antennas listening, clinging to the walls all around and above us. Luckily we learned after we came out of the cave that they can jump 3 meters (especially when provoked with a flashlight beam)!
That's probably a long enough entry for now; we often wonder who actually reads all the way through our entries. Once we save up some money we'll try to squeeze some weekend trips in. Until then, our days won't be terribly exciting, just working, going out in the evenings to listen to the surprisingly huge range of live music in this little city, and absentmindedly soaking in the news from the perspective of this end of the globe, which features lots of South Pacific events. Who knew there was so much political unrest on those little islands! So we'll blog again when there's something momentous to mention. We're now getting closer to settling on the idea of a few weeks in Australia and maybe a month in China on our way back to Canada June/August, but we're keeping our options open until we can afford the flights. So if anyone has any suggestions, we're all ears!