Nerding Event

Last Saturday Celia and I went on a nerding event, which is what she dubbed Armageddon, the comic/anime convention held at the Christchurch Convention Center last weekend. Now neither of us had ever been to such an event, but she was excited because she loves anime and video games and all that good stuff. I was curious at the comic book artists/writers themselves, so off we went and even before we got there it became apparent it was stupid day.

We took the #5 bus downtown around noon. Now as most of you know city buses are pretty big and pretty hard to miss but just blocks from the bus exchange where we got off, a mini-van totally missed seeing ours. It was in the left lane, we were in the right and that idiot driver decided he was going to turn into a parking lot on the right and turned right in front of the bus. Smash! How he did not see that bus I will never know. I mean really, how could you not see it? The poor driver was totally shook, the back end of the van was crushed, but luckily no one was hurt. So after all that excitement and drama we hopped off the bus and walked the rest of the way to the convention.We knew we were going the right way very shortly as "Jedi" and other interestingly dressed characters started appearing on the sidewalks before us.

The convention itself was interesting enough. First they give you a good bag filled with nerd fuel (Oreos, Doritos, and Easy Mac). Then it was off to check out the booths and get stalked by Stormtroopers. There was some decent art, but nothing mind blowing and the local NZ comic booth was total amateur hours skills wise. Got to see some information on their local digital and animation arts school programs, which was interesting, but like much here, more in the line of mediocre skill and creativity wise. Lots of folks running around in costumes, I'll post some pictures below. We watched an ice cream eating contest, which was pretty funny. Then came the Dragonball Z power calling contest, where the contestants basically pretended to be calling up the powers of Dragonball Z. Now this was pretty damn hilarious as well, particularly when one rather stupid contested thought he would be original and actually urinate on the stage. I kid you not, he whipped it out and urinated all over the stage! Not only was everyone, including the host shocked and disgusted but I'm betting there are several youtube videos of this guys idiocy. Needless to say security hauled him out quite roughly and the contest continued. Ironically, no Dragonball Z costumed contestant won, instead it was Mario and Luigi for the win. Those guys were a total riot. But like I said, it was a really good day for stupid people.

After all that I wandered out for a smoke while Celia wandered booths and amazingly enough she did what we had pretty much given up on, she made a friend. She and this Asian kid named Sam struck up a conversation, found they like similar anime and stuff and both loath Christchurch so I was left solo for the rest of the afternoon, which for that reason I didn't mind at all. Over all an interesting day and experience. Don't think I'm quite nerd enough to enjoy such events as others seem too, but it was definitely a different experience.

Just Married :)

On Saturday March 20th 2010 Greg and I woke up early and headed out to the beach. It was a warm and beautiful morning with a light breeze and light cloud cover. We took with us a broom and the several hundred white sea shells that he, I and Celia has spent much time collecting earlier in the week. Our mission- create a beautiful place to get married. Having scouted out a place earlier in the week, we commenced to clearing out all the ocean debris and smoothing out the sand. Then Greg drew out three circles in the sand which I traced with sea shells. While I laid out the sea shells, he inscribed the circle with stars of David, kaballah names and various other positive meaningful things. We had dreamed since becoming engaged of getting married in a meaningful way on a beach in the south pacific and that dream was finally becoming a reality. Once everything was in place Celia came out and watched over the ceremony site while we got ready.

I decided to wear the dress my now mother-in-law bought me for my birthday last year which I hadn't had a chance to wear and the diamond earrings my mother gave me so that both mother's were there in spirit. Once we were all ready to go the wedding celebrant arrived at our beach house. We had explored several options of how to get married here in New Zealand and decided a wedding celebrant on the beach was the best option to have just what we wanted. We decided to go with Ruth Gardner because her website showed her to be an open minded spiritual woman who we felt would be open to our more unusual requests and she was. Our ceremony incorporated various aspects of pagan, Native American, kaballah and Jewish beliefs. Once we arrived at the ceremony site Ruth opened by walking the circle with sage to purify it. Then she followed with prayers honoring the elements, ancestors, spirits of this beautiful land and most importantly G-d and his aspects under kaballah. We then took our vows and exchanged rings with traditional Jewish phrasing and were married. To close the ceremony Ruth spoke an native American blessing and then Greg and I took turns speaking traditional Jewish blessings, he in Hebrew and I in English. It was a lovely and beautiful ceremony filled with meaning and very personal to us. I had my bare toes in the sand and the ocean for music. It was perfect.

Unfortunately the camera was acting up a bit, so while we got some photos, we didn't get as many as we wanted and the actual ring exchange wasn't photographed. After the ceremony we headed out to Kaikoura for a mini-honeymoon. Kaikoura is a beautiful little seas side town with some amazing wildlife. We had a great time, ate some great food and completely enjoyed our time there. One of the highlights was going snorkeling with seals. Yes, we actually donned wetsuits and snorkel gear and went out to swim with seals. It was amazing. They have such individual characters and soulful eyes. Though the Pacific is really cold and while wetsuits help with that a bit, it sneaks in! Brrr! But once we got use to the gear and the water the seals were incredible. Seeing these amazing creatures in their natural habitat beats any zoo or aquarium ever. Over all it was an amazing weekend, a perfect wedding and we are all very happy! :) I would write more but I am soooooooooo tired..night!

Live and Learn

3-12-10

Every adventure becomes in its way a learning experience and this one is no different. We all have dreams, set goals and make plans with some idea of how things will be. Plans become compilations of what we know through research and what we assume and hope for through imagination. In the many months before we came here we had researched, planned and dreamed much.
We had hoped to immerse ourselves happily in another culture only to arrive and find that Kiwi Land is in many ways America Lite. Kiwi’s seem rather taken with American culture, which is really pop culture since that is really the only culture we export. Everywhere you go for every new thing one can see one will also see something rather familiar.  From Snickers bars next to the Picnic ones and Burger King next to the souvlaki shop to the entire gambit of American television, music and movies, it hardly feels like we are so far away from home. It’s easy to see why an American would want to immigrate here for in many ways it is a more peaceful and less populated version of home. In a month’s time Christchurch has become somewhat ordinary though. In that there is a rather big learning point for me which is to never stay in a foreign city more than a month before moving on to another one.  Greg tried to tell me this before we left, but I didn’t understand it then. I do now.  But despite that we do like this place enough to wish we could find work here and stay. While we have looked into it and Greg has applied, our time here seems rather too short to accomplish such goals so we have filed it away because unlike most places Greg has gone he seems keen to return to these lovely islands sometime in the future and I agree.

Another learning point has been do not take too much from home with you. For practical reasons I had to bring along school via online classes and my work to help finance this adventure but both have been rather greedy with my time. My aspiration to tap into a deep creative vein here for writing and painting has been blocked by my responsibilities. The creativity is there though. Most days I awake inspired, wanting to sit down to the keys or brush and express what I see and feel but often I sadly must put that impulse aside for work or school.  We have confirmed my idea of have internet will travel in regard to my work though, which is good. But in my mind now I dream of just having the free time to create in such a peaceful place like this with no other responsibilities. Another goal to work toward I suppose.

Traveling as a family has been another disappointment.  Greg and I both made the unfortunate assumption that Celia was like us in that we have an innate curiosity about the world.  We enjoy simply exploring new places and get great fulfillment from experiencing. I’ve been this way since I was young and assumed a similar vein ran through Celia which would make this experience enjoyable for her. But that is not how it is. This trip has not been a happy experience for her. She does not enjoy travel, is not curious about the country and spends much of her time bored and missing her friends. I feel very badly about this, for her and for us as its cast a gloom over the whole experience.
Though as a family we do all agreed our holiday home is a curious one. It’s nothing fancy but rather a simple strange cottage across the street from the ocean but we’ve noticed some oddities about it. For example there are the bookshelves. There are three large full book shelves in the living room and one in the hallway. Now we have all thoroughly investigated these shelves several times. And initial inspection was strange enough. We found medical books, spiritual books, novels, travel guides and an odd assortment of other topics. The strange thing is how so much of it applies to us. Things we are talking about like how to be a happy family, how to make friends, how to be positive people, how to use the mind to improve health, poetry and short stories for Celia’s education, marriage, cooking, even a few art books, lie on these shelves. But even more strangely are the things that appear, like Celia asking me for watercolors and a day or so later a beginner’s book on water colors complete with a paint set and paper appearing. No one saw it there before and we had all looked through the shelves in detail.  Of course one might say we are just being superstitious, and perhaps we are, but we all feel a presence in the house and from some investigation suspect that this house once belonged to an older couple, of which the woman died of cancer. Odd things continue to appear, like the sun shaped sun catcher that emerged from the wall ivy yesterday.  It bothers Greg a bit and we all have experienced vivid strange dreams and bad sleep from time to time, but overall it isn’t a bad thing, just odd.

But despite these oddities and disappointments we are trying to make the best of something we worked so hard to get. Some goals have been achieved. Greg’s health is greatly improved and he is now strong enough to launch his career in whatever direction that takes us. We talk often on the possibilities with some days being focused on actual work in the states but more time spent considering another adventure to South America this summer to hopefully find the excitement and closeness we were hoping to find here. We will be married shortly and make a solid commitment of this family despite our imperfections.  

3-18-10

Yes , I know, I’ve been terrible about keeping this thing updated. Seems none of my plans and intentions for this trip has worked out well.  So I’m including a bit of an update on the post above, which I wrote offline, intending to post it, but didn’t get to it. Not having internet at our home anymore is really very detrimental to getting things accomplished including blogging, work and school.  But this week deserves a bit of an additional update before I post.

Last Saturday we went to a so called Gypsy Fair, which was more market for weird stuff then actual fair. But the “house trucks” were interesting to look at. If you imagine an old gypsy wagon then transpose it onto an older style truck you kind of can imagine what they were like. But overall it was rather disappointing, as much is becoming here.  Like Greg’s aspirations for work. For weeks he diligently prepped his resume, reviewed immigration information and made profiles on various job search websites. But often when he went back to those websites he couldn’t use his log in information and so emailed the websites for assistance.  Yesterday he got answers. Apparently the job market is pretty much closed off to Americans, maybe foreigners in general. One site told him they didn’t register his profile on purpose because they want to give locals opportunities first. Another told him they didn’t recognize his qualifications. But the kicker was from immigration services themselves, who told him that his degree, his MPA, was not recognized here.  They would not recognize any of his education or experience and told him if he really wanted to work here that he should go hang out at the downtown cafés in Wellington, try to spark up conversations with businessmen, and offer to work for free. It was a devastating and insulting blow and the final straw on our good feelings toward this place. We probably won't be coming back as too much of this Kiwi-ness just doesn't mix well with our American sensibilities.

Its one thing to want to support your citizens getting work but an entirely other thing to completely insult twelve years of quality US university education. They acted like his degrees had come from some community college in some third world backwater.  After some discussion and venting we decided that this place is simply not meant for us and that whatever Greg is meant to do with his education and experiences it just hasn’t manifested yet. Everything in G-d’s time I suppose. So after venting we cheered ourselves with a trip downtown to celebrate St Patty’s day at an Irish bar. We were going to go to a new one, The Bog, but it had a wait line about 200 people deep. Ridiculous! So we went back to Sullivan’s, where we had gone on Valentines and had some Guinness, listened to loud live Kiwi renditions of American music, because apparently they don’t seem to have any musical culture of their own here, and over all had a good enough time to chase the blues away.

Ghosts and Scavengers

Last Friday Celia and I headed out for an excursion of our own to take the GhostWalk at the Arts Centre in Christchurch. The tour, which promised lots of spooky fun, warned about taking people up and down numerous stairs, so Greg sat this one out. So around 6 pm Celia and I hopped the bus downtown to pick up our tickets and grab dinner before the tour started at 9. We picked up our tickets at the Arts Centre then went back to Cathedral Square to find a bit to eat. Now we had both committed to trying something new this time instead of laming out and going to Burger King or some other imported US franchise. With this in mind we wandered all around downtown seeking. There are a lot of Asian places and a lot of places that sell Souvlakis. Now we had both eyed the souvlaki with interest but Celia was hesitant and pretty much took a half hour convincing before she finally agreed to try it. A souvlaki is seasoned grilled meat, chicken, beef or lamb, a salad of shredded veggies, and various sauces all wrapped up in a warm soft pita bread. Greg had something similar in Vienna and raved about them. So I got the chicken, she got the beef and after grabbing a frozen coke we headed back to the square. The souvlakis are delicious! I'm craving one now as I write this. We were both enjoying our meal when we noticed some strange things in the square. A group of four early twenties girls came running from around Starbucks in identical black capris, black tank tops and white shawls tied about their hips. Odd. Then we see four other girls dressed as pirate wenches. And then four brides, and four punks, and so on. This definitely peaked our curiosity as we watched one group run up to a couple of guys on the square and ask them if they knew how to play leap frog. After convincing the guys to do so, they were off again, dashing across the square to a tourist shop only to emerge moments later victoriously waving post cards and Australian coins. Well, we had to ask, so I stopped the group of brides as they were dashing past and asked what was up. Apparently a local radio station was sponsoring a scavenger hunt with a $4000 prize to the winner. It was hilarious to watch these girls in these crazy get ups run all over the square hunting up the stuff on their lists.  So we ate and watched for a while before heading back to the Art Centre for our tour.

Now we had both been to the Art Centre during the weekend market before and briefly wanted through the art workshop area but never fully toured the place. Our tour started at 9.01 pm at the clock tower where a rather tall thin man dressed in an old fashioned completely black suit and top hat emerged from the shadows carrying several lanterns. He took our tickets and ushered us into the start of our tour. The Art Centre was originally Canterbury College, a large series of Gothic architecture buildings that housed the original university in Christchurch before it moved to the more spacious burbs. We began in Rutherford's Den, the private underground study area when Rutherford, who apparently split the atom, did his research. Then it was up several flights of winding stair to a preserved original lecture hall. Our host told us about the ghosts reputed to roam about the center as we sat in the dark hall and I have to say that room definitely had a feel to it. The tour started out more like a history lecture, building up for when we went down the stairs when doors slammed in peoples faces and the spooky stuff began. The first good door slam got a good scream out of Celia. The tour progressed through many buildings on various parts of the campus, each one with its own spooky tale, though the last two stood out the most. First to last was the prop room above what is now the Court Theater. A narrow hot and very spooky place, it gave me an instant headache and no one was comfortable there. After that we went to a room that use to be part of the engineering school which had a very low ceiling because above it use to be a huge water tank for experiment use. It was here that the last of our steadily dying lanterns gave up and we got our biggest fright as something came barreling out of the darkness causing everyone to scream and freak out. Over all it was a lot of fun and Celia and my cheeks hurt from screams, laughs and lots of smiling through out the tour. 

After the tour we headed back to the square to catch the bus home. Having time to kill and parched throats, we grabbed another frozen coke and wandered around to listen to the various street musicians. On one block we found a trio of groovy bongo drummers keeping a beat so good that a bunch of tipsy middle age women were boogieing down right there in the street. It was hilarious and lots of fun. Probably the best time out Celia and I had here so far.


Aside from that we've been a bit quiet. Finally took Greg down to the Art Centre as well a few days later for some us time and took in the art at the Centre and the main gallery of Christchurch. Sadly the main gallery had nothing on the art in the Centre and was rather disappointing in contrast to other art we've seen such as that in D.C.  Another day he and I took a hike down the beach to see if we could make it all the way to the Southshore. We did make it, despite me getting yet another sun burn and walked a total of 2.8 miles, which is astoundingly good given he could only do .8 on a treadmill when we left Michigan  Other then those outings we've been keeping to the house, me doing my illustration work and Greg has been focusing on career prep. He has pulled together his resume and is starting the job of finding a job. Being here has accomplished that goal of ours, getting him strong enough to start his career as all the physical activity noted in this blog shows. We're working on our plans for the future, including ironing out those pesky wedding details, while enjoying our present. Tonight we meet with a wedding celebrant to try and arrange our beach wedding and this weekend all three of us plan on hitting a Gypsy Fair, so I'll post again in a few days. Cheers! :)

Akaroa

On Tuesday March 2nd, we ventured out of Christchurch to visit the French settlement town of Akaroa. Established in 1840, Akaroa is home to around a thousand people and numerous holiday homes due to its popularity as a holiday destination by Kiwis and foreigners alike.  It is located on a lovely bay in the Banks Peninsula. The original settlement represents the French attempt to settle in New Zealand after the British had found it but not developed settlements here. Of course once the Brits got wind that the French were making their attempt they promptly reaffirmed their control over the islands, but the French having come so far decided to stay anyways. This and much more was learned on our way to Akaroa during the shuttle drive up a very winding twisting road through the high rolling hills of the Banks Peninsula.  The ride was something else, but the views were spectacular.
Once we arrived in Akaroa we boarded a catamaran called the Black Cat for a two hour harbor nature cruise to explore the wonderful wildlife and scenery of this secluded bay.  This harbor is actually the crater of an extinct volcano. The Banks Peninsula was originally a volcanic island but over time the Pacific broke through one of the crater sides to fill the crater basin with shallow ocean water creating a very beautiful harbor.  When the first settlers came the hillsides of the harbor were covered in dense forest but the English quickly harvested much of the timber not realizing New Zealand trees take much longer to grow then for example North American trees, so much of the hill sides lack trees but some are coming back due to conservation efforts.  There is a strong focus on nature conservation in the area with a large portion of it focused on the world’s smallest and rarest dolphins, Hector’s, which we hoped to see on our cruise.  Luck was with us as we not only saw the Hector’s Dolphins, we saw dozens of them. There are only about a thousand in existence and our ship captain said they generally only see groups of two or three on a cruise, but it seemed that we had stumbled on their social time where many of the small groups gather to play and socialize. They swam all around the boat around us for some time as we cruised slowly through the harbor which was really great to see.  We also saw Cormorants, a type of water bird also called Shags in New Zealand, sunning themselves on the rocky cliffs. New Zealand has numerous types of birds, many flightless and water orientated.  A little blue penguin also popped up briefly to say hi to the boat, but wouldn’t stay surfaced long enough to have its picture taken.  We had another brief encounter with a fur seal that was playing along the seaweed covered coast, rolling in and out of the sea weed. While the seal blended in well with his surroundings, making picture taking rather difficult, we did get to watch it playing and rubbing its whiskers quite a bit. Yes, they are as cute as reputed.  Overall the cruise was well worth the trip to Akaroa and a wonderful experience.
After the cruise we had several hours to wander around Akaroa itself before our bus back to the city. The age of this tiny settlement shows in its older buildings and charm. Along with having become a popular place for tourists, Akaroa also has attracted many artists to call its quiet beautiful harbor home so there were many galleries and creative shops down the town’s main road. The shoreline was also very good for searching for sea shells and I found several of different shapes and variety then the ones available at our beach in New Brighton. I hope at some point to get lucky and come across a Paua shell as I was lucky enough in the Caribbean to find a conch but haven’t had luck yet. It’s very possible I won’t since the locals know the commercial value of these beautiful shells and therefore harvest them regularly for making jewelry and souvenirs for tourists. We had a great and very enjoyable day, took many pictures, and would definitely visit lovely Akaroa again.


I am only putting up a few pics though due to our limited internet access. Sorry :(