Another from Sara

Sara reports!
8/3/09

Hello friends and family members!

Bother, I said that I would be better about keeping up on my writing, and here have I failed yet again. Almost a week has passed since my last post, and with that week, so many beautiful details and memories, that I am not sure where to begin. I think I will do what has become a confusing and anti-Aristotelian habit of mine, by recording my week backwards. That way, it really is easiest for me to remember (though probably not quite so easy for the rest of you to follow. My apologies!)

Today (Monday) , Nick, Dad, and I took a couple of different buses down to Mission Bay beach. The Mission Bay area is clean and somewhat touristy, with the old beach front feel best exemplified by the fact that there were four different ice cream shops on a single two-block stretch. It was lovely to get away from the city, to be free from the rumbling of highways and the bustling of pedestrians. We spent a good four hours there, strolling up and down the beach, picking up seashells. That’s how we usually start on these little jaunts of ours – picking up one or two off the shore. But we never come home without at least a plastic bag full of opulent chippings, fans, and snail shells. It’s impossible to overlook them. Coming from a landlocked state, I daresay the ocean will never lose its charm to us. One of the greatest extravagances I have noticed here is that people use seashells in their concrete and plant mulch. We, too, had to come to terms with crushing these precious beauties, as virtually all of the beach shore at both Mission Bay and Devonport have been comprised of a crushed-sea-shell sand, in every smooth-edged shell and glittering sunrise color imaginable. Stepping on seashells! I feel like the native man in that old story – whose tribe dealt in a special type of stone for money. When he visited a very distant land, those stones were all over the fields, and he went about picking them up and shouting that he was rich, while all of the local villagers stood by and wondered if he mightn’t have been suffering from sun exposure.
We went to a gas station and bought some bottled drinks just for the bottles. Then we had lunch at a place called “Burger Fuel” which had all recycled packaging, donated its cooking oil to hybrid vehicles, and ran its own delivery vehicles on cooking oil. Then we chased seagulls, sunned on park benches, watched an old man with feed the birds with fistfuls of crumbs (oh, how he smiled! And they were eating out of his hands. He must have been there for hours; he was there whenever we passed the benches). And we combed the beach for seashells of outstanding color, cut, or texture. What a wonderful feeling to have your skin smooth with dried sea salt and your mind in the sky. We had nowhere to be, nowhere else to go, and were relieved of all social expectation.
On our way to the bus stop in downtown Auckland, Dad and I spontaneously decided to get haircuts. There was a small barbershop that had just opened up near our usual bus stop, run by an Iranian immigrant couple. The haircut prices were $15 for a “quick cut” and $20 for a “quality cut.” Dad and I both got “quality cuts” just to be safe. The barber was a thin, gregarious fellow who told my father that he had, “Very good hair – two, three months worth. It take more than the usual ten minutes. We call this place ‘Quick Cuts’ but for your hair it takes longer. Very thick. Good hair.” His wife, who cut my hair, was more of a stoic, but she did a fantastic job chopping my hair up, and played Iranian music in the background. I was done a lot sooner than my father, so I got to sit back and watch other customers. There was an Islamic girl who came in for a haircut, and asked if they had a barrier they could put up, because there were men in the shop. The woman who cut our hair was very kind and took her to a back room to do the cut. I hadn’t thought about it before – knowing the Muslim tradition for girls to keep their hair covered – of where Islamic women could go for haircuts. It was an interesting consideration for me, and I’m glad I got to witness the exchange.
We got a little lost using the bus system back, but we found our way around and Nick got a lot of knitting done while we were waiting. I suppose I should mention that, too. Last night, I taught my brother to knit, and he is a natural! Already he is halfway through a very long and lovely brown scarf. I am quite proud of my young student, as it took me weeks to get to the point he has reached in mere hours.
Aside from teaching Nick to knit, yesterday was an easy-going day. We woke up early to attend church at a local progressive Presbyterian church that is doing great things in this area. Dad befriended a man who used to be involved with the Methodist council in New Zealand, who was extremely intelligent, well read, and highly progressive. It was refreshing to meet someone else with a forward thinking attitude about Christianity, one that I will shamelessly say needs to be replicated if the church expects to do any good in a world that is in desperate need of a lot of good.
After teatime at the church, we went out for lunch at the mall, very much enjoying our respective teriyakis and curries. Walking home, Dad and I went up to visit a small supermarket up the street to pick up milk and jam. The owners are a very friendly Indian couple, who were playing Indian music in the shop and speaking to one another in Hindi. When the woman rang up our order, we noticed that her hands had been died yellow with curry and turmeric powders, we assumed from her cooking. Human beings can be quite beautiful.
Because my dad’s ankle has been giving him a hard time this week, the rest of my family went home to rest and regroup. I picked up my ipod and strolled a few miles down to the National Museum to check out the winter greenhouse. Walking is a great release for me, and I enjoyed my solo adventure dearly. There was a fernery in the museum, and I explored that, too. I had never realized how many kinds of ferns there were in the world, much less New Zealand alone. Some of them were great, elegant plants, as tall and slender as palm trees, while others were fat, gnarly, and jagged (I supposed that’s what happens when you are given a name like “creeping slugworth fern”). I also wandered through the Senses Garden, which was planted with heavily perfumed flowers and strongly scented herbs, so that at any given breath you never knew if you would be smelling lilac, mint, or oregano. Before heading home, I found a tree to lie beneath. I closed my eyes, turned up Woody Guthrie, and soaked up as much sun as my skin could hold. When I opened my eyes again, I couldn’t tell the difference between fluttering fall leaves and fluttering sparrow’s wings. It seems the tree I had been resting under was dropping good nuts, and the sparrows were eager to get to them. When the thought I was asleep, the crept up on me, and when I sat up, a small flock of twenty of them took flight all around me. I felt like Snow White, without the dwarves.
I arrived back at home just as a heavy rain began. The rain lasted through the rest of the evening, so we all settled in to our various projects, and enjoyed watching “The Pursuit of Happiness” together before bed.
Saturday was also a lovely, slow-paced day. Mom doesn’t visit schools on weekends, so she was able to join us in a wander about the Auckland area. Initially we had planned to take a ferry over to Waiheke Island, which is a highly industrial little volcanic island known for its mining towns. Unfortunately, with the heavy rains (it was a rainy week), we decided to call off that adventure and stick to more familiar grounds. We revisited the Victoria Marketplace that Nick, Dad, and I had discovered on Friday, and took cover in the various shops of the market. The marketplace is in an old railway building, with a large open area in the center of the market, and dozens of small craft and trinket shops snaking back around the old hallways, each with an open wall to the center of the market. Nick and I picked up jewelry and souvenirs, while Dad and Mom purchased gifts for her coworkers. An old, soft-eyed man in a shepherd’s cap sold Nick several unpolished greenstones. He stands out in my mind because of the intricate bird tattoos that he had in the crook of each of his thumbs. The other person who stands out to me is the large, flowery British woman who sold me my Indian tunic. Her shop was so jammed with racks of skirts, shirts, dresses, and kimonos that the walls were covered and one could hardly breathe without inhaling a mouthful of cotton. She had great, brown hands that always seemed to be fluttering to correct some loose string or crooked hanger, and moved like she was operated by a series of dropping sandbag stage weights. When I asked my mom to look at the tunic, and my mom started examining the seams, our shopkeeper carelessly flipped back one hand and said, “You like it? I been traveling too, I know, it’s hard to decide on what to buy when you got no room in your suitcase. Five dollars off, if you like it.” I liked it. And I found room in my suitcase.
There was also an elderly couple there who looked just like Jack Spratt and his wife – he was a long-legged grasshopper of a man, and she was a wide, curvaceous woman with dramatic eyes and a flashing red scarf wrapped twice around her neck. He played the fiddle while she sang French love songs. They had taken over an old performing stage at the center of the courtyard, and no one contested their claim. Even when the rain down-poured, they kept up their performance, and soon every one of the rusty wire lawn chairs in front of them was drawn near.

After Victoria Market, we all hopped a ferry up to Devonshire, a place that Nick, Dad, and I had also been to visit earlier in the week. We explored a few of the quaint shops and bookstores around the area. All of us took turns getting massages in a water machine at the ferry stop. At first we had just stopped to look at the strange, tanning-bed like contraptions before us, but we were quickly and comedically drawn in by a woman whom my brother described as, “being the type of person who should be selling motorcycles or jet engines.” I think it as her language, the way she fanned her fingers out and said, “Hey! How’s it going? Let me show you how this works… You need a rest. Oh, she’ll try it? You all should try it. You look like you could relax, honey, and this is just the thing for you…” She even tossed on an extra ten minutes for my mom and my dad each, “because they looked like they could use it.”
We had dinner at the same Fish and Chips place that Nick, Dad, and I visited on our last trip, partly because we were in love with the owner, and mostly because the food was too fantastic to pass up. The restaurant, “Riba” is run by a Croatian man and his New Zealander wife. Same as last time, we ordered too much food, and he told us so. He said, “two scoops chips? You never finish. I give you one and a half.” Indeed, if he had given us two, we never could have finished them all. Just like last time, he brought the fries out first, in a mound on a huge slab of paper, and set that papered mound down on the center of our table. Mom’s fish was tossed in the middle, on top of the chips, and our hamburgers/veggieburgers came out last – huge creations, with layers of beat, fried egg, and pineapple, in addition to the face-sized buns and patties.
While we ate, the owner and his wife came out and bantered with us. The conversation went something like this.
Owner: “I’m sorry. She put mushroom on your burger. After twenty-seven year, she cannot read my handwriting. You think I should leave her now? Or give her a couple more year to figure it out?”
Dad: [Laughing] “It’s fine, it’s fine. Give her a couple more years, what is marriage for.”
Owner: “Okay, okay. I give her second chance.” [Goes to kitchen, returns with wife. They sit at a table opposite ours.]
Dad: “So you’re Croatian?” [Referencing the poster of Croatia on the wall.]
Owner: “Yup!”
Dad: “What brought you here?”
Owner: “I break my leg.” [Rolls eyes and points thumb at wife. Pretending to whisper]: “I thought she was rich!”
Dad: [Laughing] “Well, now she’s rich, she has you, right?”
Wife: “I imported him. See what I put up with?”
Owner: “See? Twenty-seven years! I leave her now.”
That’s the kind of couple that makes me believe in marriage. And to boot, they were both great cooks.
After lunch, we strolled by The “Wild and Woolly” knitting shop to pick up more wool for scarves, and a couple of knitting needles so I could teach Nick. We bought our wool, but they were out of size 12 needles, so the cashier (a friendly Scottish woman – noticed a certain theme of cultural diversity here?) sent us to “Ike’s Emporium,” a store that looks exactly what it sounds like. Stacks of yarn, boxes of cheap jewelry, souvenirs, and mannequins in neon wigs leaned against every wall, shelf, and table. I bought some more yarn there ($3.20 a ball. I couldn’t resist) and we stopped by the grocery store for oranges. While the rest of us waited on a bench outside (Mom went in to get the oranges), we were treated to the talents of a young Avril-Lavigne looking street musician who played and sang covers of Neil Young songs with her guitar. We were also befriended by a well-behaved mutt, who was apparently quite used to being temporarily abandoned outside of grocery stores. She came over and plopped her head down right in Nick’s lap, looking for love and attention. I suppose that is unique to this area – leash laws don’t apply in many areas, and a lot of people run around barefoot. Teens, old men, and children alike come and go on the bus, in restaurants, and grocery stores, scampering along with nothing to cover their soles but their skin, and no one seems to look twice. (I count this among the positive reasons to consider moving to Auckland!)
After a long day, we hopped the ferry and bussed home, where I cooked a light dinner and we all settled in for our nightly movie ritual. Plus knitting.
Thursday and Friday need little describing, as, on each day, Nick, Dad, and I went to visit Victoria Market and Devonshire, described above. Aside from visiting the same places we did on Saturday, Nick bought a scarf at the market, and the three of us also spent time exploring a sketchy/artsy part of town, where I bought a great coat at a second hand store, because we hear it is to be quite cold in Christchurch, where we are flying tomorrow. We also had dinner at a cute pizza/burger place called “Ketchup” where we were served by a young Indian man in a full cook’s uniform. The food was great, and so was the Ketchup. Must have been the total lack of high fructose corn syrup…
Wednesday I did some more walking on my own, and we mostly took it easy, because of Dad’s ankle-troubles, though we did all still climb the huge old volcanic hill behind our hotel, and explored some more shops and side-streets around our area. I organized pictures on the computer, wrote, did some research for upcoming classes, and took a long time making dinner. It was nice relaxing, and the weather was really glum, but we all enjoyed a brief “vacation from our vacation.”
I’ll admit, I’ve completely lost track of my days, actually, so what I wrote for Thursday might have happened last Tuesday, or vice versa, but the important thing is that it happened, and that life is good, and that we are all having a fantastic time here and enjoying one another’s company.
Tomorrow Nick, Dad, and I are catching a flight down to the South Island’s largest city, Christchurch, which is about half the size of Duluth, and known for its flowers. Mom will be joining us on Friday, and we’ve got all sorts of adventures planned. I can’t believe how fast this trip is flying, as we’ve only got a day left when we come back from Christchurch, then it’s three days in L.A. and I’m home again! It seems I’ve just gotten into the traveling mindset, and, Dad and I agree, we are ready for another few months to finish exploring the world! Still, it will be nice to be home and see all of you. Hope summer is going well. Love to all! More later.

-Sara

P.S. Again, excuse grammar and spelling! I’m not going to reread this, because it is midnight, but I want to post it because I’m not sure what kind of internet we’ll have in Christchurch. Thanks!