Air New Zealand’s fancy on-demand entertainment system, just what you need on a fourteen-hour flight (although it runs on Windows, so when it crashed I was left staring at a 
boot screen)
Good fish and chips, including the wonderfully disgusting object that is the battered deep-fried pineapple ring
Isaac Freeman‘s drily witty blog and comics
Anzacs, afghans, toffee pops, and jaffas–the latter make all movie-going complete
Friendly ATMs that play video clips on their TV screen, which for some reason reminded me of Bladerunner
A bus trilogy: advertisements on the side panels of bus shelters that change every few minutes by spooling up from a roller, which is also a bit like Bladerunner, but a low-rent Edwardian sort of Bladerunner
GPS units on buses (a Kiwi invention, everyone will tell you) that lets you read the ETA off a monitor while you wait
Apologetic buses: when not in service they display SORRY as their destination
Meaty bacon, made from happy meaty pigs who have never heard of a hog lagoon (look it up, but not just before eating)
There have always been New Zealanders who, like me, are a bit fanatical about native plants, but this attitude now seems to be mainstream, with city councils putting tussock, flax, three lancewoods and a cabbage tree on every scrap of land
Gourmet food (laksa, ostrich, local wine and olive oil) at places that would be greasy diners in the USA
One thousand people paying to attend a panel discussion by scientists on water use on the Canterbury Plains; perhaps that’s a testimony to Christchurch nightlife on a damp Monday, though
And it is intrinsically more sensible for switches to go down than up, and for wall sockets to have switches on them as well (though now kiwi plugs seem big and clunky, perhaps to cope with our grunty 240 volts)
Archive for: July, 2007
Good Kiwi Stuff
Globus Returns
I previously wrote about Globus, the yellow spotted megacootie that briefly rampaged through Durham. Lou prodded me into composing a song about this noble beast, performed of course on the traditional bardic instruments of ukulele and kazoo. If you’re feeling brave, you can listen to the MP3, and download the lyrics and chords if you’d like to sing along at home. This is my first time subjecting the whole interwebs, not just my unfortunate friends, to my singing. With good reason. But when Globus calls, who can deny him/her/it? Not I, sir, not I.
Ducks in the Avon
When I was growing up in Christchurch, it seemed like the Avon River’s sole purpose was to drain the city’s inherent swampiness and look tidy while so doing. Its banks were kept neatly mowed, lined with willow trees and little else. In the 1990s, the city council changed their policy and began planting native grasses and shrubs along the banks and dialing back the mowing (a big ask for New Zealanders, with our innate ferociousness in the field of lawn care). And in just a few years, two species of native duck have returned to the Avon.
New Zealand scaup, or pāpango (Aythya novaeseelandiae), are little golden-eyed black ducks of classic rubber-duckie shape. They’re divers, happy to suddenly disappear underwater and pop up again ten seconds later. If you read the old guide books, you’ll find that our scaup are the inhabitants of high mountain lakes. Well, they don’t seem to be reading the field guides, because they make up about half the ducks on the Avon, and probably a good chunk of the world’s A. novaeseelandiae are swimming within a few miles of the Cathedral.
Paradise ducks (technically shelducks, since they’re Tadorna variegata) are pūtangitangi in most of the country, and pūtakitaki hereabouts. Weirdly for ducks, the male is duller colored–the female has a white head contrasting with a russet body. You almost always see them in pairs–one, usually the male, keeping a lookout somewhere high. When you approach, they start calling to each other in a wheep-honk-wheep-honk chorus, but in Christchurch they’re used to people. This morning I was out walking and was able to touch one as it sat on a bridge pillar.
Who knows what’ll become common in years to come? Black swans? Shovellers? White herons? Native birds are obviously just waiting for us to meet them halfway. So if you live in a city with a river flowing through it, why not bring your representatives’ attention to an interim report archived here? You too could have scaup on your doorstep.
A Short Rant About Kiwi Tucker
There was a time, I am told, when New Zealand cuisine was ghastly. A good feed might be a big hunk of meat and two boiled vegetables, accompanied by a nice iceberg lettuce salad (topped with tomato wedges and hard-boiled eggs, and dressed with, shudder, condensed milk). Garlic was viewed with deep suspicion, and coffee unknown. Kiwi tucker was essentially British food, but with all its interesting diversity (toad-in-the-hole, spotted dick) stripped away by the rigours of the long sea voyage, emerging pale and weak on Southern shores.
Well, not any more. Kiwis are now food-mad. The indigenous snack food, the humble meat pie, has been transformed into dozens of gourmet variants. Chicken, asparagus and cashew; curry and rice; steak and Guinness; hunza and lentil; lamb’s liver and bacon. That last one I bought at the modest Lyttelton Farmer’s Market, where in the shade of a local primary school on a freezing July morning you can get fresh locally-grown shiitake, and artisanal baguettes as good as any I ate in Paris. How can this be? Well, most New Zealanders live next to farmland or the ocean or both, so there’s abundant fresh local produce. Nasty industrial farming hasn’t really arrived, so cattle eat grass all year round and butter and cheese are as yellow as God intended—no need for the orange annatto coloring you get in American cheese. Supermarkets haven’t driven local butchers to extinction. And there’s no California or Florida conveniently nearby, so you have to eat more seasonally.
One thing I knew I would miss when I left America was real Mexican food. There are no Mexicans at all in New Zealand, and you could put on a sombrero and a silly accent to sell corn chips on TV without anyone complaining. But Tex-Mex, which is what most Americans think Mexican food is, has certainly arrived. On Armagh St in sedate Christchurch you can buy a burrito that kicks the living crap out of anything I ate in 8 years in the USA. Hey, Cosmic Cantina, on Perry Street, Durham, NC, I’m talking to you. (For years I would tell Americans that Cosmic sold garbage in a wrapper, and they would look at me like I was nuts, until I seriously doubted my sanity. Well, I am vindicated, and they were wrong, wrong, wrong.) Yes, New Zealanders could teach Americans how to make a burrito—yet just ten years ago if you advertised a burrito on TV you had to explain to the viewers what it was.
On every travel show about New York, one’s invariably exhorted to sample a hot dog. A hot dog is rubbery mystery meat that’s been bobbing all day in a tank of warm water, stirred up occasionally by the vendor’s sweaty arm, and plopped on a gluey white bun. Now, folks will argue passionately about whether to dress the dog with sauerkraut or with mustard and ketchup (combining all three is apparently a mortal sin), and which are the best hot dogs (Nathan’s Kosher at Coney Island, apparently). But I’m afraid it scarcely matters, because hot dogs are intrinsically terrible. I realized this when I had a freshly-grilled, locally-made organic weisswurst on a crusty French roll with a dab of mustard at one of the two wurst stands at the Arts Centre market. The other stand’s wursts didn’t look as yummy, but they also sold their own whole salamis, speck, sausages, and a dozen other kinds of charcuterie, which made up for it I think.
New Zealand pizza makes all but the very best New York pizza look pretty sick, too. The fastest-growing chain is Hell Pizza, with cool internet ordering, lots of goofy toppings including yummy vegetarian, and a box that transforms into a little cardboard coffin for storing your “remains”. Oh, and you don’t tip the delivery guy. In fact, you don’t tip anyone in New Zealand (perhaps because they’re paid a decent wage), and sales tax is always invisibly included, and the bill is always a nice round number because the smallest coin is 10c, and you’re never expected to clear your own table, because that’s what the servers are paid to do. And when you order a cup of tea, you get a little teapot with leaves in it and a tiny jug of milk, not a styrofoam cup of hot water and a teabag. (OK, I’ll calm down now.)
Haven’t found real bagels yet, though.
The Rocky Transition to Doctordom
I’ve been reading Jorge Cham’s comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper for years, and noticed an uncanny parallel between my own career and that of a long-serving grad student, also called Mike, who this year finally graduated–exactly when I did. And now, just as I’ve started choosing Dr from the popup menu when I book a plane ticket, comes the following to put me in my place.
