Life as a Hobbit

For American Memorial Day I sat with New Zealand's version of of the memorializing holiday, A NZAC Day. There is a specificity to the holiday, although I see the creep of appliance sales and furniture discounts down here, too. The day officially commemorates the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps by putting cheap red crepe poppies on every conceivable thing.  If I asked you to tell me which was the Great War and which was the World War would you be able to tell me? I gave you a big hint and put them in chronological order.  Great=1st, World=2nd. The Great War.  How great?  The only great association I have with ANZAC is homophonic, a tiny venue in Toronto, Canada: The Tranzac.  Sometime around 2009 I watched Richard Laviolette and the Oil Slicks play there (check out my favorite Funeral Song ).  The accordionist’s instrument strap broke during their first song and an audience member leapt up to kneel at her feet through the rest of the set, holding ...

Tradies - The traditional hands-on trades, physical professions like construction (builders), plumbing, electricians (sparkies). They are notorious for being fearless (aka reckless) drivers and will want to pass you if you are driving like a timid tourist (it me!) on twisty NZ rds and through residential areas. There seems to be a rhetoric of respect towards tradies as being the quintessential common man. Maybe this is something that happens everywhere to a certain degree, but farmers are held in a similar esteem. It gives me an uneasy feeling, probably the way respect for the common man rings so untrue in my experience filtered through American political rhetoric. It feels like a trick. Is it a trick? It is almost certainly a trick. Bogan - via Ozzie slang. An Antipodean redneck, lowclass, a yahoo. Think 4-wheelers, hunting, and according to my Colorado-come-Kiwi roommate’s associations metalheads. It seems like it used to be thrown around as a purely derogatory term, and no...

Tekapo is a little town in Mackenzie County which is named after that folk hero sheep rustler I wrote about in my Kentucky blog, who stole hundreds of sheep with the help of his trusty dog Friday.  The people of Tekapo erected a monument in 1968 in honor of the sheepdog beside the lake, in homage to the hard working animals who made alpine sheep farming possible.   T he brass plaque attached to the statue ends with "Beannachdan air na cu caorach" which apparently means “Blessings on the sheep dog.”        Tekapo is the east lake, Pukaki lies to the west, sister alpine lakes. Both are bounded by moraines, a scoop made in the earth with a natural dam of rock and debris etched out by a glacier sometime around 12,000 years ago. Pretty young, geologically speaking.   Lake Tekapo is 120 meters deep, twice the depth of Lake Michigan. The town boasts a Dark Sky designation (residential and commercial restrictions on outdoor lighting, streetlig...

Associations are funny things, the often irrational way two things glom together like two slightly sticky pages. When I traveled in China bourbon and chicken were always the first things people mentioned when they found out I come from Kentucky.  Hell, even when I've traveled inside of the U.S. I've gotten some assumptions about toothlessness, shoelessness, and thoroughbred horse racing.  What do people in New Zealand think?   So far I’ve gotten:   Tornados (it's funny to think about people who live in a place with major earthquakes being scared of doom that comes from the sky)  Daniel Boone and his coonskin caps (as well as a discussion of his disappearance from the landscape as a cultural icon, and how NZ has few folk heroes of that ilk, though James Mackenzie the sheep rustler--and his talented sheepdog--is a good example, a kind of tall tale legend of a man who was ballad-worthy after a few jailbreaks and many stolen sheep).   Ugly p...

I shall teach you the rules to a game I played. To play properly school must be in session. I call this game “Mormons or Schoolboys?” You only need to be within earshot of the young gentlemen in question, listen to them for approximately 15 seconds and count how many expletives each spoken sentence contains. If the ratio is about 1:3 then they are Kiwi schoolboys. If the ratio is not quite so extreme, my guess is Mormons. This is what I get for living in a country where school uniforms are the norm.

Trying something a little different this time, here's the photos that I took while on my trip with a few words sprinkled in. Picton By Train

  Birds! Moa  The name comes from the same Polynesian term for domestic fowl.  So we kind of just refer to these dinosaur-like birds as chickens.  The possible traditional te reo Maori word used when they roamed Aotorea alongside humans was "te kura" meaning red bird. A size comparison between four moa species and a human: 1. Dinornis novaezealandiae 2. Emeus crassus 3. Anomalopteryx didiformis 4. Dinornis robustus The moa were kind of wild from an anatomical standpoint. They were completely wingless, they didn’t even have lil vestigial lumps like New Zealand’s other famous flightless bird the kiwi.  Moa feathers are thought to have been less feather-like and more furry, this time similar to modern kiwis, a type of body covering that is more useful for maintaining body temperatures rather than efficient aerodynamics, especially those moa that lived in the colder alpine regions.   Look at how "furry" the kiwi feathers are.  Photo credit Alina Th...