Akaroa, Akaroa

Oh, my friends. What a happy few days this has been!

Wellington wasn’t feeling so right. It’s a perfectly nice town. I COULD live there. It’s very green, with lots of cute, old, brightly painted Victorian houses lining the hilly streets. And there’s plenty to do. It has all of the things a city has to offer – movies, restaurants, bars, shopping, with the bonus of easy access to outdoor activities.

But, well, we just weren’t getting anywhere in Wellington. Jobs weren’t popping out at us, and the more we thought things over, the more we admitted to each other that living in a city wasn’t exactly what we wanted to get out of this trip.

On top of this, it is insanely windy in Wellington. And my bangs do not like windy. Did I just write that?

Anyway, we widened our search. We started poring over online job listings for all of New Zealand, and we found that a vast majority of the seasonal jobs for people like us were down in the South Island. We found one posting that was particularly interesting – a farm hostel in Akaroa, a small town just south of Christchurch, was looking to hire two people to work for accommodation, one to work the reception desk and one to do light cleaning. Work for accommodation sounds good, we said! Think of all the money we will save!

We spoke with the guy at this hostel, and he encouraged us to come down and check out the place. See if it suited us. He did advise us that these jobs left us enough time to get second jobs, so we could actually MAKE some money, too. And so we kept looking, and we found yet another posting for this very same tiny town, this one for wait staff at a little restaurant. We called this guy up, too, and he also encouraged us to come on down.

And so we did. Akaroa or bust! Well, we decided that we’d just go have a look, and if it didn’t work, no big deal. There was plenty of work in Christchurch, too.

We pulled into Akaroa around 11 AM on Tuesday morning, and as we drove through the hills around the town, you could just feel the tension building in the car. Oh dear Lord, I thought. This is the most incredibly beautiful place I have ever seen. I MUST live here. This MUST work out. PLEASE let this work out. We were both immediately in love with the town, and the prospect of not getting to stay was, well, not happy.

Akaroa is about 85 kilometers southeast of Christchurch, on the eastern coast of the South Island. It is one of several itty bitty towns across the Banks Peninsula, and sits on the edge of a gorgeous turquoise bay, closed in on three sides by tall, green hills. Historically, it is the first French settlement in New Zealand, and they’ve tried to preserve the “frenchness” of the place – all of the streets are named Rue this and Rue that.

It is a small town, but a tourist town. Its population swells from 600 in the winter to 10,000 in the summer. Isn’t that incredible? There’s one main street that wraps around the bay, with cute little cafes and restaurants and B&Bs, and then the town sprawls up into the hills behind. The town is complete with sailboats in the bay, a lighthouse, a cemetery for the original French settlers, a vineyard – need I go on?

It is perhaps the most charming place I have ever visited. And guess what? I don’t have to be just a visitor! I get to LIVE here for three months!

Es correcto. I have a job. So does Bjorn.

About fifteen minutes after arriving in Akaroa, we decided to go ahead and call Steve Bradley, the owner of the restaurant. We had had some second thoughts about the hostel jobs, given that they wanted to the reception person to work 9AM to 9 PM three days in a row, in exchange for accommodation. It wasn’t the hours that sounded bad, but it just didn’t financially make much sense. The hostel guy was definitely getting more out of the situation than we would be.

Steve Bradley said he was at home (an apartment over the restaurant), so why don’t we just stop on by for a chat?

Steve is about the nicest guy on the planet. He’s probably in his early thirties, born and raised in Akaroa. After university, he went traveling around for about six years, then returned to Akaroa, to find that his parents were trying to decide what to do with this little piece of property they owned in town. We should put a shop in there, they said. I’ll open a restaurant there, Steve said.

And so Vangioni’s popped up two years ago.

Steve walked us around the restaurant, told us he could definitely start one of us waiting tables full-time as soon as the next day, and asked if we needed a place to live. Yep, we sure do. So he walked us over to a little house right next to the restaurant and said we could stay here if we liked, for just $440/month. (That’s about $290/month in American dollars, and split between two people that’s…$145.)

Steve asked us if we were interested, and we just stood there with our mouths open like, uhhhh, YES PLEASE!

Bjorn sweetly and graciously let me take this first job we found, as we had previously agreed (since, well, I have a bit less money than he does), and Steve told me to show up at the restaurant at 3 PM the next day. And that was that! Within an hour of our arrival, we were all set. Incredible.

We went out for a celebratory lunch, and had our first beer in 9 days. (Our first night in Wellington, we had made a pact not to spend any money on alcohol until we had jobs. We found a little loophole in this pact, though. A movie theater in Wellington had a super offer where you could get a movie ticket and a glass of wine for $12.50 – and tickets are normally $15. We decided it was NOT cheating to save ourselves $2.50 by having a glass of wine.) It was a very happy day.

The following day, while purchasing a hair dryer at the local supply store (girl’s gotta be able to make herself presentable if she’s going to wait tables), I saw a sign mentioning that they were looking to hire a sales assistant. I chitty chatted with the woman for a few minutes and told her my boyfriend would be very interested in the position. Send him down, she said. So I went out on the street, found Bjorn wandering around, feeling a bit rejected from a couple of other places he’d tried, and sent him up the street.

And presto change-o, ten minutes later, Bjorn walked out with a job. I like this hiring system here.

So we have this new life here. Just like that. Isn’t it amazing how easily you can start a new life? We have jobs, a car, and a house. It’s nothing permanent of course, but it’s EXACTLY what we were both looking for, in the end. A bit of normalcy in an amazing location.

I’ve worked two nights at the restaurant now, and I think it’s going to work out very well. It’s a small place – just ten tables inside and six outside – but it has a warm, cozy feeling. At the moment, I am working with Selene and Frankie, best friends from France who are living in another flat above the restaurant; Viv (a guy), the chef from NZ; Tomas, the dish guy from Chile; and Steve. Every night after we wrap things up, the six of us sit down and share a meal together, and I look around and think, this is just too cool. The six of us sitting together, from all different places. It’s hard to find that.

Now I’m sitting here in our living room, drinking hot tea, and wondering what I am going to do with this day. Bjorn has gone off to work, and I don’t have to go to work til 4:30 PM, so I have my whole day free! But with the beach thirty seconds from my door and all of the little hiking trails around Akaroa, I am sure I will think of something!

Hope everyone is well. Much love.

The Sun'll Come Out...Right?

And here we are in Wellington.

The drive was thankfully uneventful. Betty heartily chugged along the entire 9 hours, against my fears of her turning out to be a flakey lemon. We lucked out with the weather and had blue skies for the entire drive, so I sat myself in the passenger seat, let Bjorn drive, and took in the scenery.

And, oh, the scenery. The first several hours of the drive were mostly farmland. Sheep, sheep, and more sheep. And red deer. And cows. There are small towns everywhere along the way, and if I understand things correctly, the majority of New Zealanders live in small towns. (Auckland is a whopping 1 million people, but NZ as a whole is only 4 million. So that means that the remaining 3 million are spread out, which means there is a lot of green space in NZ.)

Interstate number one lead us all the way down the heart of the north island. About halfway, we hit Taupo, a little resort town situated on a huge lake with a perfectly-shaped volcano behind it. (I feel certain that Bjorn is the only friend I have who is interested in Lord of the Rings trivia, but...if any of you are interested, this volcano, Mount Tongariro, IS Mount Doom in the movies. Oh boy.) We had a picnic dinner of peanut butter and banana sandwiches while sitting out by the lake, watching skydivers plummet through the skies above us, and marvelling at the gorgeous mountains around us.

We pulled Betty into a campsite around 8 PM. There were no other cars or campers, though I could hear what sounded like a large river running close by, along with lots of shrieking birds. It was almost completely dark. I am NOT going to be a wus, I told myself. No way. There is nothing to be scared of. We are in the middle of nowhereland, NZ. They don't have boogeymen in NZ. Well, instead of actually pitching the tent, we decided to set up camp inside the car. So we pulled out the middle seat, spread our sleeping mats and bags down and hoped sleep would come. I was actually quite comfortable and slept pretty well. Betty kept us nice and toasty, though it must have been a very cold night - there was frost on the grass the next morning!

But now, at least we know sleeping in the car CAN be done, and fairly comfortably and safely. And...cheaply! We saved ourselves so much money by not staying in a hostel that we decided to splurge and enjoy a lovely McDonald's breakfast a few miles down the road on Monday. Yum, yum.

So we arrived in Wellington around noon on Monday, just before the rain.

Side note: It's amazing to me what weather does for a person's (this person's) disposition. The rain greeting me in Wellington made me feel CERTAIN that Wellington was not going to be a good place for us to try to settle down. We made a trip to the grocery store in the rain and by the time we got home, I had knotted myself into a tight little wad of fury. The wind was relentless, blowing the cold rain up in my face - this is NOT what I signed up for! On top of the weather, our initial pokings into the job search were not positive. I had gone into this knowing I was going to end up with some kind of crap job, far beneath my ability level, but there weren't even crap jobs turning up.

What were we doing? I wondered. Had we made this HUGE mistake? Was I going to run out of money and have to turn up back at home shamefaced and with nothing to do? My everyday self could have talked myself out of this line of thinking, could've lead myself away from the scaries and the negatives. But, on a rainy day...the scaries got the better of me.

Worse still, hoping that Tuesday morning would greet me with sunshine and a fresh page, I woke to the sound of furious winds knocking the windows and rain pouring down. STILL! Pouring!

We couldn't go out (or wouldn't, I'm not sure which), which made me feel totally unproductive. We are NEVER going to get a job at THIS rate, I thought, miserably watching the rain from the TV room of the hostel. My life is a mess. What a disaster I have made.

Luckily, I've got Bjorn here, who watches me burying myself in these ugly places and pulls me out. It's just a little rain, he says. I didn't realize you weren't going to be able to handle a little rain every now and then. And then I remember, oh yes, I cannot control things like this! Better to just accept that it is going to be a lazy day and...be lazy.

The sun came out yesterday afternoon, so we were able to get out and do a bit of exploring around the city. And we sat down at the internet for a long while and applied for jobs, which felt good. Getting somewhere!

I'm feeling torn about the job situation. I can easily get myself a temporary office job here. Data entry, administrative work, whatever. You name it, I have done it. I can do it. We can sit here in Wellington for the next three months, and I can go into an office every day, and I can make money and save it up so we can go spend it all in January, when the weather is warmer. But, hmmmm...Did I come to New Zealand to do office work? I just can't stomach that idea.

So we have contacted a few dairy farms. And we've registered with WWOOF (Willing Workers on Organic Farms). Even if I can't really MAKE any money, at least I'll walk away with an experience, right? So, we'll see what turns up.

I have had a lovely sightseeing day today. Got a tour of Parliament today, took the cable car up to the Botanic Gardens, wandered through the gardens, people watching and admiring the flowers. Enjoying the beautiful spring day.

And so things are looking up. Things will work out, one way or another. Not having a plan WAS the plan, so we're just going to take it one day at a time, see what happens, and go with it. And, oh yes, hope it doesn't rain too much.

Love you all.

Photos

One more thing...Here's a few pictures from this last week. Hopefully they will explain a bit of what we have been up to, since I haven't written about it (I know, I know...)

http://picasaweb.google.com/ellen.bucy

Blue Betty Blue

Now, getting on with things.

Bjorn and I became proud parents yesterday. We are the new owners of a baby blue 1994 Mitsubishi Magna station wagon. Betty, as we have named her, is a good car. Gooood car, we tell her, as we pet her. (Okay, that's just me.)

We got out on the streets of Auckland early yesterday morning to get ourselves down to the City Car Fair, which occurs every Saturday from 9 AM to 1 PM. People pay a small fee to park their cars in a big parking lot and let people like us come look at them. It was a small showing. They had one row for cars under $3,000, one row for cars over $3,000, and one row for camper vans.

Bjorn fell in love with Betty at first sight. He truly did. She had a sticker in her front window that boasted an economical $1650 price, she had a stick shift, she had curves and a big, round, station-wagony bottom, and the killer, she was a shiny baby blue color. He walked around her, asked the owner a few questions, but I could see in his eyes - he was a smitten kitten.

Let's walk around and look at the other cars, I said. And we did, half-heartedly. That one's too expensive, Bjorn said. That one's too white, Bjorn said. That one's missing the driver's side mirror, Bjorn said. Bjorn looped back around to Betty. This one is just such a nice color, he said.

I rolled my eyes and said, super. Fine. Let's take her for a drive. So we did. The owner made me sit in the passenger seat in the front, much to my dismay. They drive on the wrong side of the road here, and well, it's scary. And with Bjorn behind the wheel of the car... It's not that I don't trust his driving skills, but he hadn't driven on the wrong side of the road since the last time he was here three years ago. But I fastened my safety belt and dug my nails into poor Betty's seats and hoped for the best.

Bjorn did very well. But it was quite funny to watch him reach for the stick shift with his right hand and grab the door, only to realize that, oh yes, it's on his left side now. And every time he tried to turn his turn signal on, he flicked the windshield wipers. They're on opposite sides, too.

We drove her around the block a couple of times, and then out onto the interstate, across the bridge to Devenport and back. And well, we were sold. We pulled back into the lot, shook hands with the owner, then went to the cash machine to get out an enormous wad of twenties. Done deal. We paid $1600 NZ, which is about $1100 US. Not too bad!

She was Betty from the moment we saw her, but Bjorn's calling her Betty Blue and I'm calling her Blue Betty. Can't agree on everything!

So. This afternoon after lunch, Betty is taking us to Wellington. It's about 9 hours south of Auckland, on the very southernmost tip of the north island, but we are going to stop about halfway through tonight and camp...somewhere. Ohhhh boy! Then we will hopefully settle ourselves down in Wellington, assuming we can find a place to stay and jobs. Hopefully, hopefully.

It's been a hectic few days here, lots of odds and ends to get tied up before we can work and own cars, but we are getting there, bit by bit. And now that we've got Betty, good things are surely ahead. More soon. Much love.

Maggie

My grandmother, Maggie, passed away on Thursday. I have tried to write this into my blog over the last couple of days, but it just felt strained and stretched and unnatural. But it must be written about. Or at least said.

My grandmother passed away, and aside from the most obvious loss of her, I am also feeling the loss of being able to go through this with my mother and the rest of my family. You get an email from your mother telling you about what happened, you cry, you mourn, and then you step outside, and you're in...Auckland, New Zealand. And trying to relate that to anything in your back-home life just doesn't work.

So you walk down the street for a few minutes and suddenly, it's like it didn't happen at all. The sadness, the facts, have slipped into some nowhere place in your head. Some space where you put things that you don't get or don't want to get. And you call home because you want to call home and you want to be there for your mom, but when she's on the line, she feels a million miles away. And she is.

And you try to think about your family during the day and wonder what they're doing. The extended family has come into town, your brother has flown in. Everyone is gathering, but where are you? What are you doing?

Living your life, I guess, is what you are doing. But what a loss - to not be able to grieve with your loved ones. To not be able to support from the other side of the world. To hope that they know that you're thinking about them all the time.

The bright shiny part of all of this is that I was able to say goodbye to Maggie. I was able to tell her everything I wanted to tell her. I sat with her for a long time last Thursday, before I left Nashville. And I reminded her that I was leaving again, and we both knew what that meant. And she said, Thank you. Those were her last words to me. She understood.

I won't try to write a tribute to her here. It would take me weeks to put something like that together for someone like her. But I had to mention it. Because it's part of this trip. And it's one of the reasons that people don't take trips like this. What if...? But you can't say what if. I can't say what if, at least. So we keep going, hoping we've made the right decisions and doing our best. That is all I can do.

Much love.

On the Road...Again

Well, my friends, here I am again. On the road again. Most of you already know the story of why and of what I am doing this time. For those of you that don’t, here’s a short summary:

My traveling companion-turned-boyfriend, Bjorn, had just left for Sweden when I last wrote. We had a big pow-wow before parting, and agreed that we wanted to stay together, knowing it was slightly insane and totally impractical. That staying together was going to entail a summer’s worth of time apart, not to mention, where would we meet up again? Would he move to the United States? Would I move to Sweden? Was anyone ready to be MOVING to another country? Well, why don’t we just take another trip? we said. Why don’t we go somewhere that is neither your country nor mine, and why don’t we try to go somewhere we can both work and live and try to have some semblance of a normal life? Why don’t we…go to New Zealand?!

I’ve told this story so many times over the past few months. It’s annoying and exhausted, but it’s the truth. It’s still seems slightly insane and totally impractical, but that makes it completely wonderful. The outcome is not known, the path is not clear. It’s a real leap of faith. So, we shall see!

It’s 7:15 AM here on Monday morning. My family and friends in Nashville are an unbelievable 17 hours behind me, which makes it 2:15 PM on Sunday afternoon for them. Is that crazy? It is crazy. This time difference makes me feel like I have traveled to a different planet altogether. It’s so odd to think of your family and wonder what they’re doing and realize that they’re not even living the same DAY as you are.

And the jet lag is real. We arrived on Saturday afternoon around 1 PM after a 28 hour journey. Four hours in the plane from Nashville to LA, four hours in the LA airport, 10 hours in the plane from LA to Fiji, 5 hours in the Fiji airport, and finally 3 hours in the plane from Fiji to Auckland. It sounds like hell, but it was somehow not so bad. But we SKIPPED an entire day in the process! We left Nashville on Thursday evening and arrived in Fiji in the early hours of their Saturday morning.

My body doesn’t know what to do with itself. After we arrived, we fought to stay awake til an early 8 PM, hoping that falling asleep in the evening and waking up in the morning would get us right on schedule. Well, it sort of worked. But I’ve woken up at 3 AM both mornings so far, feeling pretty keyed up and ready to get the day going.

I feel like I am on drugs in the evenings. Starting about 7 PM I just sort of turn off. My mind turns to mush and I feel like I am in a wakeful sleep. Or living a dream. I’m not sure. It’s very bizarre. But the mornings are good. And I know that it will just take a while to get adjusted. That’s just part of it.

Aside from the jet lag issues, I feel like I am just about the luckiest person on the planet. It’s spring here. The loveliest of springs. We were wandering through a park yesterday, and we said to each other at about the same time, this is absurd! The beauty of the flowers and the trees feels surreal. It’s some odd suburban tropical paradise. It’s like Nashville meets Hawaii meets San Francisco (even though I’ve never been to Hawaii or San Francisco – I am certain of this). Bjorn said he felt guilty, getting spring right after summer, and that’s pretty close to what I am feeling. Do I really get to do this? After six months in South America? I feel guilty. But I’m going to get over that quickly, I have a feeling.

We had a typical tourist day yesterday. We climbed up Mt. Eden yesterday morning. It’s more of a hill than a mount, but I guess technically it’s a volcano, with a huge crater at the top. Regardless, it’s a lovely viewing point of the whole city.

Auckland is situated on a bay that leads out to the South Pacific Ocean. The downtown area itself sits right on the bay, and then the suburban areas sprawl out behind it. It’s a fairly small city – only 1 million people – and it feels much more like Nashville than New York or Buenos Aires. Lots of quiet residential areas, beautiful houses with large green lawns, sidewalks, trees, parks. It also feel very cosmopolitan, though. There is a large Asian presence/influence here, as well as the obvious British influence (NZ is a colony), so the downtown area feels like some everyman’s city. Like the quintessential city. It feels very familiar and un-foreign, but it also feels totally removed from the rest of the world somehow. I think I just left the world. I keep saying that to Bjorn. He thinks I am loco.

So we hit Mount Eden yesterday, the Auckland Museum, wandered around the downtown area, sat by the harbor and drank coffee. It was a lovely first day.

We are slowly formulating a “plan”. We are going to hang around the Auckland area this week, do a couple of side trips to the surrounding islands, and go to the City Car Fair on Saturday. Oh boy! That is correct, we are going to buy a car. It’s the only way to travel around here, so we are told (and according to Bjorn, who has been here before). People buy station wagons and camper vans and drive around with mattresses in the backseat. I want to travel around and sleep in my car at night! Sounds so...hippie-ish and fun.

We are then going to drive ourselves down to Wellington, try to find jobs and an apartment, and hang out down there for a couple of months. Then, we will have the whole summer to play. This plan is, as always, subject to change.

So. It’s 8 AM here now. I’m juiced up. We’re taking a ferry out to Rongitoto island, which was created only 600 years ago by a volcano eruption! We’ll do some hiking and then return later this afternoon.

On the road again…thank goodness.

For Al (Yes, You)

Dear Diary, It´s been quite some time since I´ve written.

Isn´t that how every single journal entry you started as a child went? No commitment to writing, just a whim. I swear, diary, I´m going to write every day from now on. We´re still best friends, aren´t we, diary?

Oh, boy...

Well, I am back in Buenos Aires. To very briefly sum up the last couple of weeks:

1. I spent five amazing days in the jungle in Peru. Lots of creepy crawlies and humid air and muddy jungle walks. We saw monkeys and spiders and flowers and birds and frogs. It was wild. Literally! And, as I was joking with the rest of the group about how I was expecting someone to walk out of the kitchen with a birthday cake with my name on it, someone walked out of the kitchen with a beautiful chocolate cake that read, "Happy Day Hellen". Unbelievable! They also served us all a free Pisco Sour. Que amable.

2. Two days after returning from the jungle, we boarded the first of four buses that would eventually take us back to Buenos Aires. We left Cusco on a Friday around 2:30 PM, arriving in Tacna, Peru around 7:30 AM on Saturday. (This, by the way, was quite possibly the most miserable bus ride of my entire life. The bus was ICE cold. No heat whatsoever. And we had no blankets or anything. And there were irritating Peruvians piled up in the stairway and the aisles, so I had to crawl over them all to get to the baño. We thought we´d booked with a good company, but it turns out that silly company sold us a bus ticket for another, much shittier company. Why? That REALLY ticked me off and made me feel many not so nice things about the country of Peru. Good thing I was on my way out.) We then crossed the border into Chile and killed the entire day in Arica, Chile, waiting for the next night bus. By Sunday evening, we had made it to Salta, Argentina. (After a ridiculous three hour layover in some little town that began at 5 AM. What do you do when the bus just dumps you out in a town you don´t know at 5 AM? You take a cab to the Esso TigerMart, apparently, where you drink coffees and eat hame and cheeses and play I SPY WITH MY LITTLE EYE and watch the sun come up.) We finally took a night in a hostel in Salta, and then Monday afternoon, we were back on another overnight bus, delivering us to Buenos Aires by 9 AM Tuesday morning. Yowsers. That´s travel for you.

3. What am I doing in Buenos Aires? Well, a few things. First, I came to escort my traveling companion to the airport. Bjorn left for Sweden yesterday morning, and well, it´s not the same without him. That´s all I´ll say, Diary. Let´s not get personal. Second, I am doing a month-long TEFL certification program, starting TODAY! TEFL is Teaching of English as a Foreign Language, and the certification is required by most English language schools around the world. So, no, I am not planning to come home anytime soon, at least not for a permanent stay. But, who knows. My dear mother says I don´t have to plan the rest of my life, just the next six months or so. Well, I´ve got June planned. Maybe in a couple weeks I´ll figure out July. Uncertainty has a certain beauty to it, don´t you think?

That is all for tonight, Diary. I am sleepy, and I need an ice cream bar. I´m not sure about our future, Diary. I´m trying to stay loyal to you, but my head is distracted and I haven´t felt like writing much lately. Perhaps the new program will give me some new fodder for you. I hope so.

Much love to you all.