Kia Ora, Aotearoa: Do you remember the taste of food?

Forgive me father for I have sinned. It’s been 3 days since my last blog entry. Mainly because the weather has been so lousy that I couldn’t take a decent picture to share or do anything exciting. We’ve tramped (kiwi for hike) all over the city gathering tiny things that you don’t realize you really need until you don't have them; like batteries, needle nose pliers and Panko. In our travels we have noticed that here in the darkest heart of the city, at the height of rush hour, the traffic is about half as bad as Smokey Point at 2pm in the afternoon.

We average about 6 hours of walking a day. Cynthia dragged me on about a six mile “tramp” yesterday in a giant pointless circle “just for fun”. One of the first orders of business when we got here was to find a place to obtain provisions. We asked at one of those handy visitor kiosks where the nearest grocery store was. “Grocery store?” he asked. “Yeah” we said. “You know, the place where you buy food”. “Oh yeah, you mean the market; no worries” (pronounced O yee ah, you mean the maa keet). “Just straight on down the road. It’ll be on the right. Called Food Town”. Well “right on down the road” turned out to be about three miles. We loaded up on groceries and had to buy two eco-groovy reusable zip-top bags to carry the foodstuffs back the three miles. Later that night we went for an exploratory expedition and found the New World “maa keet” about a 5 minute walk away. I bet he was laughing his ass off over that one.

Since the supposed main reason that we are here is to evaluate life in NZ, we always take our calculator with us to compare prices here. At first blush, it seems like food is really expensive. A couple of reasons: first, our brains are geared to quantify things in terms of $/unit of measure; $/gal, $/pound, etc. Well here in the grocery store, the preferred unit of measure is the kilogram (kg). So when you look at a piece of (insert food item here) for $28.99/kg, you think “holy shit”. But let’s break it down. There are 2.2 pounds per kg. That makes it $13.18/pound. But wait, there’s more. These are NZD, which have plummeted in the last month from about .75 USD to .62 USD this morning. That makes it $8.17 USD/lb. Then, the final factor in the equation is that there is a 12.5% GST added to everything here, but is included in the list price. That brings the item down to $7.14/lb, and works out to be about equal to our price. Unless you consider intrinsic value. The produce here is for the most part locally grown and puts our pathetic excuse for plants to shame. Everything actually has a taste. And the eggs! Can you remember way back when instead of falling apart in your hand, you actually had to crack an egg? Remember when egg yolks were orange? Remember back when if you cracked an egg into a skillet, it actually stayed where you put it instead of run all over the bottom like water? In some ways it’s like passing back through a time machine here.

The weather broke today so I was able to take a few pictures to share:

The apartment complex where we are staying is the building in the center with the black roof. It's like a ghost town here in the building. As it turns out, all of these apartments are privately owned (like our condos) but none of the owners live here.

Our apartment is long and narrow. One end is a giant bi-fold window, so the whole end of the apartment opens up. It's like sitting in your garage and looking out.

The Sky Tower

At 1066 feet tall, Sky Tower stands above any other tower in the Southern Hemisphere and is the 12th tallest tower in the world (taller than the Eiffel Tower in Paris or Sydney's AMP Tower). It has a bunch of casinos and restaurants and other currency black holes. One cool thing is it has a sort of base jumping platform on top where you get strapped into a harness and flung off the top at the end of a cable. They also have this deal where you stand on a 1.3 meter wide (no guard rail) catwalk that goes around the entire restaurant level, way up there. You're all strapped in to a jump suit and a harness and can lean out and stuff. Now to me this seems about as dangerous as pressing your nose up against the glass on the gorilla cage at the zoo and saying "ooh...you're so tough...like I'm really scared..."

The tower from our apartment deck: