Kia Ora, Y’all

People! I am in! New Zealand! I am writing this to you, if you are in North America, which most of you are…from THE FUTURE!

Actually I’m writing from a rather overpriced internet cafe, because that’s how I roll now, in lovely Rotorua, where I’ve arrived after a couple of rather blurry days in Auckland. I am having a couple of touristy days on my way down to Wellington; tonight I’m going to a Maori cultural experience thing and tomorrow before heading down to Napier I’m going, thank heavens, to a spa, lost bikini be damned. My only complaint about Fiji was that I didn’t get to have a beachside massage so I hope the geothermal pools will somehow make up for that and constitute the inaugural stop of my newly-minted Hot Tub World Tour.

Hey, you want to hear more about Fiji? Yeah, me too. It’s hard to believe that I was there only a week ago, getting into my lost bikini and putting on my lost sunglasses and my not-as-of-yet-lost sulu, heading down to the beach with my flippers and mask in my hands, going out to see brain coral. Everywhere I go here, like the bank or the bus station or the hostel, people a) ask me where in the States I’m from and b) isn’t the weather dreadful. I don’t tell them that a) it’s pretty much just like spring in Seattle so, you know, not that bad, and b) that I have just come from Fiji so the shock of having to wear closed-toe shoes is still a little raw. I’m having enough problems explaining my name to people, spelling it over and over again and worrying about whether I should put on a fake accent to make it easier for them to understand my pronounciation of “H” and “R.” The Octopus Resort, though, with its attendant octopus and all the cool people I met there (Hi Frances, Georgina, Keri, Damian, Christine, Charlie and Cheryl!), seems very far away. Is that just part of traveling, that I feel very focused right on the moment? Is it because I didn’t take nearly enough pictures? Or is just because until I get to Wellington (on Saturday!) this is all just a holiday still and you never really expect to talk again with people you meet on vacation.

Man, time is ticking here and I feel like I’m not even writing about anything important. Pressure. So, let’s just do a straight travel itinerary thingy: I got into Auckland late Monday night and the lovely Jem was there to pick me up, along with her delightful boyfriend, which was awesome because I was a little intimidated by the thought of hopping on a bus in the middle of the night in a strange city and also because Jem and I have been emailing for a while and I’d been really excited to meet her anyway. I stayed at a sort of institutional hostel right off Queen Street. I only mention the location because I saw pretty much only that street the entire time I was in Auckland. I can’t tell you much about the city at all, I’m afraid, except that internet was $2 an hour and that there were two Muffin Breaks, a Gloria Jean’s, and two Vodaphone stores between City Street and Victoria, as well as a LUSH. Plus a lot of Korean barbecue places. I did get to meet up with Jem once more for lunch but most of my time in the city was spent doing business: going to my rather laughable orientation, setting up a bank account, getting a tax number, and buying a phone.

A word about my new phone. Well, first about my old phone, which was from 2001 I think, one of those old Nokia bricks, and which weighed like ten pounds and could barely text message, not that I ever texted anyone until about two months ago. I was very happy to get rid of that two weeks ago, but a little nervous about getting a new phone here for some reason. Cell phone stuff here is just really different, i.e. really super expensive, and I was all in a tizzy about which plan to get and which phone to get and so on and so forth. I ended up buying a used phone from IEP after my orientation, which, if nothing else, allowed me my first taste of L&P, which is super yum. Anyway, this used phone still had a SIM card in it (what’s a SIM card? I don’t know) which meant that it had all the previous owner’s information and stuff on it. How do I know this? I have spent most of my bus ride from Auckland to here deleting all her contacts and texts and messages and everything, and I’ve come to know a bit about her and her life while she was in New Zealand.

Her contact list was full of people named things like Gareth and Chelsea, and there was one boy, Jason, who texted her quite a lot. And one of her girlfriends asked her, you know, how things were going with good old Jason. And then another guy, Joe, texted her quite a lot, these sort of plaintive messages like “We need to have a chat” and “Just call me, will you?” and “Are you still there?” And then he called her, as in, called me, last night when I had the phone turned on, during a multiple sclerosis presentation I happened to be attending, interrupting the speaker and thereby condemning me to hell. I didn’t answer it, of course, but sure enough it was Joe, and I couldn’t understand everything he said but I could tell he had an English accent and was all tore up about Emily, who, as far as he knew, was just not answering her phone. He texted (“Is this Emily?”) later that night and as soon as I figured out how to text back, a mere hour after turning the phone on, I tried to let him down easy and tell him that Emily just isn’t…well, she just isn’t here anymore, Joe, and you know, whatever happened between you and her concerning Jason, I’m sure it’s for the best. “Emily just had to be free,” I texted Joe. “That’s just her, you know?” Oddly, Joe hasn’t called me back.

I guess I’m focusing on minutiae (“EMILY! EEMMMMMIIIIIILLLLLLYYYYYY!”) because I haven’t really been able to comprehend the big picture yet. I’m finally here, finally, finally here, and all I can think about is making sure to get to my bus on time and how my pack sure is lighter now that I’m wearing all my warm clothes, and how when I get to Wellington I’m going to make sure to see the special Lord Of The Rings exhibit at Te Papa,, and that I plan to pour out an L&P gangsta-style in honor of all my geeky homies who would surely love such a thing. I keep noticing little things like people saying “Ta” and “Cheers” and how the light switches are backwards from ours, but I have to say, it hasn’t quite sunk in yet. At my Seattle going-away party Chris asked me if it felt real yet, if it had sunk in that I was really going. I said then and I say now: no it doesn’t. I’m still on vacation. I keep telling people I’m on my Big OE, but I don’t really believe it. I don’t exactly think I’m coming home in two weeks, though…Seattle feels really far away right now, just like the Octopus Resort does, and I think I have grasped that I’m not going to be there for a while. I don’t know what I think I’m doing.

One of the best things about the Octopus Resort, speaking of the Octopus Resort, was that the music they played at the cafe could have come out of my own iPod: Aimee Mann and Stevie Wonder and Zero 7, all perfect. Try laying on a hammock on the beach in the South Pacific, right, and think how great that is, and then let “Love and Happiness” by Al Green come wafting over to you, and you will know the true sweetness of life. Still, though, Friday nights are Friday nights and Ross, the hilariously Scottish-accented manager of the Octopus Resort, did put on the good old Legend album during this fantastic barbecue we had that night. I was sitting at the head of a long table populated by all the cool people I had met, stuffing my face with fresh fish caught that day and delicious fruit and yummy dessert, acutely aware of how lucky I was to be alive in the world, let alone barefoot in Fiji. “Everything’s going to be all right,” sang Bob, “everything is going to be all right,” and I looked around at everyone’s candlelit faces and looked out at the ocean and knew, knew that Bob was singing to me, singing the truth about this year.

And then this morning on the bus, I was listening to the iPod and watching the green hill and the sheep and cows and funny birds, thinking about beauty, and all of a sudden the world was moving, she was right there with it. David Byrne, describing my bus journey from Auckland to Rotorua, describing the last couple of weeks, maybe even prophesying what my relationship with the world will be this year: right there with it. Everything’s going to be all right.

It doesn’t feel real yet, you know, but it feels good.