Category: New Zealand

Well, babies, I’m not going to lie to you, it’s been a pretty insane week, and not in a way that involves strippers and hot tubs, I’m sorry to report. Work absolutely blew up, friends freaked out, I had a small lasagna-related breakdown in the Mt. Vic New World last night, I have been talking…

I have been super amazingly sick with some sort of martian death flu from hell: the kind of sick where my hair was all matted sweatily to the side of my head; the kind of sick where I would have to take a nap after an exhausting hour of watching TV; the kind of sick…

I didn’t think that there would ever be a time when I would look back at putting my phone through the wash as the good old days in terms of my various electronics, but there you have it. There has been a mutiny amongst the various gadgets, y’all, and it’s getting more annoying by the…

I have this post about my new job in the works, and I also really wanted to write about what I made for dinner tonight, but then I read this thing about belief that my beloved Linda wrote, and then I banged out about three pages of a big long explanation of how I got…

Lately in my head it’s been a pretty steady loop of omg-new-job-immigration-visa-residency-flight-home-to-the-states-boys-lollies-bellydance- trim-chai-latte-maybe-I-should-go-to-Rarotonga, so there isn’t much worth writing about, you know? However, a couple of silly things have happened semi-recently and I am just in the mood to tell you about them. The first silly thing that happened didn’t actually happen to me, but…

You just can’t let your heart die, you sob into the phone on a Friday night. You have to allow for the fact that just because you’ve been hurt once, more than once, doesn’t mean you won’t be hurt again…you can’t decide to just not feel anymore. You have to let some light in, you…

It’s continued to be pretty intense around here for the last couple of days, I tell you what. I went on this awesome weekend trip to Taupo last week with some fantastic people and am currently trying to figure out a way to meet up with those very same people this week except it has…

I have had a very busy week, really, which has involved welcoming A. home from her 30th-birthday trip to Europe; being blown down the street by the crazy wind as I try to go to the beach; finding a cool new store on the way to said beach which sells all NZ-made clothes and making…

Koko alaisa, sometimes spelled koko araisa, is this very yummy Samoan dessert, a sort of chocolate-coconut rice pudding that uses a special kind of freeze-dried cocoa. I have been thinking about it a lot lately. I made it for my Global Dinners group right before I left for Australia, and when I saw we had…

I was IM-ing with a friend this morning, about body stuff. She was saying that she was feeling a little unhappy with her figure. “I know what you mean,” I typed. “I dropped a little weight when I was in Oz and I’ve spent the entire month since I’ve been back worrying about it. Sometimes…

Ooof, girl, it’s been a very busy week. I’ve been to two dinner parties (I brought pita and hummus to one, Samoan koko rice to another) and went to bed too late on school nights, and then I had Sylvia and Michael over on Wednesday (I made the very best pasta in the history of…

The big annoying thing in my life at the moment is that it turns out I am not going to be performing at the next hafla after all. No, I haven’t finished my coin bra yet and yes, there are plans afoot to do the duet in September maybe, but it’s still annoying me way…

You just have to be open. You just have to love yourself. You just have to stop looking. You just have to live your life. You just have to believe that you’re beautiful. You just have to be the person you want to be with. You just have to be totally happy on your own.…

Apparently I want to write about nothing more than silly. conversations I’ve been having recently. So: Sunday night, and it’s time for Planet Earth, the best nature show in the history of nature shows. Chiara: [sitting on the couch wrapped up in a blanket, talking to herself] I very much enjoy footage of swaying kelp…

I realized that it’s been ten years almost exactly since I graduated from college, and I have been thinking about that a lot this week (“Whoa, ten years. Dang. Wow. Ten. Okay. Whoa.”) and it turns out that it’s impossible for me to write about it without the following things I think are a little…

I finally saw Pan’s Labyrinth the other night, after having heard a lot about it from various people and waiting for it to come to New Zealand. It was frightening and unusual and awful and fantastic and I found myself gasping aloud and having to hide my face several times. At one point I thought,…

If I were very beautiful, would I get more or less of what I wanted in my life? Would people listen to what I said or not, take me more or less seriously? Would I have more or fewer friends? I feel invisible most of the time. “Invisible” often means “asexual” which often means “unfeminine”…

I’m busy, and tired, and social, and haven’t been to the grocery store all week, and just started another Wednesday bellydance sharing session, and my friend Steven is in town and making me go out to dinner every night and have interesting conversations and I’m having a late birthday party on Saturday and I don’t…

Tomorrow is my thirty-second birthday, and I am feeling introspective. Summer is all of a sudden over and it’s raining outside and I’m not sure what time it is because I went to bed late and got up early and the clocks changed today. I’m sitting here on my bed waiting for my sheets to…

Last week I went out for a friend’s family birthday dinner. His parents were visiting from the UK and took us all out to the good old Southern Cross, to which I’ve been many many times but never for actual food. It was a fantastic dinner that involved little individual barbecue grills, much bonhomous camaraderie,…

“Hmm,” said Rob on the cab ride from the airport to my flat. “It’s…just like Seattle here!” It has felt like it, since he and Anna have arrived, just as it did when my cousin and when Abi were visiting over the last couple of weeks, or even when Mom was here for New Year’s.…

I’m thinking about…people, I guess, a lot lately, which is not altogether surprising considering how social I’ve been lately and how many friends have been sleeping on my couches in the last couple of weeks. The other weekend I had to go to the emergency room with a girl I’d met over Christmas and known…

There is too much going on and I am too busy having fun with people outside the computer to write much this week—remember when I said I wanted to post pictures of last weekend? Obviously I meant next weekend—BUT I would be very remiss, my fine blog-reading friends, if I did not report to you…

I want to be putting up a(nother) big picture entry all about my weekend with my crazy cousin David, who just blew through town like a tsunami in a bright yellow motorcycle suit. I want to be telling you about how the aforementioned weekend involved the ukulele orchestra, an astoundingly yummy five-course home-cooked dinner, more…

Everybody, everybody, everybody I know is thinking about love lately, if by “love” you mean romance, or attraction, or desperation, or sex, or giddiness, or sadness, or heartbreak, or solitude, or any combination thereof. Everybody. The reason I know this, the entire contents of all my friends’ heads at all times, is because they all…

Last night I went to a housewarming party at The Swedes’ house, just a couple of blocks away from me in Newtown. I first met The Swedes—who we sometimes refer to by their names of Michael and Turrina as well as just by their nationalities–at the eighties’ party back in September, at which Turrina blew…

Yesterday I brought home about five library books, all of which are stacked up by my bed, and only one of which I have cracked, to read for fifteen minutes before falling heavily asleep at night. I am reading a lot, though, even if none of the books I read have much plot or character…

One thing I like a lot about my friend Jill is that her text messages always use capital letters and punctuations and, occasionally, subjunctive clauses. I am relatively new to the whole texting thing, so it’s always nice to get a message I can actually recognize. What’s even better is when I get a text…

I had coffee with Jill today at Espressoholic before my three o’clock haircut (the hair dude said, and I think this was a compliment: “I just love how your hair takes finger waves so easily”) and we were talking about our plans for Christmas and New Year’s. She was not that into it, she said.…

Out of nowhere I am very worried. I am worried about global warming; about whether I will be destitute at age seventy because at age thirty-one I decided to spend a year working somewhere other than America; about whether my face is always going to look like it belongs on a claw-banged fourteen-year old; about…

Watching House Before Catching the 9:40 Bus Loving Hugh Laurie means loving his dank stubble; I go to such lengths Rocking Out That lead singer looks so cool in her orange and pink leotard outfit Equal Opportunity Lesbians, gay men, straight men—all ignore me, despite my cute shirt After The Show I have another inappropriate…

Last Saturday I had dinner with my friend Cherie. We were talking of this and that and when we parted ways I said I guessed I’d see her next week. “Yes,” she said. “You’re coming round ours for Thanksgiving.” Turns out she has a very lovely American flatmate who was really into the idea of…

One night during my first weeks in Wellington, I went out for a big night with a bunch of my hostel-mates. This involved a lot of discussion about what we were all going to wear and then getting lost and texting each other from various locations in town (“@ Bodega. U?”) and then dancing around…

It’s been hard for me to understand that here, I have the accent. I think of myself as having the most boring run-of-the-mill speech patterns possible, but it turns out that I can be imitated here, that I can be done, usually by flattening out every word ridiculously or by trying to imitate George W.…

Let’s see how my weekend stacked up compared to my terrible horrible no-good very bad day I was having on Friday, shall we? I will give an up-or-down good-or-bad assessment of each of its aspects, for increased ease of…your being able to…uh, see how my weekend was. Lucky, lucky you! CDs everyone sent me: Very…

A bunch of really nice people sent me a bunch of CDs over the past month or so, CDs I was unable to listen to because neither my flat nor my work computer, for some reason, have CDs players. I wrote to the people who’d sent them to me, saying “Thanks for the CDs! I…

I haven’t driven a car since going down to Portland from Seattle in the middle of July. I parked at the Burger Time next to the Convention Center and that was it; from then on it’s been public transportation, cabs, rides from friends, and my own two feet for me. I’ve been driving since I…

I’ve mentioned, a couple times by now I think, one of the weirder aspects of the backpacker lifestyle: the questionnaire you go through every time you land at a new hostel. Having lugged your pack up to your room and recollected with a sigh that your other pair of dirty jeans are all the way…

Labo(u)r Day Weekend sort of sneaked up on me, I guess. I’ve been busy at work and I didn’t really know what day it was and I sort of thought that it might be nice if someone invited me to do something but it wasn’t until last Monday that I realized I could try to…

I am happy to report that I am feeling much better since the last time I wrote, thank you for asking. Things have settled down quite a bit: lovely large-bathtubbed flat, supportive emails and phone calls from fantastic people, and a robust social calendar have all combined to give me a more cheerful perspective on…

People drink a lot of coffee here but I hardly every see anyone hurrying around carrying a paper Starbucks-esque cup. Seattleites, you know how at Green Lake on a Sunday afternoon there are all these women walking around the lake with their kids in strollers, and everyone has a Starbucks cup? And how a Starbucks-or-similar…

Just about a month ago I got on the plane to Fiji. I’ve been in New Zealand for four weeks now, in Wellington for three. It’s the end of my first week of work; I’m going to the pub with some new work friends this evening and am helping another new friend move out of…

It’s all moving along on schedule, or what passes for a schedule in my case. I got a job last week, unbelievably, and I start tomorrow and so today is my last day of doing what I do every day. Tomorrow starts again with passwords and staff meetings and grant applications. If you’d told me…

Today’s the day. I get on the plane to LA in eight hours, and then I have a four hour layover, and then I get on the plane to Fiji. I feel so strange right now. Yesterday was a really hard day for a variety of reasons. I’m all packed up and ready to go.…

The less said about my time in New York the better, I think, except that spending time with my fantastic cousin Delores, the inimitable Coleen, the scintillating Molly, the luscious Maxwell and the lovely and fascinating Caroline, who has no online presence that I’m aware of but did come to meet us for drinks on…

I shouldn’t even be writing this now because there are a couple hundred things I need to be doing—vacuuming! Getting my shampoo out of the cloud room shower! Putting boxes in the basement—but I just wanted to say that, whoa, man, my trip is really beginning now. Yesterday I moved my stuff to my cousin’s…

So, she said, do you have a question? and had me cut the cards. I don’t really believe in this stuff and I wasn’t really sure what I was doing there so I was having a hard time not making a face at her. I’m going to New Zealand in a couple of weeks, I…

The fireworks have just started outside because it doesn’t get really dark until ten this time of year, and I should get ready for bed soon. I didn’t go to work yesterday either and I’ve spend the parts of the weekend when I wasn’t hanging out with fun people and barbecuing or having brunch or…