New Zealand blog 1: June 2007

Onward to New Zealand!
My passport with work visa arrived in the afternoon on the day before we were to travel from LAX to New Zealand. Wouldn't you know my passport would be on the Fedex plane that for cosmically unexplainable reasons didn't depart from its location of origin on time. Fortunately it arrived by terribly rushed courier that afternoon, and not a moment too soon. Our flight departed at 5pm, so we left San Diego by 11am to budget for hellacious traffic coming into the city. Amazingly enough it was totally smooth sailing from the moment we left San Diego until we pulled our car into the Hertz rental car return at LAX.

A rather teary goodbye with our trusty Corolla ensued, but sense pulled us together and we went to the terminal. Which, by the way, was the smallest and most boring airport terminal we had ever been to. A few restaurants, a few whimpy gift shops and a newspaper stand. That was it. We ended up getting buzzed on wickedly expensive beers at the burger restaurant prior to boarding. Air New Zealand flight whatever non-stop to Auckland.

The flight was a painful 14 hours, but the on-board entertainment system was the coolest I had ever seen. Each passenger had their own TV with independent selection of 180 different channels! We had a great time with movies, Pan's Labyrinth, Pursuit of Happyness (a heartwrenchingly depressing film with a brief flicker of hope at the very very end) and I can't remember what else. The food was good, the service was great, the plane was clean and comfortable - definitely a good choice. But enough commercial prostitution, on to the meat of our adventure.

We arrived in Auckland at 5am two days later. We totally skipped over the summer solstice during our flight, that day just drifted into the ether and we landed on the 22nd. Our flight to Christchurch was cancelled, but we got shuffled onto another flight and arrived at about noon, greeted at the airport by my boss, Prof. Leo Condron (yes, he's a real Scot!). He dropped us off at our student apartment on campus so we could collapse (which we did). Fortunately it was a Friday and we had the weekend to recover our capacity for thought processing. Our apartment was nice enough for a temporary base camp, although without internet and without the ability to call anything other than NZ landlines. In other words, we were isolated which was not at all comfortable and didn't do much to enhance our first few days in the country. Our kitchen table quickly was converted to the work/junk table.

We got our for a few walks, during which we experienced real NZ hedges. Nothing to mess with, and likely self-containing ecosystems. Made us feel small and insignificant.

While in Lincoln we rented a truck to pick up our stuff that had arrived by boat - SM's virginal experience driving on the left side of the road. Stuff (read: windsurfing equipment for about $3000) was damaged, unfortunately. BUT we have insurance and will hopefully get everything replaced, cross fingers...

We moved into our house on Southampton St. after 10 unpleasant days of isolation from the world in our student apartment in Lincoln. There's no serious news in NZ, no serious weather forecasts, no nothing that gives you the sense of living even remotely globally. So getting out was good. And my boss was even kind enough to foot the bill for our stay in Lincoln.