KUH-FADDA-FADDA

Kiwi English is kind of a foreign language.

It's fine when standing together and talking with someone, but over the phone it's just a stream of unrecognizable syllables.

The other day I got directions to the leasing agent's office, and the guy said the street name so fast I had to ask him to repeat it. I couldn't make out anything. He said it again and it sounded exactly the same and I still couldn't make out anything so I wrote it down phonetically in my notebook (I carry a tiny notebook everywhere and I scrawl phone numbers, addresses, names of shops, etc as I figure stuff out or get advice) and I wrote down "KUH-FADDA-FADDA".

When I got into a cab with the family 30 minutes later, the cab driver was trying to work out where we were going, and so I tried describing the route that he gave me on the phone but the cabbie was having his own english-barrier issues. Finally I took a chance and said "33 KUH-FADDA-FADDA." I could see something click for him and he said, "Oh. Ok, no problem." and put the car in gear. Turns out the street is called "Kaiwharawhara." It's a Maori name. In Maori pronunciation, 'wh' is pronounced like 'f' and 'r' is somehwere between an 'r' and a 'd' (it's kind of a single-rolled r.)

KUH-FADDA-FADDA.

Today at the Botanic Gardens

The girls and I packed a picnic and took it to the Botanic Gardens. On the way we walked through the Bolton Street Memorial Park, a cemetery of winding overgrown paths up and down the hills, where many prominent figures from New Zealand history are buried. The Botanic Gardens are home to many beautiful plants and birds, as you will see in this short video clip from our picnic.

Wellington Zoo

I keep forgetting to post these pics from the girls' and my trip to the Wellington Zoo on Friday. Wellington Zoo is excellent in that you can get very physically close to the animals. Additionally, the animals were very active and seemed as curious about us as we were about them. The two qualities made our encounters with the animals feel very intimate, and I look forward to visiting again very soon.

There's a Fungus Among Us

We spent our Sunday hiking around the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary here in Wellington. What a truly amazing place! Blocked off by a large mesh fence, plants and birds are protected from invasive and predatory species that have taken a toll on their populations in the wild. We hiked through some of the greenest, thickest, lushest forest I've ever seen - still eye-poppingly green after a long, dry, summer - and became acquainted with many of New Zealand's very special birds, bugs, reptiles and plants.

We were particularly impressed by the gorgeous fungi we saw along the trail, as you will see by their prominence amongst our pictures from the day. I used to give my Dad a hard time about all the pictures of birds and mushrooms and other inanimate objects he took. Well, Dad, I think we would do you proud today!

Some of the highlights have to include: donning hard hats to venture back into an old cave (leftover from gold mining in the 1800's) to look for wetas, the huge native crickets, using a red-light flashlight; seeing several kakas, a large indigenous parrot; sighting several tuataras, a very special ancient lizard-relative found only in NZ, and of course, the many brightly-colored mushrooms.

Oh, and I should mention that at the beginning of these pics you will see a picture of some 'succulent roast lamb and mint' potato chips that we had with our lunch at the park. They're so gross they're good. (Sounds like a slogan!)

Historically Speaking

New Zealand is a young country, by modern standards. It's reportedly the last large land mass settled by human beings, and one of the last reached-for by the dubiously intentioned arm of western civilization.

As such, its history has a certain immediacy and relevance that even the USA's own young-country history doesn't have for me. This may be in part due to scabs formed around the wounds inflicted during the formation of a Sovereign New Zealand and the clawing and scratching at those scabs that continues to this day from both sides of the racial divide.

Joanne to a greater extent and I to a lesser extent have started to learn about New Zealand history. She picked up the book A History of New Zealand by Keith Sinclair and has been making her way through it. At the recommendation of Jim, a colleague and fellow expat, she checked out An Illustrated History of the Treaty of Waitangi by Claudia Orange which she finds much more enlightening and interesting. In the Sinclair book, however, I managed to find an unexpected treasure. The book is a bit dry and historian-ish and its dedication page is full of other historians to whom this historian is in debt for their works. One of these historians has potentially the greatest name I've ever found:

J. C. Beaglehole.

For the last week or so, there's been a lot of "J. C. Beaglehole" talk around the Mariotti compound. I've been trying to slip Beaglehole references into our conversation on a regular basis. I've come up a set of new aphorisms that are very Beaglehole-based such as "There's a little Beaglehole in all of us" and "What would J. C. Beaglehole do?" Sometimes when Joanne or the kids are grasping for the right word, I quickly suggest "Beaglehole?" It's kind of an obsession at the moment.

So when Joanne got back from the Wellington Public Library with a bunch of kids' books and The Illustrated History of the Treaty of Waitangi, she was able to slap this little gem into my hand:



It's a linen-bound light blue book that smells of age and has heavy, rough paper pages. It was printed in 1934 and is currently serving as my introduction to New Zealand history. I end each day now by sticking my nose into a Beaglehole and fighting my way through a few more chapters of his (short, so he says) account of New Zealand's history. I say "fighting" my way through because the entire book is written in a sort of flowery discursive style that buries the facts under a bunch of linguistic ornamentation and protracted tangents in the footnotes which often take up the majority of the page's real estate.

I enjoy the mental challenge, and no one ever said a Beaglehole was breezy.

Killed da Wabbit

And just when we were planning to regroup and head into the next batch of listings, relaxing our housing requirements along another axis and casting a wider net, we got a call from a leasing company. I got the call at work, where there aren't individual desk phones and phones are sort of shared every few desks or so. I'm still trying to figure out the system. Someone a few desks over said I had a call, so stood there and spoke to a really friendly guy named Jamie.

It was about the house in Ngaio. It was the one for which we'd tag-team applied two days earlier. Joanne got the leasing application mailed to her as a word document. I printed it at work, found no available fax machines in the building and set out on foot down Victoria St. towards Bond to locate a print shop that could fax. I faxed it over for $2 NZD and went back to work. I'd jumped on this particular task as quickly as I could and turned the faxed application around within the hour that Joanne had received it from the agents.

When I got the call at work, it was Jamie and he wanted us to "come down and go over" the application. There was no mention of actually being able to rent the place, but this sounded new to me so I told Jamie I'd call Joanne and get right back to him for an afternoon appointment. I couldn't raise Joanne on her cell after three desperate tries, so I called him back and offered to come down to their offices immediately and be sole signatory on it. It was 10:30am at that point. We scheduled it for 11am and I started frantically packing up my stuff so I could go run after a cab to Ngaio.

Just as I was about to walk out the door, Joanne called me back (on yet another co-worker's phone which rang a few desks in the other direction) and she and the girls were right outside my building waiting for a bus to the Zoo. We scuttled the day's Zoo plan and met downstairs and jumped in a cab. A short cab ride to Kaiwharawhara St. (pronounced KUH-FADDA-FADDA) later we were signing our rental agreement for our front running house in Ngaio!

It's a small, three bedroom house at the top of a big hill (so it gets lots of wind and sits in a misty cloud for most of the winter) but it's on the correct side of the hill for afternoon sun and we can see the girls' school out the front windows. It's perfect.

It's a five minute walk down lush overgrown well-staired corridors between hillocks to get to school, and another few minutes to the train station. I can walk the girls to school and then keep going and get on the train for town. It's perfect.

It lacks a fridge and washing machine, so we'll have to investigate getting used models from somewhere. It's a little musty-smelling in the downstairs and no doubt gets a little dank during the rainy seasons. It's got a yard, but it's split among several terraced levels.

It may not be perfect, but it's perfect.

And it's ours.

Be Vewwy, Vewwy Quiet...

...we're hunting wental pwoperties...

We're familiar with this process, because we rented houses in West Los Angeles.

We're familiar with this process because we bought houses during the boom period in Marin County.

We're familiar with the fleeting bits of joy and apprehension that you constantly cycle through while hunting for a place to live in markets where the houses move fast, stay on the market for only moments, and are snapped up by others before you can even get a look at them.

So we're familiar with the Wellington City Area rental market, even though we're very new here.

I'm sitting here wracking my brain trying to come up with an analogy for it. I think of the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland where the soldiers had to run as fast as they could just to stay in place. It's kind of like that. It's also kind of like playing a game where you throw out all your high scores every day and start fresh. It's also a bit like juggling where some of the balls you're juggling explode and some clown (yeah) is tossing new balls to you now and then.

It's basically a full time job for two people.

A really nice place in Northland showed up on trademe.co.nz yesterday (the highest-traffic site for Wellington area rental postings) and Joanne and I jumped on it. We were out there at the open house by 2pm the day the listing showed up. We put in an application. But we weren't fast enough. Two applications beat us that day, and god knows what other sorts of back-channel dealings were going on elsewhere. No dice! We were good---really good---but not good enough.

One of the keys to this process is to not get too hung up on one particular rental that looks possible or even likely. Getting hung up stops you from being open-minded about new listings and takes some of the wind out of your sails. You'll need that wind to keep the flow of potential listings coming. There seems to be absolutely no way to tell which one will hit, so every new potential rental is at least as good as the last. Maybe better... if you're fast enough. And lucky.

Leaping From the Shoulders of Giants

Today I wanted to take a break from sharing all of the newness and the goodness we're finding around us and step back a bit and examine our whole enterprise at a much larger scale.

It's frankly amazing to me that we're here at all.

And when it boils right down to it, there really is no way we could have pulled off this mad mission if it hadn't been for a tremendous amount of support and hard work from those we love and who loves us back. This post is meant to be, in the lexicon of those half my age, a "shout out to all our homies" for solids done, support given and moves-to-NZ enabled. I could say "you know who you are" but that'd be a cop out.

Thank you mom and Ed for taking our pets and buying our van. Having our pets still in the family removed the heart-crushing blows of having to place them with families or subject them to months of shipping, quarantine and puppy-and-kitty-torture.

Thank you Ruth and Tim and Alex and Ember for storing our sentimental bits that we couldn't part with but didn't want to move. Knowing that my Apple IIe is safely tucked away saves me having to come to terms with how useless it is and that I should have chucked it years ago. Thank you for taking our various remnants with the intent of having continued garage sales of your own. Without your help in removing and dealing with the last bits of our belongings we couldn't have possibly gotten on the plane when we did!

Thank you Ruth and Sharon for helping us purge and organize our garage sale and hawking our useless crap to unsuspecting neighbors. You both came through for us hardcore during a time when we were overwhelmed by a tidal wave our of various and sundries and fighting to keep our heads above water.

Thank you Patty and family for letting us borrow your car(s) and for taking our children so we can knuckle-down on a few things here and there. Your generosity---especially during a time of crisis---is more than any friends could have asked for.

Thank you Sharon and Tim for helping us get to the airport and sending us off.

The list goes on and on. Without the support of all of you and more than I can even think to list right now, we'd not be here at all.

I just want you all to know that our even being here is a testament to your hard work, love and friendship and that we really are incredibly amazingly lucky to have you all.

Books and Coffee

If you know me at all, you know of my fondness for both books and coffee. My friend Kathryn, as part of a going away gift, mapped out downtown Wellington pinpointing all the coffee shops and independent bookstores. I knew from the looks of it, I'd be in heaven. But I didn't know the half of it!

Wellingtonians have brought the art of the latte (or flat white, or long black, or cappuccino or what have you) to a new art form. And if you saw the picture of my latte from the other day, you know I mean that quite literally. There've been pretty hearts and foamy fronds. It's like a frothy Rorschach of hot whole milk each time I order my cup o' joe. I'm pretty sure a person can sustain themselves on nothing but whole milk lattes, right?

And the books! Wellingtonians must love their books, because you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a bookstore. There's Dymock's, Whitcoull's, Unity and, of course, Borders. I thought I would have a heart attack when I looked at the prices, though! Luckily, I found Arty Bee's. Arty Bee's (or Bertie Bott's, as I keep calling it) is a fabulous, well-organized used book store with two locations near us. I recently finished Bill Bryson's travel journal In a Sunburned Country, and I was inspired by all his historical research and knowledge of Australia to pick up a copy of A History of New Zealand by Keith Sinclair. There were quite a few histories to choose from, so I chose the one that had survived the most editions, five since it's first edition in 1959, with the most recent revision in 1991. Thank you, Arty Bee's!

I also bought Edmond's Cookery Book, which, from what I gather, is the culinary Bible of the Kiwi kitchen. Akin to the American Betty Crocker Cookbook, Edmond's claims to be the best-sold book in New Zealand. It has all the old favorite (or is it favourite, Steve?) Kiwi recipes for scones, afghan cookies (how come no one told me about these little bits of heaven?!) the famously controversial Pavlova dessert (there's a whole blog post waiting to happen on the Aussie/Kiwi rivalry over it's origin) and of course lots of savory, meaty pastries that I can't wait to cook up.

Well, that's all for me for now. Mr. Sinclair and the Maori tribal wars of the 1830's await me for my evening reading. Hope everyone is well. Keep up the comments. It's more fun for everyone that way!

Ngaio Rhymes with Pie-O

And many fish we'll fry-o.

Monday afternoon I took off early from work and rode up to Ngaio with the family to scout out an open house that Joanne found out about and we kicked around the area a little. It was a light drizzle pretty much all afternoon.

Where is it?

What is it?

What about the school?

Train station?

The Ngaio suburb borders on Khandallah.

It's named after a tree.

It seems like a nice area. What's funny is that we'd kind of "picked" it as a good area for us long before we set foot on Kiwi soil. Maybe we're still carrying those prejudices with us, or maybe it really is what we'd hoped it is.