NEW ZEALAND

Woohooooo! New Zealand!

I fell in love with New Zealand. Seriously, the prettiest place on earth. I cannot count the number of times Beth and I had to stop and seriously ask ourselves if we were still on Planet Earth. It was unbelievable. Don’t worry, I’ll liberally sprinkle pictures throughout this blog entry. Also: we only did the South Island. We heard that for the amount of time we had, the North Island wasn’t really worth it. I could be convinced to go back and be proven wrong, though.

On our first day, we flew into Christchurch, rented a car, and did a short drive to Arthur’s Pass National Park. The hostel proprietor there was hysterical. I refuse to refer to him as anything except Michael Moore. He kind of looked like him, but that’s not the point. He was Canadian, and he kept trying to bring up Bush and how much he hated Bush, and he clearly wanted us to sympathize. Beth and I were like… yeah, we get it, we hated Bush too, but that was THREE YEARS AGO. WE HAVE A NEW PRESIDENT NOW. NO ONE STILL IS TALKING ABOUT BUSH. The guy kept using the word “groovy,” with no apparent sense of irony, and kept trying to get us to rant with him about evangelical Christians and the Bible Belt. Beth and I were just like… wow, news must travel slowly to rural New Zealand. Yes, we saw Jesus Camp, yes, we saw the results of the 2004 election, yes, we were horrified at the time, but we’re pretty much over it now. Let’s… let’s move on.

So anyway, the next morning we woke up and went hiking in the national park. It. Was. Stunning. Pictures here:







However, I had to wuss out a little early. I think I thought I was in much better shape than I was. It got better the more I hiked, but that first day… I couldn’t quite make it to the top of the mountain. Sad day.

After we went hiking, we drove down to glacier country. There are these two glaciers along the West Coast of New Zealand, so the next morning we hiked out to see those. Pictures here:







That was also cool but I mean, I’ve seen snow and ice before. There were Australians ahead of us who were just blown away because it was the first time any of them had seen snow. Beth and I were just kinda like, yeah, we get it. It’s cold. Wahoo.

Our next stop was Queenstown, which is like the adrenaline sports capital of the world. I did no adrenaline sports. First of all, SO not my thing. Secondly, surprisingly expensive! I mean, I know throwing yourself out a plane would be in the region of 600 bucks, but bungee jumping was like 400, which actually did surprise me. Had it been like 30 or 50, I maybe would have considered it, but for that amount of money when it’s something I don’t really want to do? Forget about it. We stayed there two nights and it was one of the only non-rural locations on our trip. We met these two Canadian guys in our hostel who were in their late 20s and doing a trip around the world because they got a year off work – a PAID year off work! GOD I love Canada.

After Queenstown, it was on to Te Anau National Park, where we stayed one night before taking an overnight cruise around Doubtful Sound. Here is a random scenery picture from that drive:



Anyway. There are these two big sounds in southern New Zealand: Milford and Doubtful. Milford you can do in a day cruise, but it was like 150 bucks to do that, and Doubtful was overnight and 200, so it was pretty much a no-brainer as we’d have to pay for a hostel that night if we’d done Milford. Doubtful Sound is called that because when Captain Cook was a-explorin’, his men wanted to go into the sound but he was DOUBTFUL there’d be enough wind to get them back out! Haha! Geddit? DOUBTFUL!

Anyway. The main point of the cruise was just to look at how pretty the sound was, so I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves:






I mean HONESTLY.

After Doubtful Sound we drove up to Christchurch in the morning. We spent two nights in Christchurch. Our first we had to spend in this horribly sketchy Asian hostel because the hostel we wanted to stay in closed its reception at like 8 and we got there at like 8:30. It was clean and safe and all that, but it smelled SO strongly of curry and fish. It was disgusting. That morning, we woke up and drove out to Kaikoura wine country, where we saw a seal colony and did wine tastings.

Here is a picture of the beach and of me at a seal colony:




We had a lovely dinner at a brewery that night and drove back into Christchurch. It’s kind of unbelievable how badly Christchurch is still suffering from that earthquake and, correspondingly, how quickly the earthquake disappeared from the public eye. I went to New Orleans in 2007 for the Sugar Bowl, and honestly, the downtown of Christchurch reminded me of some of the worse-hit neighborhoods I saw of NOLA. The entire city center is closed off to traffic and pedestrians, but the surrounding areas were still really bad, so I can’t imagine what the city center is like. It shocked both of us – we remembered hearing about the earthquake but I guess we sort of didn’t realize how much it would still be affecting daily life in the city.

Our last night we stayed in an absolutely lovely hostel (the one whose reception had been closed the previous night). We drank a bottle of fine wine that we’d bought at one of the wineries and watched How I Met Your Mother and it was basically a perfect ending to an absolutely lovely trip.

Then I flew for 30 hours and took a 2 ½ hour bus ride and I never, ever want to travel again. Cheers!

p.s. If you’re on facebook, there’s a ton better pictures up – it’s sort of hard to load pictures onto this thing and the majority of them are on there.

Australia: Sydney!

Ah, Sydney. You, I think, more than any other Australian city, truly captured my heart. You were just so… sunny… and… warm.

Beth and I stayed on Bondi Beach in a hostel. Originally we were planning to stay with these two Irish guys she knows (ha!) but they are leaving Australia in a couple of weeks so they didn’t want to pay an extra month of rent so they just moved into a hostel for their last two weeks. We stayed at the same hostel as them and had a great time. Apparently Bondi Beach is becoming known as “County Bondi” because so many Irish are moving in because the Irish government does such a poor job of providing jobs and welfare for its citizens that almost every young person with a college degree is basically required to move to find work. Sorry for that little rant – I have many, many issues with the way the Irish government makes decisions and conducts itself. But that’s for another day.

So we stayed in the same hostel as these two guys from Kerry. And about the rest of Ireland. I’m not kidding, probably 80% of that hostel was Irish people who had either just arrived and not yet found a place to live or were in a similar situation as Pete and Trevor (Beth’s friends) and just needed a place to live for a couple of days or a week before they moved on. (Trevor is moving to a different city in Australia and Pete’s actually off to America.) We caught them in just the nick of time before they left!

Sydney was definitely the most touristy city. We took a tour of the Sydney Opera House, which was AWESOME, and we walked around downtown Sydney, took free ferries out to different islands, etc. We really wanted to go to this immigration museum Beth’s dad kept talking about, but sadly never made it there. Just too much to do, I suppose. I’m trying to remember what else we did – saw the Harbour Bridge, took a ton of pictures in front of the Opera House – standard touristy stuff but it was really really fun.

Sydney was just… lovely. It was winter but 80 degrees, everyone was smiling and happy, it didn’t rain once… it was just AWESOME. And we knew people so we got to, again, hang with the locals – went to a house party where Beth and I were the only non-Irish people (everyone was SO confused when I tried to tell them I lived in Galway but was American… ) got to go to some cool tucked-away bars and restaurants… just again, really great. This was definitely the best time for me to go because I’ll never know that many people in Australia again, you know? And so much of this vacation was living how the locals live. Great fun.







So yeah, Australia was really, really fun. And then it was onto New Zealand, which was obviously very fun as well, but in a totally different way. Australia (especially Perth and Sydney) was laid back, sunny, hanging out with fun people and taking it easy. New Zealand was much more active… I can tell I’m transitioning into a new blog entry so I’ll just start a new one now.

Australia: Melbourne!

So after Perth, it was on to Melbourne. Beth was quite excited to know what I thought of Melbourne. Apparently there is a big Sydney/Melbourne competition: I sat next to an Australian man on the way home and when he asked me about my trip, his immediate next question was whether I preferred Sydney or Melbourne. The joke is that Sydney is the pretty girl in class, and Melbourne’s her plain friend who had to develop a personality. Sydney is about beaches and sun and surfing and Melbourne is the cultural capital of Australia – plays and museums and cafes, etc. Based on that description, I was actually fully prepared to like Melbourne.

…but I liked Sydney. More on the merits of Sydney later, and I did really like Melbourne as well, but especially for a vacation, Sydney was tops. Melbourne was super interesting, tons of cool little alleys and cafes, etc, but the weather’s not very good and let’s face it, I’m living in Europe. I’m good on the whole museum front. Maybe to live, I’d prefer Melbourne because it seems like there’s a lot of cultural stuff going on that you could always take advantage of, but because so much of it seemed to be knowing underground stuff, it was hard to kind of take it all in in vacation.

Beth’s (obviously) working in Melbourne, so the days were pretty much my own. I took a guided walking tour with this sort of creepy old man, but he was very informative and I learned a lot about the city – it was a big gold rush city, used to be a huge financial capital, etc. I walked around this Queen Victoria market which was pretty cool and basically just roamed the city. I got the impression that that’s sort of the point of Melbourne – there’s not a ton to see and do (I guess kind of like Perth) but it’s about walking around and getting a feel for the place. Honestly, it reminded me a bit of Brooklyn – hipster, a bit pretentious, a bit suspicious of outsiders (especially ones deemed uncool). This all sounds negative, but I swear I actually did like Melbourne. But that did seem to be its general vibe.

Here’s just a couple of pictures of the city (and of Beth and I posing in front of this really famous nude painting... it's apparently worth more than the bar it's in and is a Melbourne landmark):







So anyway, what was really great was getting to meet all of Beth’s housemates and friends. One of her roommates is a superb cook and he made this giant Indian feast for all of us one night. She’s met some very cool people and it was really nice to meet them and see where she works, etc (she’s working at a non-profit that finds housing for low-income people). It’s super cool because now I can picture what her life is like there in Melbourne.

One very interesting thing I did was go to the Melbourne Museum. I only went because there were giant banners up about a King Tut exhibit, and I’ve never seen King Tut, so I figured, why not? I got there literally 7 minutes after the museum opened and they were already sold out of King Tut tickets for the day. Not kidding. But I figured I’d walked all the way out there, might as well go to the museum anyway. Some of the exhibits were fairly underwhelming, but they had an EXCELLENT display on aboriginal life and culture. I know very little about aboriginal Australians, but one thing I was quite impressed with was the amount of attention paid to aboriginals in Australia. You see stuff about them EVERYWHERE – someone was saying there’s even something about the prime minister starting all her speeches with one of the aboriginal languages. I was really impressed because we definitely don’t pay the same attention to Native Americans. It feels like white Australians are quite serious about atoning for past sins. I was quite impressed with that.

Anyway, this exhibition. There was all kinds of interesting historical stuff about the Stolen Generation (basically an early 1900s thing where aboriginal children were taken from their parents and sent to orphanages to be trained to become servants for white Australians) and even stuff before that, like the super early colonial stuff where it was basically a huge giant massacre. There was one story in particular about a tribe in Tasmania where the British rounded up everyone – men, women and children – and basically forced them to jump off this huge cliff into the sea. The history seemed very similar to how we treated the Native Americans, but I found it admirable how much more in the forefront of national consciousness treatment of aboriginals seemed to be than it is in America.

While I’m (sort of) on the subject – something that surprised me about Australia was how much it reminded me of the States. I was expecting degrees of similarity, of course – we both speak English, both settled by British immigrants in the early days, etc – but Australia, more than any country I’ve been to, reminds me the most of America. Definitely more so than England, and I also think Ireland is extremely similar to America, but Australia beats Ireland. It just surprises me because I guess I assumed for a long time that England and America would be extremely similar, but Ireland is more like America than is England, and Australia more like America than Ireland, even. It just surprises me. I sort of didn’t expect that to be the order.

Anyway. Melbourne was lovely but then it was time to go onto sunny, sunny Sydney.

Australia: Perth!

So I just got back from a whirlwind and wonderful trip to Australia and New Zealand! I went to three cities in Oz: Perth, Melbourne, and Sydney, and then Beth and I rented a car and did a road trip around the South Island of New Zealand. Right before I left, my friend Kyle from the States and my friend Eric who lives in Maynooth (in Ireland) came to visit for a couple of days, which was fun and amazing and wonderful. More ND love whooo!

But (sorry Kyle and Eric) the main focus of this entry will be Oceania. To make it easy, I’ll divide this update into four chunks, one for each city and then one for NZ. To begin: Perth.

My first moments in Perth began with my almost-arrest. We landed, and right off the airplane there was this big “Welcome to Perth!” sign. Being a huge tourist, my first natural inclination was to take a picture. Apparently this is a $1,000 fine as I was in some sort of restricted area (there was a sign, although it was tiny and not in a terribly conspicuous place. I noticed it once it was pointed out but I never would have just seen it on my own). I was accosted by Australian border police and after a great deal of apologizing and groveling, they let me off with no fine. I didn’t have to cry, but I was fully prepared to if the need should present itself. I did have to delete the picture, though. Sad day.

My friend Christina from high school lives in Perth with her boyfriend, Chris. Their friend, Joey, and my cousin, Beth, picked me up at the airport. (Beth lives in Melbourne but flew into Perth to hang out since I was there.) Joey told me fun facts about Perth, including that it’s the most isolated capital city in the world, which is pretty cool. The next nearest city is a place called Darwin, and I’m pretty sure he said it was about a five hour flight away. Other than that, it’s just the Outback til you hit the east coast (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, etc).

Joey and Beth and I hung out at Chris and Christina’s until the two got off work. I had never met Chris before, so it was really good to meet him and SO good to hang out with and catch up with Christina. After their senior year of college (at ASU) Christina and Beth decided to do 7 months of traveling around Southeast Asia, which is where Christina and Chris met. Adorable story. She’s working there and he’s a native, so it was really fun to hang out with locals. The two of them and Joey and a couple of other Chris’s friends showed us a really good time: we went tubing on the river on Saturday and got a sweet tour of Perth beaches, etc.







Basically Perth was just good times of hanging out and being with fun people. The only seriously notable thing I can think of that happened was this conversation, which numbers among the most uncomfortable I have ever had.

So Saturday night, we went to a bar where a ton of Chris’s friends were. I met all of them, but since there were so many, I couldn’t keep names/faces straight, etc. Small piece of background information: Christina is originally from Arizona and after high school, went back to go to ASU. Beth also went to ASU. Usually, for sake of shorthand, they just tell people they are from Arizona because this makes it much easier. For this reason, everyone in Perth knows them as “the Arizona girls.” To continue:

I’m at the bar, ordering a drink. This guy overhears my accent and says, “you American?” This is the conversation that follows:

Me: Hi! Yeah, I am.
Him: oh, you from Arizona?
(at this point, I assume he is one of Chris’s friends and knows Christina, assumes that since I am American, I must also be from Arizona.)
me: Oh, no, I’m not, but I know those girls.
Him: What girls?
Me: Sorry, Beth and Christina.
Him: What? Who’s Beth?
(I now assume he must know Christina but not Beth, as Beth, like me, is just visiting.)
me: Oh, right. She’s Christina’s friend, living in Melbourne.
Him: Who is Christina?
Me: Chris’s girlfriend?
Him: Who is Chris?
Me: Chris Bates?
Him: What?
Me: Arizona?
Him: huh?
(we stare at each other blankly for awhile.)
me (tentatively): Arizona?
Him: I have no idea who any of those people are. I was just asking if you were from Arizona because I went to the Grand Canyon last summer.
Me: Oh. Um. I have to go now.

It was seriously so amazingly awkward and uncomfortable.

But other than that, it was just really fun and laid back. We just hung out and ate and drank and had a lot of fun. I guess a couple touristy things we did: we went to a farmer’s market and a prison that the British made prisoners build with their own hands (because Australia started life as a British penal colony). Ah, the Brits. Masters of torture.

Basically, Perth is lovely. A lot of people skip it because it’s so isolated and because there’s really not a lot to “do.” Frankly, had I not known people there, I probably would have skipped it as well. But I’m so glad I went – had such a good time!