Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

New Zealand

the paradoxical tour guide

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Tomorrow is American Thanksgiving, a holiday that I don’t have many positive feelings about that has no relevance here in Wellington, but which finds many family members free and willing to travel, which makes getting them to Wellington a lot more feasible.

To commemorate our first non-US non-Thanksgiving, E’s sister and brother-in-law have made the trans-Pacific trip to visit us here in Wellington. Their impending visit caused me to feel a lot of pressure.

Not just because they are sleeping in the room in which I shoot Crushing Comics, which meant I had to get a lot more of it unpacked and get ahead on episodes before they arrived.

And, not just because of typical hosting concerns about if we have enough snacks to keep them fed, either. This post could really easily be another 1,000 words about searching grocery stores for decent ricotta and any provolone at all in order to make my baked penne, but I think that logline probably tells you all you need to know about that particular misadventure.

No, the pressure has to do with my inherent, internal tour guide and his feelings of inadequacy.

That erstwhile guide is still left clanging around in my brain a whole sixteen years after I started giving tours of my college campus. He existed even before that. He has a need to keep any crowd educated and entertained as they move through a space that is new to them … and in Wellington he is grasping at straws.

This was never a concern for my siblings-in-law’s many visits to our home in the states. Both of them had lived in and near Philadelphia for long enough that they didn’t require much showing around. In some cases, they could tell me about places I had never seen as much as I could do the same for them. Their visits tended to focus on a lot of TV and movie marathons and, later, a lot of fussing of EV6 followed by much shorter TV and movie marathons.

Now they are visiting us in a place that is totally new to them. They had to fly almost three times as long to reach us! It cost a lot of money to do so! And they’re only here for six days! Plus, they love adventures like safaris and canyoning! All of the days need to be full of X-TREME adventure content!

Except, I don’t know very much about New Zealand, Wellington, really – and certainly very little about anything adventurous! It feels like the only things I’ve been doing for the past three months are unpacking, grocery shopping, and going to kid-friendly stuff with EV6 – plus driving between those endeavors.

As a result, I have a lot to say about traffic patterns. Not too much else, though. The sum total of my “adventuring” has been within the confines of Zealandia preserve and in walking up and down Cuba Street.

Today I picked J & B up from the airport and it felt like I unfurled every possible Wellington factoid on the drive back to our house. It’s a strange feeling that drives home how much otherness there is left to tackle in my life here, even if I have gotten comfortable finding my way around and knowing where to buy my must-have groceries. In Philadelphia I could (and have!) lead an eight-hour walking tour of neighborhoods full of fun facts and hidden gems. I had a story or a memory to go with almost every square block. I could recommend a fun activity to anyone of any age.

I don’t have that here and I’m not sure how long it will take me to get there. The paradox of my internal tour guide is that he wound up that way by happenstance. I’ve always been homebody at heart. It’s not the cool stuff that draws me out of the house, but the memories attached to it. I am less likely to go out and wander here because I don’t have a history and a social fabric to draw me out. There are no streets I derive comfort from walking the way I did from a wander down 4th street in Philly.

I might not know enough to keep my tour guide self monologuing for an eight-hour day, but this week I have a brief window of opportunity to create new New Zealand memories. That’s the fuel for my future tour guide and the memories that I can follow down the streets of Wellington.

this is why I can’t blog about nice things (or nice birds)

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Remember a couple of weeks ago when I was rhapsodizing about the bird sounds of New Zealand and how I have found a deep and abiding love for all things avian and how these are not the kind of evil, unimaginative American birds that tweet the same damned sound over and over again all the day long?

Well, jinxing is real, because the past few days I have been subjected to endless bird-based torture.

Some form of dull, unimaginative, plebeian, single-chirp-sounding bird has fashioned a nest directly under the eave of the roof above our master bedroom. That in and of itself would be pretty annoying, but these boring birds took it a step farther: they laid eggs and reproduced.

By my count there are now at least five distinct birds living somewhere about nine feet above where I sleep. How have I estimated that number? Because when mama or papa bird returns to the nest with some sort of food starting in the vicinity of sunrise at quarter to six in the morning, each of those eager little mouths starts tweeting their demands for food. In the clamoring chorus, I think I can hear at least three diminutive birds chattering in disharmony like an elevator bank where each of the arrival chimes is slightly out of tune to the others.

It is quite specifically my idea of personal sound pollution hell. If you had asked me a week ago when I was making that lovely, charming post about birds what the worst case scenario of birds would be, I would have described THIS EXACT SITUATION.

How long do these unimaginative birds nest before the little ones get kicked out to live on their own? Weeks? Months? We initially mentioned the nesting sounds to our landlord the moment we moved in purely out of concern for the roof, but now I have to be the absolute monster who demands that an entire nest of defenseless young birds be ousted from their home so I may sleep more soundly…

…and I am totally okay with being that monster, but now I’m worried these are going to be some sort of special, endangered, protected brand of boring New Zealand birds and our rental is going to be rezoned as some sort of special nature preserve area and these birds are actually multi-generational cohabitants that will have several sets of young living in one nest and I’m going to have to live with the sunrise wake-up calls from now until we move out of this house.

All because I was feeling mushy and wrote one damned nice post about birds.

the giant sucking sound

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Sometimes the biggest culture shocks come from the subtlest parts of our daily routines.

Case and point: the giant sucking sound produced by seemingly every bathtub in New Zealand.

No matter where you live, you probably take for granted that your bathroom habits translate more or less universally around the globe. Everyone has toilets and showers, right?

Well, yes, but they don’t all have exactly the same form and function as what you’re used to. I haven’t lucked into any bidets or squat-toilets in my admittedly minor international travels, but they’re out there. More common is that showers outside the US often come standard with a detachable head on a long hose rather than a fixed one, so that you can spray your most hard to reach spots.

What I did not expect is for baths to be different here.

Personally, I have not taken a bath since the 1980s. I find the concept of sitting in a puddle of my own lukewarm filth to be pretty disturbing. Heck, even swimming pools are a little bit creepy if you stop to think about it, and they have the benefit of chlorine.

Yet, when you have a small child, bathtime becomes a regular fixture of your daily routine (which is a bit ironic to me, as after a typical day of life kids generally have way more filth to rinse off of their bodies than a grown-up). Even when your little one starts to become enamored with showers, you will continue to appreciate the convenience of just tossing them into a bath and let the water passively soak off their grime while they play with floating toys.

Thus, that’s what we did back on our first evening in our temporary lodging in August. The filling of the bath was normal. The bathing was normal. Then came the draining of the tub.

I forget if if was E or I supervising the bath that evening, but I know that it was likely EV who pulled out the drain stopper – a favorite activity of hers. Or, at least, it used to be a favorite activity. This time when she pulled out the stopper, the drain began to emit a horrible, deafening sucking sound.

“WHAT IS THAT?” I asked E, covering EV6’s ears with my hands as she (totally understandable) freaked out about the squelching.

“THE DRAIN?” she replied?

We both peered into the drain, thinking perhaps it was clogged in some way. It looked like a normal, unclogged drain. The water was going down in a typical fashion. It was just making a terrifying sort of slo-motion Nazgûl sound while it was happening. Like, maybe Peter Jackson just sampled a Wellington tub while it drained to create the Nazgûl’s in Lord of the Rings and then speed it up slightly for their high-pitched wailing.

I didn’t think too much of the noise. After all, it would only be our problem for a few weeks. We simply got in the habit of one of us scooping EV6 out of the tub and transporting her to her own room, closing several doors behind us in the process, while the other unplugged the drain.

Thus, the giant sucking sound was not on the top of my mind our first night in our house, when I gave EV6 a bath. Right up until I unthinkingly pulled out the plug and that very same squelching began a new, much to EV6’s terror.

I spent the next few nights poking my finger and other blunt objects into the drain to see if I could interrupt whatever hellish centripital force that was summoning the sound. E decided to take a more anthropological approach to the problem. She polled her co-workers: who among them had impossibly loud bathtub drains?

The majority of her subjects volunteered that they, too, had Centripital Sucking Nazguls in their bathrooms. Not just brand new renters like us. Long term residents who just kind of shrugged as if to say, “Yeah, they all do that.”

This story is more about incorporating a careful strategy of closed-door tub draining into EV6’s nightly bedtime routine. It’s about peculiar little cultural differences in our expectations.

I’d imagine many travelers to the states marvel at our many undetachable shower heads. It only takes a little more effort to make the thing detachable. Honestly, I agree with them.

Similarly, if a drain made this noise for one second in America, you would do something about it. As a renter, it would merit a call the next morning to your landlord. I cannot conceive that anyone I know would tolerate it in the long term, especially if they were using the bathtub on a daily basis. You’d swap out the drain fixture, check the fitting, move the U-pipe or something… I don’t know, we’re coming to the end of my plumbing knowledge already. I just know that you would do everything in your power to do something about it!

In New Zealand – which, I will point out, is a country of incredibly handy people – this noise is so common that it merely produces shrugs. It’s not a problem worth innovation or solving. It’s just a minor, bearable annoyance.

I’m not sure which will take longer to get used to – the noise or the shrugs.

The Great Wellington Wheelie Bin Saga of ’17

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One way you can be pretty sure that I am a liberal in American political terms is that I really don’t mind taxes.

I frame this sentiment in two ways. First, I happen to have empathy for my fellow human beings and I am totally cool with redistributing a pretty big sum of my meagre wealth to other people if it serves the greater good.

But, shhhh, be quiet about all that altruism. The second reason is why I really don’t mind taxes: I want stuff from my government.

Roads? I like’em. Firefighters? Nifty. And for all the bitching that homeowners did in Drexel Hill about their property taxes, do you know how excited I was every time the dang snow plow would come down our dull little street before there was even an inch of snow on the ground?

SO EXCITED! Because, after you have lived through a few blizzards in Philly proper, where your side street is left with six inches of hard-packed ice on the ground for a month after the snow, the sight of a snow plow before it’s even really necessary is really freaking exciting.

New Zealand has an uncomplicated flat tax rate on income and in exchange for forking over so much of your hard-earned money the government actually cares about you while you live there. Yes, socialized medicine, they have that. But I’m talking about special perks like friendly and informative people working at the Ministry of Biosecurity who don’t mind talking to you on the phone. I’m talking about really well-designed government websites that thoroughly answer your questions about every possible municipal service.

Look at them there, all lined up together, so stately and consistent with their thick yellow plastic lids.

It was just such a service that brought me to said web site a few weeks ago. As a part of Wellington’s impeccably well-choreographed dance of weekly trash and recycling pickup, I noticed that some amount of neighbors had special wheelie bins for their recycling, while we were left with the still-pretty-cool color-coded bags that you buy at the library – a place where paper goods can also go to get re-used!

(Can we just pause for a moment to marvel at the narrative consistency of this country?!)

Anyhow, putting recycling in a disposable plastic bag seemed to be a bit counter-intuitive and I covet pretty much any kind of functional houseware I can lay my hands on, so of course I wanted our own wheelie bin. They didn’t seem to be sold anywhere I could find, so I turned to internet research, which is actually effective in Wellington because all of their web properties are so lovely.

The lovely government website provided a handy number to call for wheelie bin inquiries. The handy number was answered by a friendly human being with one of the thicker Wellingtonian accents I have encountered to date. Forging through this potential communication barrier, I explained how I coveted a wheelie bin. In return, the friendly government employee (paid for by our hard-earned tax dollars) explained that he would have someone visit our property to conduct a multi-point inspection for appropriateness of wheelie-bin issuance and we would be notified by post if we were approved.

“Awesome,” I told him. I love tests. Bring on the inspection.

Friends, yesterday I received a letter from our friendly, helpful government. Do you know what it said? [Read more…] about The Great Wellington Wheelie Bin Saga of ’17

birdfriends

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Major Plot twist: Living in New Zealand has turned me into an avid bird-watcher and amateur bird-song identifier.

This is a big twist because I do not have an especially positive history of avian/human relations. This is what I had to say for our fine, feathered friends the last time I moved to a new house:

That’s not the nature of my problem. Birds are fine as a concept. I just don’t like things that make uninvited noise (other than, obviously, me). Birds fall into the same offensive category as small dogs, train tracks, and babies.

Based on that assessment, you might be a bit nervous about me moving to a country with a serious stock of birds and where bats are the only native land mammals. Bats!

Yet, I’m living a bird-loving kiwi life. I send chats to E about cool bird songs I hear when she’s not at home and can frequently found browsing Birds of New Zealand to try to identify the ones I spot on our deck or feasting on snails from our garden.

The only way I can explain it is that birds here have beautiful, varied songs. Key word: varied. The birds of Philadelphia didn’t have songs so much as rude catcalls that they screeched repetitively at the top of their birdy lungs.

“CHIRP. CHIRP. CHIRP. MOTHERFUCKING CHIRP.”

They’d all gather around my house starting just after 5am and start their shouting all at once. There was nothing beautiful or remarkable about it. It was like the world’s worst noise machine.

To be fair, those are some of these insistent asshole birds in New Zealand, but I think the other birds must shun them or eat their food or something, because I rarely hear them singing. Maybe it’s simply an evolutionary thing.

Tui are one of the most-common NZ-only birds, and one of the first I started noticing while we were living in our Air BnB house. They possess a double larynx, which gives them an uncannily large range of vocalization. There’s not a lot of repeats on tui radio.

When we we were looking at houses, we met the New Zealand wood pigeon. It is a hilariously, outlandishly large bird, maybe four times the size of the pigeon of the flying rat variety you see back in East Coast urban spaces back in the US. It’s husky, low hoot matches its comedic appearance as well as its rather humorous habits, such as getting drunk enough on fermented berries that they fall out of trees.

There is an even greater variety of birds here at our more permanent home, as we’re not in an urban area and also much higher up. I’d say we hear at least six or seven distinct bird calls each day, at least.

One particularly mysterious bird living in the bushes surrounding our house has such a beautiful call that I crave hearing it. Its bright, trebly tone sweeps down and into a throaty alto and then back up again, with fluttery vibrato throughout. If I notice this mystery bird’s song ringing out I will literally drop what I am doing and rush to a window to try to spot it, to no avail.

What I find most interesting about the situation isn’t the variety of birds or their beautiful calls, but my sudden change of heart about having them all around. It represents a complete shift from what I would have sworn was a make-or-break aspect of a new house just a few months ago – being relatively birdless.

As it turns out, it’s not just brands and habits that change when you move to a new place. Sometimes it’s your whole philosophy on what constitutes noise versus song.