New Zealand in retrospect, pictures to follow

Wish I could say it's been completely "no news is good news" on the blog front, although I have to say the past week has been ... unusual.  I am typing this in the lobby of the Radisson Blu Hotel near Nadi, Fiji, where we have been since Sunday night, when we caught the last flight in from Sydney.  Our frequent flier miles only allowed this routing, via Nadi to LAX, so we decided to extend the layover and make it a holiday at the end of our sojourn.  I haven't uploaded pix from the fun we had last week so I will do a skeletal of our New Zealand trip in hopes of filling in a little.

Last few days in Sydney were filled with some social engagements (thanking people who had helped us, dinners etc) and some grading (there was less of a sense of urgency than sometimes, in part because the program finished earlier than the Davis quarter) and lots of packing / organizing.  We went to Alex's school concert, again marveling at how easy it is to meet people late in the game when you have something in common--if we were here for more time we would have a lot more of a social life than we did, which is both a positive and a negative, given my work habits!

By Dec 5th we had split our bags into a leave-in-Sydney pile and a take-to-New-Zealand pile, and and thanks to an incredibly generous offer from our friend and colleague Lorraine we were able to dump the Sydney pile in her storeroom and not store in a hotel for 10 days.  Then it was off to Christchurch on Air New Zealand, complete with the new "Welcome Aboard Air Middle Earth" inflight briefing that you can view on YouTube.  Pretty cute how the whole country has tapped into the marketing swing this way--probably the biggest thing the country has ever had in that line.

Thankfully all the arrangements that my sister Kate had made for us turned out great--including the weather: we checked into our little airport motel on the outskirts, then had dinner with Am's old friend Dave who drove up from Timaru (that's loyalty for ya) so we at least took him out for dinner.  He finised by taking us on a tour of what remains of the Ch-Ch downtown, which is incredibly sobering: after the earthquakes there are giant scars where buildings used to be, lots of street work, and a general sense of rolling-up-sleeves or else this place will die.  Most impressive to me was a 10-story Rydges hotel still standing but eerily dark, not a light on anywhere: condemned to come down like so many others because of internal structural damage. 

Next morning back to the airport for a short flight to Queenstown, the adrenalin-sport capital of the world.  Alex was impressed that the plane only had four seats across, and that there was no security check-in.  That said, he was pretty gripped when we started bouncing around over the Southern Alps.  The plan was that we would meet Kate Rob and Kieran in the airport when they arrived from Palmerston North, the closest airport to their home in Wanganui, and sure enough we were all together in an hour or so. 

Though I had had a great visit from Kate in July, I hadn't seen Rob in 20 years, and hadn't seen Kieran since he was 3, so it was all quite amazing.  We picked up our Toyota Previa rental and mashed all the Stenzel-Mel gear in before heading for our palatial motel in Q.  There was a little drizzle but nothing like what the place often features--Am and I took a little walk up the hill trying to find a view after I had bailed out to a cafe for some grading for a couple of hours.  Once again I marvelled at the ways NZ was set up for different types of tourists, from campers to conventional motel-dwellers.  These holiday parks / motor hotels all featured a variety of modes from tents to RV pads to self-contained units like the ones we packed into, with better appointed kitchens in some cases than our "boutique apartment" in Mosman.

Next day we drove down to Te Anau, winding through lake country redolent of the Tolkien movies, slotting in a picnic by the far arm of Lake Wakatipu in between rain showers, before another motel just across the road from Lake Te Anau from whence weather willing we would take a bus to a boat to Milford Sound.  That's when Kate's weather karma really kicked in: unlike the other 300 days of the year, we had beautiful clearing skies, enough recent rain that the waterfalls were running, AND the road to Milford was open again after being closed for several days by a slide. 

More: our deadpan-delivery bus driver, the amazing boat journey, the stunning drive, the glow-worm caves, the return to Q complete with sunny swims, last night in Q, then John learns to drive on the left in a rental car, up to Wanaka and thence over Haast Pass and dow to the West Coast, etc.

Carping the diem

Interesting to try to write a few lines while my students tap away at their computers here in the bowels of Australian Catholic Uni in North Sydney, as we near the end of the southern sojourn: this is the first of the two final exams I am giving like a good little soldier of the University Writing Program, and as usual I kick myself for not having done X or Y or having done Z instead of W. 

One thing that is good of course is that I did squeaky-wheel enough to secure this computer classroom (hatefully Windows-ish though it might be) for my little end-of-term activities.  I think I have successfully parsed these last few days out well enough that the kidlets have enough to do but not too much at the very end.  I have never been less in the mood to hear their bellyaching, I must admit, especially since I am pretty sure I have done my very last 3-year merit review before retirement.  This means that I will have neat typescript to read, instead of Today's Students' Bad Penmanship, the successful deciphering of which has always been a source of perverse pride for me.

That said, I always like to feel decent about what I have done, and in many respects I do--to the point where I actually have mentioned the possibility of an Inverness reunion for this crew next quarter, something that I frankly have never felt like even entertaining with previous groups I've had abroad.  Sure, if I could select a subset I might well have a couple of dozen from 2009-10-11, but no way would I have wanted the whole group of any of those years.  But this cohort--I could see it.  With the adding-by-subtraction at midquarter, it's a pretty congenial bunch of people who mostly seem to like each other--in stark contrast to what I have seen from some of the other groups that this agency is hosting here in Sydney.

It'll be interesting also to see how my exit interview goes with the people who organize on this side: what they get from me is likely not to be the most cheerful little earful, as I have found about five things that really have stuck in my craw and / or my students'.  Some of it may be style, but some of it most definitely is substance, and I am really hoping I can Keep My Temper when I do try to air some of these concerns.  In retrospect it is easy to see some of the shoulda-coulda-wouldas, but there are also some plain old mismanagement issues that I didn't realize would loom so large.  Very odd.

Of course, my temper has been frayed unexpectedly on the homefront by construction noise from the apartments upstairs, unthinkably loud and relentless, sort of like living inside an industrial blender filled with cement chunks.  I am not exaggerating here--the construction is steel-reinforced concrete, and there've been "Kangas" (smallish jackhammers) working from 8 to 5 for the last week, completely gutting the place, including the tiles on the floor and walls and balconies.  Today as I wrapped up the final exam prompt before skedaddling (I'd swum at Balmoral in the gray overcast, then retreated to a cafe to scribble after changing), the symphony was interleaved with gigantic sledgehammer blows as walls came down, and the balcony shook as debris was sent down the chute at the other end.  No matter how hot and muggy, our windows and screen doors are closed because of the dust--but there is good news: the rapacious folks at the rental agency are supposedly going to forgive our last three nights' rent that we otherwise would be paying for (there was a minimum 90 day stay requirement in the fine print, and we are leaving for New Zealand next Wednesday).  Not that anyone passed along to us the news that this construction was imminent, or that most of the inhabitants were finding alternative arrangements (like living in a steel mill, for the quiet).

So yeah--as if the 14-year-old punk isn't enough, we've had "tradies" to deal with starting at 7AM (though they are not allowed to "make noise" until 7:59).  Grim.  OK.  No pictures on this one (for some reason the ACU wifi has crapped out so I am typing on a Dell), but I will get more done tomorrow perhaps.  As soon as I collate all the chillun's e-mailed versions I will hustle my heinie back to Mosman High to catch Alex in another performance, this one without the high production values....

Entering the homestretch

Yes we are approaching the endgame here, as I try to figure out how to spend the last little bit of Activity Fund money (the agency alleges that it is use-or-lose, which I find hard to believe), and as with all endings this one is tinged with relief but also regret and pre-nostalgia (I think that was a Tom Lehrer coinage): there are aspects of this place and even this group that I am going to miss. 

Of course there are the obvious things, like the many many different ways in which the Opera House is on my list of the World's Coolest Buildings (this photo was taken on a warm evening when Amelie and I spontaneously decided to take in a Symphony concert in the big hall, and as I waited for her on the esplanade from the ferry terminal I was again struck by how casually wonderful this place is.  The sound was great by the way, even from where we were, up in a side area back of the orchestra where we could spy on the percussion section as they busied themselves with the Rachmaninoff 4th Piano Concerto and Tchaikowsky's Manfred.  Very cool.

   

But to the left here is another of the things I may find myself missing: Sydneysiders take their coffee pretty seriously, and even the little shop on the corner at the top of our street, which treated me to this casual masterpiece, seems to take pride in serving damned good stuff that looks great too.  Sure this "large flat white" (which is the size of a regular cap) costs 4 bucks easy, but hey, I'll support this barista artist in a heartbeat.  On the other hand, the patisserie a little further up the street has pretty good-looking croissants for sale, but I haven't had any yet--not for $5.50 to eat in, $4.80 to take away!

My ducklings are supposedly hard at work on their end of term projects--Friday is the last day of class, and they have to be out of their apartments and homestays on Saturday, and this picture here shows a recent class session where I had the groups of three reading and commenting on each others' draft reports using a web form I developed for my Business and Tech Writing classes back home.  I was able to wangle a computer classroom at Australian Catholic Uni, and was able to adapt my patented routine to the unfamiliar surroundings (a PC lab instead of Macs, a class that had been meeting in conventional classrooms all term, etc).  They did great after a slightly slow start, and I was able to give each group the other groups' comments anonymously within a couple of hours of the finish of the class, thanks to this cool method.

Here's a shot that shows what Alex has been up to, besides driving us slightly crazy.  Mostly on his own accord he volunteered for the Jazz Band at Mosman High--this required him taking the initiative since we had only asked that he attend regular band, and he had to ask the jazz band guy to join late.  His trombone section mates are both female as you see, and he actually learned a lot of music in a hurry.   This gig he was playing at deserves a full post of its own, but you can google the Schools Spectacular and find out about the biggest variety show in the universe.

Mosman's jazz band didn't make the main show, but they were selected to provide entertainment in the foyer both before the show and during intermission.  In this area of the hall they probably had an audience of several hundred, maybe more, and they were a LOT better than most of what we have heard back in Berkeley.

They fill this giant auditorium for two shows--in the area of 10,000 spectators--and the quality of the numbers is stunning.  Some of these kids go on to win "Australia's Got Talent" and then come back to help guest-host, and from the look of it the dancers and drum corps spent half a year rehearsing.  Then the full show is broadcast on New Years Eve, which makes for some odd moments where the emcee asked us to count down and yell "Happy New Year" as if we mean it!  Am and I were able to sneak into the matinee by tagging along ("we're with the band"), watching from the side but surrounded by literally hundreds of chorus kids and so on.  The level of professionalism was ridiculously high, and though one wondered whether the thing had to go on for three hours, Amelie and I had a whole lot of those dropped-jaw moments as the best high schoolers from all over New South Wales did their thing.

That night late he volunteered that he wished that kids at home didn't talk back to teachers so much, because, in his unprompted words, "we get so much more done in band here, because Mr Hardy doesn't let anyone waste any time."  Wow.