Fall is for Suckers

A Facebook message from Kate made me realize that I haven't been keeping up with this blog as I would like to. So here I am. Don't worry- you haven't missed much in my life. I work on my thesis sometimes in the daytime and look for cars with Alex at night. Sometimes we drink on weeknights and eat whole bags of potato chips to ourselves and watch 30Rock. Tzatziki is my favorite kiwi chip flavor.

It's turning into fall here but guess what- the trees don't lose their leaves. According to the girls on my hockey team, only the lame imported trees change color, which is such a relief to me. I hate all that shit about the beauty of fall and scenic road trips in October- fall is for suckers. Sure, it's fun to play sports in the chilly evening and wear scarves for the first time in months and drink something warm outside and see the steam, but then it gets bone crushing cold and I want to crawl inside my own belly and die.

So to fend off the depression sinking in from having to bear another winter in one calendar year, I bought myself a fabulous new wool coat and Alex bought a space heater for our bedroom. The coat is long, gray, and has a belt at the waist and those cool tabs on the sleeves, like an old driving coat. Also I bought a hat and some sweaters at the thrift store, and broke the washing machine in my flat trying to get the thrift store smell off them. The landlord will not replace it. My flatmates hate me.

Car shopping with Alex might be the funniest adventure we've ever had. I've only ever gone seriously looking at cars with my father, who does all the serious looking for me, kicking at tires and crawling under the bodies and revving the engines and listening to the wheels while I drive in circles for him. I just wander around the lot, peering into windows and alternatively trying to appear defiant or adorable, depending on how I think the negotiation is going with dad. I think Alex has only looked at antique cars with his dad. Now that we're on our own, we usually just stare at the passenger's side of the car because we think it's the driver's, get in and go for a test drive around the block, and get back out and stare at it again with the owner. Occasionally we poke a tire with our toe, and when they ask us if we want to see the engine, we say "Oh sure, sure," and stare under the "bonnet" for awhile. (BTW, I think that England used to pretend that their cars were nineteenth century noblewomen, and the tradition has stuck with the colonies. Kiwis call the hood the bonnet and the trunk the boot. I wonder where the petticoats are?) Then we usually offer the owner a sum way under what he's looking for (Why can't we find a woman selling a car? Our friend bought a car off a cute pregnant lady who was moving back to Australia to be with her mom for the birth. Unfair!) and he says that he's looking for more, and we try to play hardball so we go home, all the way talking about how much we really liked the car and thought it was great, and the guy sells it to someone who will pay higher than us and we lose.

I'm playing hockey for my school. BTW, when they say "club sports" in any other country, they just mean "the school's team" and not just-for-fun. Also you don't have to go to the school to play for the team, or be an undergrad, which is how I can be on the team. I play in a relatively low division because we have about six teams at this university and I suck, but it's still pretty serious. We were kicking ass in the first two games, but then school holiday rolled around and all of our undergrads went home to visit their families and we barely even have enough people to play anymore. We may have to forfeit this weekend, and last weekend we got murdered 5-0. It's pretty frustrating. What's also frustrating is that playing hockey with a bunch of eighteen year olds has made me realize that I am getting old. And out of shape.

Alex has been cooking a lot of really good soups recently, which is also making fall much more tolerable. Although last week he spent like twelve hours boiling down vegetables into a delicious stock, and when he left it in a bowl on the counter to cool down, my one flatmate thought it was garbage (how I don't know) and dumped it down the drain so she could wash the bowl. The next day our (only kind-of) wilty spinach got thrown away. Life in the city is hard.

Office Place

It's a gorgeous day in Wellington, super sunny and pretty warm, for this time of year. I'm bummed out that it's early fall here- I'm craving hot sunny beaches and sweatshirts at night. My body still thinks it should be spring time. I bet I'll get a serious bout of seasonal depression in July when it's in the thirties and I'm crying because my feet are frozen instead of stuck to the blazing sand on a beach. This will suck. I guess spring will be oh-so-much-nicer afterwards, but I could really care less about what happens in five months.

My school finally gave me an office in the English department this week. I plan on heading over to campus later and sitting in it for a while. Maybe I'll do some work. These past two weeks have not been my most productive, since Alex moved to town. We just hang out all the time. Yesterday we ate vegan Chinese food and watched tv, the day before we went and got his hair cut (so short!), made dinner, and went to a movie. Now it's actually the weekend, and everyone else can hang out, but I should really do more research. Oh well. Weekends never really meant much to me anyway.

About our trip to Auckland- I really liked the city. It was bigger, warmer, and felt like a city. Wellington is charming and quaint, and really provincial. It takes twenty minutes to walk across and is relatively dead in the middle of the day. Auckland is the opposite, and I loved it.  Great shopping, too- a whole mile stretch of just boutiques and secondhand shops. 

The train ride back from the city was...surreal to say the least. We woke up at six to shower and leave our hostel on time to make it to the platform. Seeing the train and hearing the rumble of its engine at seven in the morning on a crowded platform really made me feel like I was in and old timey movie, or going to Hogwarts. But that spell was soon broken when we got yelled at to hurry up with our luggage and I walked by the bathroom, which looked like it hadn't been serviced since the last film noir was recorded in it. Still, we had back row seats in our car, which is always awesome, and we packed tons of snacks for the trip. We were excited. 

Once the train took off, it began gently swaying back and forth on the tracks, and Alex and I realized we were inside the biggest cradle ever. We both fell asleep off and on for the next twelve hours, and this is what made the trip so misty. I kept waking up to see gorgeous countryside or really busted-down urban scapes. One minute (or so it seemed to sleepy me) I'd being staring at sheep delicately perched  on gigantic hills that look like crinkles in blankets when you bunch them up- the next I'd see some lame tag sprayed on an old warehouse. I do think, however, that there are way more farms than towns along the railway, and I've never seen so many sheep in my entire life. Fat sheep; little sheep; black sheep; creamy, fluffy sheep; curious sheep who stared at the train; frightened sheep who ran away from the train, their little sheep butts bouncing in retreat; sheep on hills; sheep laying down; sheep eating; sheep playing; sheep being sheep all over the place. Every fourth farm or so would be cattle, and you'd see a cow standing on one of those picturesque New Zealand hills, but - unlike the sheep - the cow would look around confused, as if to say "How the fuck did I get up here? OH GOD I CAN'T GET DOWN." 

At one point in our trip, the train stopped at a little cafe inside the National Park for a half hour break, and everyone got off at once. In the background loomed Mount Doom. And let me tell you, it looks way more impressive with flaming eyes super-imposed on it, but it's still a pretty formidable mountain, and I would not be interested in climbing it. Especially if I were hobbit-sized.

 After Mount Doom, we saw more sheep and cows, and arrived in Wellington in the early dusk, just in time to watch New Zealand's next top model. See? A very surreal trip.