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.