come, take a walking-trip through happiness.

you know you aren’t in chicago anymore when you wake up in the morning, open the shade and realize the train tracks are right along the street, but you can’t even hear them as they glide along. my sister, who in the past year has become a veteran cta rider, couldn’t get over the trains- how CLEAN and QUIET they were. we didn’t have any sort of plan as far as sightseeing, i grabbed a map from the hostel front desk and off we went to circular quay. there was no one there, at ten in the morning.

we walked up to a place in the rocks that dianne recommended called the gumnut teagarden, which was adorable. the tables in the courtyard were all old singer sewing machines. i had french toast with carmelized bananas and danielle had the wood fired bread with ricotta and honey. now thoroughly sugared-up, we set out to walk the harbour bridge. if i was rich i would have liked to have done the harbour bridgeclimb, but at $180 per person, i just couldn’t justify it. the sun came out in full force while we walked along. there were a few other tourists, and some joggers who i got really jealous of, because how nice would it be to have that be your normal morning jog?

now i know, next time i go i will have to just do the bridgeclimb.  the only thing that we knew we wanted to do in sydney, i mean besides like, going to eat at the meat pie stand, was go to the zoo. i don’t really give a shit about zoos or animals but my sister wanted to go, and i will go look at some fucking koalas, if only so i can recite that mitch hedberg joke about his apartment being infested with koala bears. we took the ferry over to the zoo. the sun went down and it was freezing but we sat outside on the ferry over. admission to the zoo is like $40 and at first i was whiny about it, but now i know why: because it is FUCKING AWESOME.

first of all, you get to take a little gondola lift to the top of the hill. when you get off at the top, you have a spectacular view of the city on the other side of the harbour. also one of the first thing you see is a booth where you pay to get your picture taken with certain animals. so we decided to get one taken with a koala. unfortunately no one can really touch them (the zookeepers rarely even do) so wherever they happen to be chillin’ when you roll up, is how the picture gets taken. this uncooperative little bastard was called huxley.

he was goddamn adorable, i was pretty much in a trance and almost went so far as to buy a stuffed koala because i wanted to pet one so bad. i feel a kinship with them because i love to sleep and will probably also claw your eyes out if you disturb me. the girl who took the pictures let us take a bunch with our own cameras and hang around and watch them for awhile. you can get pictures with other animals too, like giraffes and reptiles. i had to hold danielle back from doing another one with a giraffe.
there are a lot of areas with no fences, like anyone could just go up to a kangaroo if they wanted. for some reason, i can’t see that shit ever working out in america. my only complaint about the zoo is that the tasmanian devil was NOT THERE. but we looked at pretty much everything, i think we were there for like three hours. i don’t know why, but i was surprised by the lack of tourists. i know that it is the off-season, but the weather was still gorgeous and it was the middle of the day.the zoo is set on a hill, so the entrance is on the bottom. even though we walked down through all the exhibits, danielle and i knew we would rather walk back up and take that silly gondola back down.

i don’t think i’ve ever been this happy in my whole fucking life. we took the ferry back to circular quay. we wandered around the rocks some more.  i could not stop saying WHY IS THIS PLACE SO ADORABLE?! many new zealanders we met told us, upon hearing that we’d be going to australia, ‘oh, you will like it, it is a lot like america.’ which i took as a sly insult, to america but mostly australia. sydney reminded me more of london than anywhere in america- melbourne felt far more american to me, with its sprawling suburbia. for dinner we went to eat thai food at another place recommended by dianne (you should read her blog, then you will understand why i trust her so much- the girl knows food). i think we ate every meal outside in sydney except one (breakfast on the last day, because it was TOO HOT OUT!). this one was on a little balcony. i had some kind of steak with lime and chilies, it was obviously amazing because i don’t have a picture of it. we decided to talk back to our hostel through the central business district, until it started thunderstorming. we stopped in a few arcades and looked through some stores and one of the most impressive food courts danielle or i had ever seen (hey, it doesn’t take much). where i bought a box of donut holes. ah, is that what they mean by ‘more american’?

we had to see the beach one more time before we left new zealand. this is a place called waikouaiti. that’s whacka-why-ee-tee. first we dropped hannah off at school, she showed us her classroom and her pictures hanging on the wall, when we said goodbye it was like we were only leaving for the day, not for an indefinite period of time. the other kids were more sad that my cousin (mom) was leaving to drive us to the airport. the airport in dunedin was practically deserted. we got there with about an hour before our flight, so i went to buy a sandwich and coke to use up my coins, because they only take bills at the currency exchange. the total was more than i had, so i sighed about having to break a tenner and the cashier girl asked me how much i had in coins, and told me it was enough. that would probably never happen in america. also, there was no security. NO SECURITY. no mental detector, no carry on luggage screening, no scrambling to finish your bottle of water.

that is only because our plane was this small. there is no security screening for flights with fewer than 90 passengers. we flew to christchurch where we had a layover. the international departure area had tons of swank couches so we relaxed and ate salt and vinegar chips and chocolate fish. i bought a bunch of crunchie bars and perky nanas to bring home.

much to my sister’s annoyance, i could not stop singing the fucking kinks song ‘australia’, you know, ‘no one hesitates at life or beats around the bush in austrayyyyleeeeeaahhhhh….we’ll flyyyy….down to sydney for a holiday!’ on the flight i finished my book about the replacements (which is amazing because i am pretty sure that i stared at a picture of a shirtless paul westerberg for like 45 minutes like a damn 13 year old) and then was forced to look at the movie 27 dresses playing on the screen, which i had embarrassingly ALREADY WATCHED on the flight to auckland. i only like to watch movies i think are terrible because at least i am not disappointed when my suspicions are confirmed. we landed in sydney around six. it was dark already (remember, autumn!). we grabbed our bags and hopped on the train- that is like my ritual whenever i am in a new city, somehow getting on the subway helps me get my bearings. our hostel was in surry hills, near central station. the night air was balmy like summer, i was so excited even though i had to rip my coat and sweatshirt off as we walked to the hostel. the hostel we stayed at was truly fantastic, we had a private room though so it was nice and quiet and clean. after we dumped our suitcases we went for a walk up and down elizabeth street, past vietnamese and thai restaurants, more hostels, the 7-11 where i would purchase many a bottle of peach iced tea over the next few days. we came back and went to bed early, weary from travel and the previous two weeks just being around four children. it was nighttime and the city looked much like any other, i wanted to keep some of it a secret until i could see it in the daylight.

on the last day danielle and i went out on the farm with paul again. first he took us to milk the cow. i wanted to actually milk the cow by hand but they use a machine to do it. there are four things you slip on their udder that squeeze the milk out. paul made us put our fingers inside to feel the thing pulsing, it was kind of gross.

they only have one milk cow and use the milk for themselves, they make yogurt and butter (and maybe by now, cheese) and my cousin showed me later how she skimmed the milk- by holding a plate to catch all the cream at the top. old school! we went over to paul’s mom’s house and she made us coffee and fed us chocolate chip cookies and we sat around talking for like two hours. we had to get home to make lunch, which was the ribs from our friend, the aforementioned wild pig. we had to fuel up so we could go rabbit hunting- one of the things i had wanted to do while i was there besides 1. go to the cadbury factory (check!), 2. milk a cow (check, i guess), 3. eat as many different kinds of animal as possible.

here is a hilarious picture of me practicing with the ridiculous puffy coat on. we drove over to paul’s uncle henry’s farm, across the street, to go shooting. i guess there were supposedly more rabbits there? usually they go shooting at night, with helmets that have flashlights attached to them. there was no way in hell they were gonna get me to go out at night, though (too cold). so we loaded up the two .22s (for me and my sister) and the shotgun (for paul). i had never shot a gun before, which is probably a good thing. i am the most clumsy person ever and most people who know me would probably express extreme fear at the thought of me handling a firearm.

danielle got to wear the ammunition belt, which is so badass and i admit i was a little jealous. after practicing shooting at targets (quite unsuccessfully, i would say), we started off into the bushes on the hills to find some bunnies. i wasn’t confident that i would be able to shoot a rabbit, because i had stupidly forgotten my glasses, which meant anything far away would not be clear to me. we were strolling along when paul spotted one running down the hill, he hoisted his shotgun, cocked it, aimed and BAM shot the fucker dead within the span of about three seconds, from about fifty feet away we saw the rabbit fall dead into a shallow creek.

danielle and i stood there with our jaws on the ground in awe of his precision. paul modestly told us that his brother was a far better shot even than him. we traversed the matagouri-infested hills, paul shot two more rabbits. danielle and i pretty much resigned ourselves to the fact that we probably could only shoot a rabbit if it was stationary two feet in front of us.

we dumped the bunnies in the back of the truck and raced home to greet hannah as she got dropped off by the school bus. paul told us that he would show us how to skin them after the kids were in bed. the kids went to bed a few hours later, and i fell asleep on the couch in the lounge next to the stove while talking with my sister and traci. paul woke me up and asked if i still wanted to see the rabbit skinned, um hell yeah i do.

there he is. we discovered it was a boy. since it was late, paul only skinned one, with enough meat that we could cook it up just to taste it. paul said, okay, i will skin this rabbit in about a minute. so i took a video, and he was right. the video is pretty amazing, kind of hard to see because it was late at night and dark. fortunately i don’t have a video of paul slicing the belly, twisting the body and ALL OF THE GUTS SPILLING OUT. that was truly the foulest thing i have ever smelled.

it is sort of amazing how thick the skin and fur are. it didn’t yield that much meat, i ended up greedily eating most of it. it tasted like chicken, but a little tougher. it was a nice way to cap off our last night in new zealand. belly full of rabbit, i scrubbed the soles of my shoes clean and gave my cousin back the sweaters and hats and scarves i’d borrowed, and folded my laundry that had been drying on a rack above the wooden stove. as much fun as it was, i was eager to get to the warmer climes of australia, to assault my senses with urban noises and smells and giant buildings of a big city. tomorrow, sydney….

the morning after returning from queenstown, my cousin came in an asked if we wanted to get up and go to church and then afterwards go to the beach, or stay home and sleep in and rest. i really did not want to go to church (remember how they only heat buildings using wood stoves? well, they don’t bother to heat the church at all,  because it’s too big) but i decided to suck it up because i really wanted to go to the beach, and in the end, it was a small sacrifice to make.

first we went to shag point, near palmerston. the beach was beautiful and rugged and utterly devoid of other humans. there was giant kelp and plants that looked extraterrestrial. we walked along the cliffs for a bit, but my cousin’s friend had told her to go to moeraki, home of the famous boulders and lighthouse.

this was my favorite part of the whole trip, hands down. this beach was fucking gorgeous, desolate, and it was so cold but i was in such awe it didn’t matter. the lighthouse was fenced off and it’s operated by computers now, so we couldn’t climb up it like we’d been told we could by my cousin’s friend. the special part about moeraki/katiki point is that there are penguins there. we walked down a steep path to a little hut where you can watch for them.

there are binoculars you can use to spot them, supposedly if they don’t see people they are more likely to hang around. we saw one lone penguin, a yellow-eyed penguin- those are native to new zealand. we decided to keep walking along the beach to see if we could find more.

i kept thinking we would eventually get to the end of the coast, but it kept going on and on. though it was winter and cold, everything was really green. there were tons and tons of seals, just hanging out and curious. they must have been fed by people before, because they would start flopping up towards us with no fear, which would thoroughly freak out the hannah. luke kept asking, DO SEALS  HAVE DISEASES?? they reminded me a lot of my dog, with their big sweet eyes and lack of hind-end dexterity.

we saw probably five or six penguins, and these two are the only ones that weren’t so afraid that they bolted away as soon as they noticed us. i kept saying to hannah, do you know how lucky you are that you live here? do you know how few people will ever get to see something this amazing in their lives? to which she replied, mandible, you’re my favorite. LET’S RACE UP THE HILL!

paul was in as much awe as i was, and though he lived not thirty minutes from this place for most of his life, he had never been there. i felt bad because we left traci in the car with the baby and abigail, who had fallen asleep after the excitement at shag point, and we had been wandering out there for over an hour.

my pictures will never do it justice.

the second weekend we took a trip to queenstown, which is about a three hour drive away, though it is only about 200 km from the farm. there’s no major highways and when you are travelling with four kids everything takes longer. as soon as we drove for about ten minutes and gained the slightest bit of altitude, everything was covered with snow- i am sure the first snow i have ever seen in may.

despite this, we stopped at a dairy in ranfurly for ice cream anyway. i got a giant scoop of hokey pokey, which is apparently a huge thing in new zealand. it tasted like the insides of a crunchie bar, of which i had eaten an obscene number a few days earlier on our cadbury factory tour. we drove through the central otago wine region, then along the kawarau river which was just gorgeous. it reminded me of driving on I-70 west of denver, one of my favorite places in the states.

queenstown’s sister city is aspen, which makes sense. queenstown is a ski resort place, the main attraction is a range of mountains called the remarkables. which we couldn’t see because the fog had descended so far over their peaks. queenstown is located on the north end of lake wakatipu, a giant lake that looks like a lightning bolt when seen from space.

after having fish and chips for lunch, we walked along the lake. it was goddamn freezing outside, but the kids didn’t care because they chased ducks and threw stones in the lake and ran all over the place. we walked over the the shopping area and my cousin bought a warmer hat and i sat with luke while he sniffed the tester bottles of men’s cologne in the pharmacy.

paul’s auntie june has a holiday cabin there, which is where we were going to stay the night. first we stopped at the grocery store to get meat pies for dinner and l&p for me to try. before that, we had to stop and operate on abigail because she decided to stuff berries she found on the ground up her nose. it is funny now, because my cousin pulled them out using my tweezers. at the time i couldn’t laugh until i knew we wouldn’t have to go to the emergency room. in the grocery store, luke was sitting next to a red-faced abigail and he turned to danielle and said, “it is a good thing there isn’t a sign that says kids can’t be hilarious, because abigail is being hilarious right now.” (i am certain he got that from me, since i use the word ‘hilarious’ far too much.)

auntie june’s crib was of course freezing, so the first thing we did was start the fire in the wood stove. a few minutes later, i noticed smoke spewing out of it, so paul had to take out the logs and burning fire starter and put them on the WOODEN BALCONY until he figured out the problem. we boiled a kettle right away and i drank cup after cup of tea trying to warm up. auntie june’s stove only had three burners, the space where the back left burner would be is a flat surface to set the kettle on. another cue for me to lament that we don’t live in such a tea-centric culture (by the way, they call dinner ‘tea’ there).

here is the view from the balcony, it was lovely but would have been better if it wasn’t so bloody cloudy. soon it was nighttime and the stove was pumping out heat and i sat next to it eating my meat pie which was the most delicious thing ever. the rest of the night was spent drinking chai and playing monopoly with the kids and me reading out loud from some birth-order book that i found on a shelf.

the next day was still cloudy, so we hid out by the fire for most of the morning. hannah got to choose where we would have lunch, because it was almost her birthday, so she chose subway, of all places. i think it was because subway is a reminder of american life, which hannah remembers better than the other kids. i had a tandoori chicken sub which is probably the best thing i’ve ever had from subway. they need to get that in america.

we went to the aquarium, which wasn’t really an aquarium but rather a room under a pier with lots of windows. you could put a quarter in this machine that would spit out food into the water and of course the ducks, eels and fish would all swarm to get some. that kept the kids rapt for probably 45 minutes. i was just happy to be inside where it was warm.

of course the kids found a park which normally i would be into but everything was wet from rain and i am prissy about being wet. so i pushed them on the swings and waited at the bottom of the slide instead. they all had so much energy, even after playing outside for hours they weren’t tired once we got in the car. immediately they started asking ARE WE HOME YET? CAN WE GET ICE CREAM? DAD DAD CAN WE STOP IN CROMWELL AND GET ICE CREAM?!?

cromwell is a town that produces lot of stone fruits: peaches, plums, nectarines, pears. we stopped at a fruit market and everyone got ice cream- they take the ice cream and put it in a machine with fruit and it spits out a soft serve blend. i didn’t have any because i was holding out for dinner, which was pizza in a place in alexandra. it was weird, they had a mexican pizza that had pickles on it. there was also a young kid who worked there who looked exactly lake a young dave davies and i couldn’t stop staring at him.

hannah clung to me while our pizzas were made and kept saying, “you’re my BEST friend, mandible. you’re my FAVORITE.” paul has always called me mandible and now all the kids do it, it is infinitely endearing. on the rest of the drive, i rode shotgun with paul and we counted the number of cars we saw that passed us: a total of five, in about 2 hours. it is pitch black at night, and we kept driving through little towns and i would ask, how many people live here? usually it was around fifty, and each town had a pub and we’d slow down to count the cars outside- probably most of the population were hanging out there. when we got home, paul offered to take me to the pub in dunback for a pint of speight’s, but i was so tired and the lounge was warm as a sauna so i decided to stay in and drink peppermint tea and eat tim tams. warm at last.

i understand now why there are so many sheep in new zealand- because you need three sweaters and two pairs of merino socks to keep warm in the winter. my cousin told me to bring warm clothes, but people always tell me that because anyone who knows me, knows my body temperature is always so low i wear cardigans even in july. in rural new zealand (i’m not sure about the more urban areas?) people heat their homes with wood stoves. it isn’t really like here where you leave your centrally-heated house and get in your heated car and drive to your heated office or heated shopping center and are able to warm up relatively quickly. by the time the lounge gets heated by the dozen logs thrown in the stove, it’s bedtime, so you have to crawl under five blankets in your freezing bedroom just to keep warm, and don’t even get me started on getting up in the middle of the night to take a piss in the bathroom that is pretty much as cold as outside.

so, i get why there are 10 sheep for every person in new zealand. while we were there, it wasn’t the typical shearing time, but they had a batch of about 25 sheep that they wanted to shear so they could send them off to the works. plus, the little american girls need to witness it! luke and abigail came with to play in the bales. the machine they use is super loud but not unlike the battery powered thing my mom uses to clip the grass. first you have to drag out the sheep. those fuckers are heavy, you have to pull by their front legs and i was afraid it would hurt them. obviously it won’t. once they are out there, they pretty much just curl up and lay there. there is a method to the shearing, since these had already been crutched (bellies shaved), paul started with the back leg, then up the back and over the other side. the stuff on their heads goes in a different bin because it is a different grade. the wool comes off in a single piece, it reminded me of a bearskin rug or something. paul’s mom takes it and skirts it, which just means spreading it out on a table and picking out pieces of stuff that shouldn’t be on it. the whole process takes only a few minutes.

i tried to shear one and it was not difficult, but after doing several dozen i can’t imagine how sore you would be- you are leaning over the sheep the whole time and you have to keep them firmly in place with your legs. in the summer when they do tons of them, the amount of wool that is produced is astounding and you get to jump in the bales to pack it down, which sounds like tons of fun. sometimes there are sheep who get pieces of crap stuck to their fur on their asses, so you have to pull those pieces off- they are called dags. there was only one in the batch paul did that day with dags, and he pulled them off and was throwing them at my sister and me. for some reason, the word dag is also used there to describe a really funny person.

after they’re shorn, they are soooo soft. i feel so bad for these little guys, they have to stuff their faces to keep warm without their wool. too bad these dudes are by now all lamp chops!

on the first monday, my sister and i went with paul and his mom to muster their cows. if you have never spent any time on a farm ever, like me, i will tell you what that means: the cows are scattered out in the hills and so you have to take your dogs up in the truck and then help round the cows up, and chase them down to the paddocks. then the calves get separated from their moms so they can be weaned. easy enough?

my sister rode in the front while paul’s mom drove, and paul and i stood in the back of the truck with the dogs- 4 of paul’s dogs, and 4 of his mom’s. it was the funnest shit ever, the terrain is really rough and hilly so you have to hold on and even then you get thrown around so much, i had bruises all over my legs from bumping against the bars on the way up.

there’s the view from the top of the gully. by this time the dogs were losing their minds, they wanted to get out and run around. so they let them loose, and we started down the gully by foot.

you can’t really tell how steep it is in the photos, but you have to be really careful walking around in gum boots because you might slip on a fresh pile of cow crap or into a rabbit hole. the hills are also covered with weeds like gorse and matagouri, which is pronounced like ‘mada-gary’. it is a giant prickly mass and they are everywhere, when i got home my legs were covered in a rash of red dots from where i had been poked by its sharp little branches. they are weeds so they flourish like crazy, the only benefit they have is that goats like to eat their flowers, but there are no goats on their farm.

the dogs of course know exactly what they are supposed to do, but there are all these commands that tell them where to go when they aren’t going the right way- and the dogs know whether to go left, right, behind. soon we hear the stampede of ten dozen cow hooves coming from behind, and we hop back in the truck to follow them down.

once we get them to the bottom of the hills, we drive them into a paddock and then take a break. the whole process, though it sounds simple, is really time consuming because you can’t always get thirty cows to go where you want. they run away from the dogs but sometimes the dogs get a little rambunctious and run really close to the cows and they get pissed off and will kick the dogs in the face. the cows are also fiercely protective of their calves, so if they think the dogs are threatening the calves in any way, they will turn around and try to butt heads with the dog. my sister and i were worried that one of the dogs would get really injured from a blow to the face, but they are fucking tough little guys and nothing the cattle did seemed to scare them at all.

after the cattle are fenced in the paddock, we took a break for lunch at paul’s mom’s house. i loved his mom, she is a pretty badass lady. her and paul’s dad bought the farm in the late 60s, and have been running it ever since. when paul’s dad died suddenly two years ago, and paul and my cousin were still living in colorado, it was up to her to keep it going. it is serious work, and after one day of mustering i was dead tired- i can’t imaging having to muster the sheep, of which they have thousands. at 61 she is still at it, and i have tons of respect for her. also, she makes fantastic fucking scones. the awesome part about being a farmer is you can break for lunch for two hours and just sit around talking drinking tea and eating chocolate chip cookies. so that is what we did. afterwards, we picked up luke and abigail so they could come with us to drive the heifers back up the hills.

first we needed to separate the heifers from their calves, which is really hard because they don’t want to leave their babies and they groan and moo really loud and incessantly. paul and i used giant sticks to guide the calves into a separate paddock and then got back in the truck and let the dogs loose again.

see, they don’t want to go. i sat in front with paul because i was cold and danielle was in charge of making sure the kids didn’t fall out the back of the truck. the cows were being stubborn and kept going the wrong way, paul kept running into them with the truck’s front bumper which freaked me out a little but they can take it.

these cows are all pregnant, as well. the gestation period for a cow is the same as a human, about nine months, and these cows will have a calf every year. i am not sure how many calves a cow can have during her lifetime, but i assume once they aren’t able to have calves anymore, they get sent off to ‘the works’, which is a slaughterhouse, as you may have guessed. once we got the cows far enough back up the hill, paul dumped this giant cylindrical hunk of feed and we closed all the gates to the paddocks behind us. it was cold so abigail came up front and sat on my lap for the drive home. i am partial to her, she is a total daddy’s girl but since daddy is a farmer who isn’t afraid to skin rabbits and trudge around in animal shit all day she is one tough little cookie.

when we got home, i was all pumped from a hard laborious day, so decided to do some core exercises on the lounge floor and of course luke wanted to participate. we did all kinds of crunches and even though i got worn out he still begged me ‘show me another one! let’s do more core exercises! do you wanna do an workout video?!’ luke is sweet and kind as abigail is bold and feisty. the first night we were there i was wiping off my eyeshadow and he asked what i was doing, and i told him and he replied, ‘you don’t need to wear makeup! i think you are already beautiful.’ he would also beg me every night to let him brush my hair and gave his grandma a foot massage when we went over to her house for tea one night. abigail, on the other hand, liked to run up and hold her face just centimeters from mine and growl while holding her hands in tight fists under her chin.

not to be all, shit is so much better in other countries, but really, sometimes it is. there is such a stark contrast between flying on us-based airlines and ones from other countries. my sister and i are so obsessed with air new zealand though it is probably just because we were able to watch episodes of flight of the conchords on demand. they don’t even feed you on a four hour united airlines flight from chicago to la, so after landing at LAX around 7pm and walking fourteen miles, starving and sweating, to a different terminal to catch our flight to auckland (though, counterintuitively, it was not out of the international terminal), we met an adorable couple in line waiting to board- an american girl and a dude from new zealand with amazing ron wood hair who told us how the airport’s layout was so frustrating that they immediately went to the bar after clearing security, something i wish we had time to do. on the plane, we settled into our bulkhead seats (!) for the twelve hour flight to auckland. the bulkhead seats were a total score, even though we were near babies, but after dinner and a glass of wine i blew up my inflatable neck pillow, stretched my legs out, cued up jenn’s mix on my ipod and fell asleep for about eight hours.

new zealand (and australia) have really strict biodiversity rules, so it took us awhile to get through customs because we had to declare the eight million boxes of kraft mac and cheese we brought at my cousin’s request. man, if i wanted to really smuggle some reptiles back home it would be pretty hard. sorry luke. my cousin told us to not take the bus to the domestic terminal and instead take the interterminal walkway because it was a nice stroll. we didn’t see anything because it was five in the morning and still dark.

down there, the sunrise turns the sky pink. my cousin had warned us how small the airport at dunedin would be (or, as the united employee who checked us in at o’hare called it, DUD, after it’s iata code) but we still flew down in a 737. i kept hearing people talk about how cold it was in dunedin, and in my head i laughed at them like, what a bunch of pussies. come to chicago in january and then we’ll see what cold is. miraculously our four suitcases made it all the way, and we waited for a few minutes until my cousin showed up with samuel, six months. i am sort of indifferent when it comes to babies, i can see the appeal but until they get a little more mobile and are able to talk, i kind of only see them as lumps of pudge. but he is fucking adorable.

people everywhere we went were freaking out about his little lion outfit, which was more for warmth than to look “outrageously adorable” (as one guy in the airport parking lot put it). we were starving so we got lunch in waihola and then drove out along taieri mouth and up to dunedin proper along the coast. my cousin needed to do some grocery shopping while in town (the farm is about an hour away, with not much of anything in between) so of course i immediately ran to the candy aisle and got a dairy milk bar with cashews (but never ate it) and a kitkat mint chocolate (not as good as the peanut butter one).

my cousin took us to baldwin street, which is the steepest street in the world according the the guinness book of records, so she could nurse the baby while we hiked up it. dunedin reminds me a lot of san francisco because it is really hilly. you can’t really tell how steep it is in any pictures i took, but after having travelled for like 24 hours, i gave up after going about 3/4s of the way. my personal trainer would have been so disappointed in me but my body gave up on me. the high of first arrival was starting to wear off and i really wanted to see the other kids, so we started the drive to what would be home for the next ten days. once you get past palmerston, pop 1000, into the hills of central otago, there is no more cell phone reception or even radio. it is, however, fucking gorgeous. my cousin was pointing out all of the native and non-native trees, plants and weeds that blanketed the hills. the farm consists of many hectares of such land.

paul and the kids were over at his mom’s house, which lies just several hundred meters away. when hannah saw me she bounded over and knocked me to the ground with the most forceful hug ever. i got a much more normal hug from paul, who immediately told me he had killed a wild pig and had it waiting to show me. luke came out and attacked danielle in the same way hannah had me, and abigail stood and stared at us for a minute, uncertain what to think. the last time we saw her she was two, in april of 2007, and she didn’t quite remember us. hannah took me over to the big trampoline and i got my second wind and started jumping with her and charlie, who is the son of paul’s sister heidi. he would later exclaim to me, while we were jumping, ‘you have a big bottom!’ maybe i should have walked all the way up baldwin street. abigail jumped on and was doing straight up backflips and warmed up to me immediately once she saw that i was one of the kids. now that she is three, she is talking a lot and has the most pronounced accent of the three speaking kids. after landing funny, she exclaimed, ‘oww, i huht my finguh!’. paul came over and told me he had some sheep hanging up in the shed if i would like to come help him cut them up. i didn’t have my camera so unfortunately he has all the pictures of me wielding a giant electric saw and cutting a lamb in half right down through the spine. with our bag of fresh meat, paul, abigail and i climbed into their little hatchback but it wouldn’t start. abigail turned to me and said, ‘it’s out of petrol!’. paul’s mom and i pushed the car down the street to get it going while abigail giggled like mad and hopped all over the backseat.

wild pigs are a serious nuisance, along with rabbits. they kill a lot of them in new zealand, and i was hoping to be able to go along on a hunt while i was there wasn’t able to. paul had killed one already so i posed with it so i could send the pictures and really creep out my parents. even though i had just carved up a sheep, it was already skinned and beheaded and was not unlike cutting up a piece of meat you’d buy at the store. so when paul handed me his knife and asked if i wanted to cut up the pig, i couldn’t do it- it was still a WHOLE PIG. he showed me how to cut off the limbs, and i brought one to each of his dogs. he took out the balls and tried to get me to hold them, and i was like HELL NO DUDE. fortunately abigail doesn’t have any fear (yet) and went for it:the rest of the time we were there, every time she’d see me with my camera, she’d ask, ‘can i see balls picsha?’ and of course i would oblige because she is the baddest ass little three year old ever. we cooked up the lamb for dinner and it was delicious. i could barely keep my head up but they forced me to stay awake until seven, just to get me somewhat adjusted to the new rhythm. plus we had to get up for church in the morning, so i would need to either be extremely well rested, or drunk, to be able to make it through that.