Everyone I’ve talked to that’s been in New Zealand any amount of time has told me that Auckland sucks and not to get stuck there. It’s true it isn’t much of a city, by my judgment of a few days. Good cities have a feeling of being connected, the hearts that the blood of whole cultures pumps through. New York has it, Montreal has it, Los Angeles and Shanghai and Seoul and Busan, but even Halifax and Ithaca have it. Auckland does not have it. This is a land of small towns, they tell me, and I think I can feel that.

The trouble is it’s “winter” here. I had always thought of winter as a meteorological fact, but it is something of a cultural thing, I guess. I met a guy from London, Tom, at the first hostel I stayed at, and we went out to Waiheke Island, where there are a bunch of vineyards and it’s apparently possible to get very cheap wine. My priorities may need rethinking, but there you are. We found a half-cheap rental car – “Just don’t get smashed,” the cheery South African behind the desk winked – and set off around the island. Every vineyard we went to was closed. We did get some nice views and eventually ended up at what we had been told was a nice place to hike and look around, the site of an old WWII gun emplacement. It was closed. At that point we simply weren’t having it and jumped the fence. Having been decommissioned many years ago, it’s now half historic site, half active farm. Sheep and cows roamed as freely as we did. That was a good day, in spite of its total lack of wine or accomplishment.

That hostel was a bit of a hippy place, where people ate nothing but organically grown local vegetables and one guy insisted that doing so was a moral imperative. Climate change might end the world, but I guess their hands will be clean. There was a guy there, twentysome years old, with a tattoo of a globe in a backpack. Next to it was written, “Into the Wild”. I imagined punching him in the mouth. What he calls the wild, impressed enough with his own intrepid nature to get it tattooed on his arm, I call an amusement park for white people that like birds.

Not that I don’t like birds, and I guess hippies are mostly harmless. This hostel I’m at now is a much more commercial, professional kind of place, and very central. That has its perks, but at least the hippies have a little more soul than the gap year party crowd.

Am I getting older?

I know I sound a bit cranky in this post, but I’m actually feeling very nice and chilled these days. Last night I baked a batch of cookies, which was awesome because I haven’t had proper kitchen access for months. Lots of nice little walks and talks. I’ve been picking up leads on things to do, and eventually I’ll follow one.