Beattie: “They don’t show up at your wake. Not because they don’t like you, but because they never knew your last name. A month later, someone tells them, ‘oh, Jimmy died.’
‘Jimmy who?’
‘Jimmy the cop.’
‘Oh,’ they say. ‘Him.'”
-The Wire (5.10, “-30-“)

The past couple of weeks I’ve been staying at the Cambridge, which is an old hotel that has a backpackers’ wing. It actually isn’t bad relative to lots of hostels, but that’s not saying much. I almost have an apartment lined up, and if I get a job that’ll be a nice little setup. I don’t talk to the people here much, mainly because I don’t like them and I’ve never been very good at hiding things like that. Backpackers are awfully boring people, by and large. I met a guy here who was pretty excited to meet a Canadian (naturally the first thing he asked was where I’m from, a question I have answered an average of 4.1 times a day outside of North America) and beamed at me constantly, although he may have just been drunk. He went a step farther than most and actually asked what it was like.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Canada lately, how much other places don’t feel like home. I thought, then, about waking up at 4:30 in the morning in the middle of January and going outside, and even though there isn’t a lick of dawn, having enough light from the stars and the moon bounced up off the snow to see the edges of the woods. I thought about the cold in my bones, the snow so crunchy when you walk on it that the sound carries for miles, the car not starting the first time or the second but maybe the third. I remembered gloves grabbed off and bare hands clutched around a coffee cup and gloves replaced, their owner’s ass frozen to bleachers so his useless 10-year-old son could try to skate. I thought about people that don’t ask questions when the people they love need something.

“We sure like hockey,” I said. He had a way of making his laugh sound like a word he was shouting.

I went to the grocery store today, and I saw a girl there that I had met before, at a hostel. I couldn’t remember which hostel it was, or what we talked about, or what her voice sounded like. I couldn’t remember whether I liked her or not. I pretended not to see her.

At the checkout, the person in front of me was buying a copy of Woman’s Day. I stared at it and thought of Seb. I wondered whether I ever would again.

Sometimes I learn a bit of language here and there, travelling. Languages are cool and nice. Sometimes words are such tidy encapsulations of things that you would have thought were too complicated to explain, if there wasn’t a word for it. Sometimes they express feelings that you might not have realized other people had. Good words are like tiny poems. The Maori have a word, “keo”, that means “the call of a bird”. What a nice part of the world to pick out and make a mental unit of. I’ve always thought there should be a word for the anxiety induced by awareness of the passage of time.

There’s a job I’ve had four separate interviews and two reference checks for. Tomorrow is Monday, and hopefully I’ll hear something on the exchanging labour for money front. I think I sort of got the idea at some point that because I like to go for walks and don’t own very much, I’d be a good backpacker. It turns out there is more to it than that and I hate most of it. I would really like to have a job and a home, like normal people always said. That’s okay, I think it’s good to learn these things for yourself. And there is still a lot of walking and austerity. Zealandia was my latest sally, a unique nature reserve that’s not a distance I would casually describe as “walkable” from the city but I sure did walk it. They have a fence all the way around the entire thing, like Jurassic Park, but backwards. It’s designed to keep mammals out, although they make a controlled exception for humans. That means they can bring in species that today mostly exist on small islands they’ve been moved to on account of how they get massacred by rats and weasels and stuff. I saw a couple of takahe, big flightless birds of which there are only about 200 left. Also kaka, bush parrots with an unpleasant skraark of a keo. Also kakariki, saddlebacks, parakeets, and ducks. Grammy O’Hanley would have been thrilled, I’d bet. If you want to get a glimpse at a day in the life, have a look here and consider that I walked more inside the park than outside. My hamstrings are iron these days.

“Whatever. Travelling!”
–anonymous jackass

I don’t have a lot to say about Auckland. It isn’t terrible, but it didn’t give me many good stories. Certainly nothing I can blog about, at least. I went to a Scala conference one weekend, and Lord there were a lot of beards in that room, and I’m not sure what I expected. There was a break in the afternoon to get at the beer fridge, “So go on, have a drink, mingle a bit,” said one of the host employees. In roughly 20 minutes, I got through three beers and mingled very little. Dev stuff is not always my jam. A Woman’s Day writer named Seb let me stay on his couch for a few days while I wrapped up my time in Auckland. He was a fun guy, and his apartment looked like this:

He also pointed me in the direction of the Winter Garden, which was easily my favourite thing in the city. I spent two long afternoons there, reading and drawing the flowers. I would like to live there and am not interested in hearing about why it’s not suitable as a home.

I left on an overnight bus, 11 winding hours to the south for Wellington, a city I’d heard lots of very nice things about. New Zealand is somewhat bigger than I thought, hey. Looking absently out the window around midnight, I realized it was my first time seeing the wrong stars, too much light in Auckland. We stopped at a gas station, and I got out with the smokers, laid on my back on a dryish piece of wood, shivered and looked. They really are wrong, you know. I wasn’t sure they’d look obtrusively different but they’re just completely off. I glanced over at the smokers. How do they tolerate it?

Wellington has sea on three sides and is extremely windy. The entire city feels like a giant ship and I like that a lot. I’m trying to get a job and a place to live, and hopefully that will work out and I’ll be here for a good while.

I will certainly not be staying at Nomads Central Wellington, which the rest of this post will be an extended review of. Kendra has a very particular facial expression that she uses to express the thought that you’re being extremely stupid, a combination of offense taken and incredulity, both at the fact that you could even possibly be so stupid. I first walked in to Nomads off the night bus on a Monday morning, and got the key to the bag room from a gal that used that exact same expression to react to my arriving earlier than check-in time as well as my locking the key in the bag room. That second one was my bad though, yeah (side note: this is far from the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in a hostel. Ask me about the time I accidentally did a load of laundry with orange Kool-Aid crystals instead of detergent). As time has gone on, some doubt has arisen in my mind as to whether she actually thinks everyone is stupid or that’s just a neutral expression to her. I might be overly sensitive to it on account of getting it approximately 17,000 times from Kendra, so benefit of the doubt, I think.

Nomads is advertised as offering a free meal every night of your stay at the bar next door, which is true-ish. The “meals” are really just snacks and if I paid anything for them, I mean literally anything 10 cents up, I would be pissed. Everything the surly staff dish out, from chili on rice to bacon fettucine, tastes exactly the same.

Nomads also advertises having a kitchen available to guests. This is akin to advertising Bunbury as having an arena available to NHL teams. I guess you could say that and it wouldn’t, strictly speaking, be an outright lie. Kitchen amenities do not, for instance, include an oven. They do include free pancake batter in the morning, which I was somewhat excited about until my actual first morning here. These pancakes are terrible. They taste like nothing and the syrup they have is, I’m sorry for my Canadian maple syrup snobbery but, godawful. In practice, I could pretty much take or leave the pancakes (Let’s keep score! I’ve gone from excited to indifferent on the subject of the pancakes). There are four four-element stoves in the kitchen, for a total of 16 burners. Of these, four burners are capable of generating enough heat to just barely cook food to a safe temperature. They struggle mightily to do it, so cooking a single pancake takes about twelve minutes (I pretty much don’t even want the pancakes at this point, and the batter takes up precious counter space, so put me in the anti-pancake camp from here on). In most hostels, nobody bothers to make breakfast, or if they do it’s just cereal or whatever. I like to make eggs most mornings, and generally can do so unmolested. At Nomads, the kitchen is swarmed every morning with cheapskates that can’t pass up 13 cents worth of free pancake batter (I am now deeply resentful of the pancakes). This combined with the limited burners and slow cooking leads to what would be an enormous queue of people if the people in this hostel had the common courtesy to queue. Instead, it’s a culinary jungle less forgiving than Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen when ratings are bad. This very morning I watched someone cut the line in front of a patiently waiting middle-aged woman with small children. “Dude,” was the only thing I could think to say, and she was very quick to apologize. “Oh, are you waiting?” she asked the woman, betraying herself by demonstrating that she knew precisely who was actually supposed to be next. On my second morning here, I brought my pan over to my plate to drop off a pancake, and when I turned around to put it back on the burner, a shifty French guy had jacked it. The ensuing standoff ended fairly quickly, and a good thing because I truly don’t know how far I would have gone to get that burner back, but it has led to ongoing tension as it turns out the guy is one of my roommates. The pancakes, then, have gone in my mind from fun hostel bonus to scraps of gristle tossed to a mass of profound inhumanity disguised as backpacking youth. It would be better for this hostel if pancakes had never been invented.

The French guy. My roommates. Last night, I had a few drinks, went to a show, and went to bed around 12:30. It was a fun and reasonable night. I woke up what felt like an hour later when a young gentleman blundered in and collapsed onto his bed, making no effort whatsoever to be quiet. This guy had a nasty case of hiccups, and was apparently pretty frustrated because he tended to groan loudly after each one. After a few minutes, it became clear to me that he wasn’t going to stop. I leaned over the edge of the bed. “Who the [puppies] is that?” he asked, gobsmacked by the idea of there being another person in his 10-bed dorm room. I asked him if he would mind shutting most or all of the way up. He did quiet down a bit and I managed to get back to sleep. I woke up again some unknown amount of time later, when some people walked in and turned the bloody lights on. They, too, seemed surprised to see me, a person trying to sleep in his bed. They switched the light back off and bumbled around in the dark with their phones, apologizing loudly and repeatedly. I heard the unbelievable but unmistakable sound of a guitar being tuned. “Shut,” I suggested, “the [puppies] up.” The guitar was put away and the revellers shuffled out of the room. One I heard mutter, “Seems a bit aggressive,” which I thought was unfair because really I think it was pretty diplomatic given the situation. I fell asleep again after they left and woke up again when some people came in later. I don’t know if they were the same, I can’t tell these people apart. One of them took a lot of convincing to sleep in his own bed. The one he wanted to sleep in and had to be physically repelled from happened to be the one right under mine. I told him to shut up and go away, to which his response was absolutely ideal. He said nothing and went away. I looked at my phone after this. It was 4:00.

Actually, there was one more quote from last night I remember. When people were galumphing around with the light on and most expressed some regret, there was one guy who said, “Whatever. Travelling!” and laughed. This guy has a lot of symbolic importance to me.

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.