This smile means...

'Never mind the giant eel, I see my friend coming!'

Holly joined him shortly thereafter.

How's the weather down there?

It's now officially winter.  Even so, the weather has been quite mild and pleasant.  Today was the first day that I could see my breath when I left for work.  We've all bought new coats, but I've really been warm enough with just a sweatshirt or sweater.  Kiwis tell me that there is generally about a week of really cold weather, but that's about it.

I've easily transitioned to the metric system for volume/weight/distance, but it's a little harder for me to convert temperatures to Celsius--I don't seem to have the same reference values internalised.  So I've started thinking about it this way:

5 degrees = coat weather (and about as cold as it ever gets here)
15 degrees = sweater weather
25 degrees = t-shirt weather
35 degrees = beach weather

With extra peri-peri

Amiri and I had an outing.  We held hands and walked all the way up Queen Street.  Near the library, we stopped to play by some statues.

Then we went to Nando's, the chicken place.  I had a coupon.  We were order #14 and Amiri got to carry the Fourteen Chicken to our table to wait for them to bring us our food.

Nando's serves Portuguese-style chicken:  cooked over an open flame and slathered in peri-peri sauce, orange and peppery.  I got the hot peri-peri, and Amiri got the mild.  He ate SO MUCH CHICKEN.

But we only heard a few vuvuzuelas

So we live above a bar, right? Above ten or twelve bars, to be accurate. (It’s not as shady as it sounds—these are Viaduct Harbour bars, after all, not biker bars on skid row—and instances of shenanigans out on the street below are few and far between.) They are all sports bars. Regardless of how they brand themselves the rest of the year, right now during the World Cup they bring in TVs if they have to, and they are sports bars.

Because the matches are played in South Africa, they’re on during the dead of night here. No matter, say the fans, of course we’ll go to the bar to watch soccer from 1-4 AM. And there are a lot of fans. We have been awakened nearly every night by the jubilation below. (Last night was especially noisy, as New Zealand tied with first-place Italy.) It turns out that we’re in a perfect position to do some informal census-taking regarding the relative densities of nationalities in Auckland, as estimated by the volume of the intermittent roars that accompany every exciting play. The apparent Brazilian and Mexican populations are larger than I anticipated.

So good at holding on

Matariki

Maori New Year comes in early to mid-June, when the constellation of Matariki first starts to become visible on the pre-dawn horizon.  Meaning 'little eyes' or 'God's eyes', Matariki is believed to predict the crops for the year to come.  It's traditionally celebrated for three days after the first sighting, with feasts and celebrations of the people's connection with the land.  There is a month-long festival in Auckland. 

We know Matariki as the Pleiades. 

On safari

We used a day of our copious annual leave to play hooky on Wednesday.  We dropped the kids off at daycare (oh. yeah.  School, I mean school, PRE-SCHOOL) and then we got on a boat for a safari.  The catamaran was staffed by marine biologists, and our fees went toward paying for the education of future marine biologists who are doing their training while crewing the boat.  We got a little safety demonstration and then off we motored.  We went through Waitemata Harbor, north past Rangitoto, and admired the green water and the view of the city.

Then east across the Hauraki Gulf, north of Waiheke Island to within view of the Coromandel, and then north to near Great Barrier Island.  We could see the Little Barrier Island, a bird sanctuary.

The tropical current from the open north Pacific pours into this region.  This means warm blue water.  Which means plankton.  Which means fish.  Which means birds.

And which also means dolphins!  We came into a pod of about 100 of them.  The captain slowed the boat down and they surrounded us.

They would surface every few seconds and seemed to actually enjoy looking up at us and pacing the boat.

Eventually, 10 or 12 of them ended up chasing along behind the boat, playing in the chop.  I was within six feet of wild dolphins!


It got late, and cold (remember, it's late fall here!), and it was time to turn around.  We saw more birds, like the shearwater and the Australasian gannet, and a few smaller pods of dolphin who dashed past us.  And then way off in the distance, at approximately here, we spotted a whale.  He made a big plume of spray every time he took a breath.

What a really incredible day.

Upon arriving home from school

And it was Triple Chocolate, to show you just how generous he was

Amiri was a good boy recently, so he was rewarded at home with a big ice cream cone.  Oh, he loved it so much!

Then Arram turned up and wondered what his big brother was doing.

And Amiri was SUCH a good boy that he willingly shared with him!

Some of my favorite things

Nice coffees.  New Zealanders are serious about their coffees; you can get a really proper coffee at nearly any cafe.

Or enjoying a plate of Kapiti cheeses-- here we have brie, havarti, and bleu, and some purple grapes.  

 

But my favorite favorite thing is going out for pizza with a charming gentleman...

Or enjoying a walk with another gentleman friend.

I have to sound them out just like Amiri

Many towns and landmarks in New Zealand have native names.  They almost sound cartoonish to me at first, when they're pronounced fast.  It's actually rather straightforward to sound them out, though.  Here are the rules:

• Every letter is pronounced
• Exceptions (because Kiwi is a lazy-mouth accent)
• au = prounounced like 'oh'
• ao = pronounced like 'ow'
• ei= pronounced like 'ay'
• wh= pronounced like an 'f' sound
• The accent is usually on the first syllable

And here are some of the towns in our vicinity.  Have fun with them!

• Pukekohe
• Papakura
• Wanganui
• Te Papapa
• Manurewa
• Takanini
• Waitakere
• Remuera
• Manukau
• Whangarei
• Papatoetoe (my personal favorite, it makes me smile when I hear the announcements over the loudspeaker in the train station)

We know it's ridiculous

Now that Arram is a good walker, and also very clever about opening things, he gets up to more and more complex examples of mischief.

Just having a nice bottle of milk, right?  Think again.

No, it's a squeeze bottle of mayonnaise.

He toddles over to the fridge and opens it up, pulls the mayo bottle out of the door, scoots back into the living room, and pretends to drink from it.  (It's closed, and clean, so he's not actually ingesting any.)  Silly little boy.  He could at least close the fridge afterward.

As Amiri would say, "Funny Arram."

Footie jammies

One of the AWESOME reasons to have kids is that you get to dress them in footie pajamas and take pictures of them.

Happy Birthday Liz

We have the day off from work/school today!  It's the Queen's birthday, a public holiday here.  Her actual birthday is in April, but there's always been a winter celebration for a monarch's 'birthday', so I guess there always will be.  I think it's just an excuse to have a day off.

They succeeded in making me feel slightly guilty for liking it

We got the best burgers the other night.  The place was called Murder Burger.  The staff all wore shirts saying 'Meat is Murder'.  And happily serving up big meaty slabs.  Yeah, they were really good.

He just teethed two new molars. You wouldn't know it from this smile.

More speaking Kiwi

• Chokka: As in chock-a-block, meaning full or busy. “I’m tired. My day was chokka!”
• College: A private or upscale high school. “I’m in year ten at Queen’s College.”
• Ta: Bye. or OK.  or Yep.
• You sneeze.  The other person says: "      ."
• Diary: Schedule book or calendar. “OK, I’ll meet you next Tuesday at 3 PM. I’ve written it in my diary so I won’t forget.”
• It suits you: Wow, you look really nice!
• Good on you: Good for you.
• Uni: Where you study after high school. “I’m going to uni at Auckland University.”
• That's all right: You're welcome.
• Are you happy to...: Please do this task for me.
• Aircon: A heatpump with both heating and cooling functions. “It’s a [chilly/hot] morning, shall we turn on the aircon?”
• Aye: I agree—“Aye, let’s go to the store.” Or Do you agree?—“Let’s go to the store, aye?”
• Poor sausage: Pitiable wretch. “The computer just crashed and you lost your document? You poor sausage.”

I like the light in this one

The New Zealand yam

The selection at the farmer's market was kind of sparse this weekend, so I took a thorough look through the produce section at the grocery store.   On the top shelf was a cardboard box filled with these bad boys.  I did a double take, because my first thought was 'OMG tropical grubs'.    There was no label on them to help me out.  A fruit?  Some sort of spice?  Maybe a tuber.  Well, that's what Google is for, I thought, and I put one in my basket.

It rang up on the receipt as 'Yam, $0.38'.  Googling told me that they are New Zealand Yams.  Only called that within NZ, though... the rest of the world would call them oca.  They're a type of potato, one of the thousands of varieties eaten throughout Peru.

I boiled my oca up in a little salted water.  It sloughed off its skin as it cooked (Eek!  it IS a grub!) and also lost its brilliant red color, ending up a golden pink.  Its texture was potato-like, but slightly sweeter.  Maybe like a rutabaga, except pleasant.  Its ends, which were a little more red than the rest of it, had a tangy flavor.

That Mom trick of licking your finger and then wiping a smudge off your child’s face? Yeah. I’ve done that too.

You learn a new vocabulary when you become a parent.  Suddenly you live in a world where you use odd words like ‘onesie’ and ‘bouncer’, and can describe your kid’s poop with ten different adjectives and a straight face. 

Parenting a toddler also requires some linguistic modification.  Instead of new words, though, this new phase involves sentence construction through the apposition of words that I never thought I’d use together.

·         Is there pee on that towel?

·         Don’t be scared; flies are happy!

·         Underwear goes on first.

·         Bath water isn’t for drinking.

·         Take that bread off your foot.

(say it fast.)

So at every grocery store and butcher shop here, you've got your...

Mince beef

Mince chicken

Mince lamb

And now, new from Arnott's...

Couch time!

A cuddly morning in Mom and Dad's bed

The flash on the camera made them close their eyes.  They were very playful and huggy.

Haka

Writing about the All Blacks made me think of another bit of New Zealand trivia for you.

Maori have a style of dance called Haka.  It's performed by groups of men, women, or children, and can be done for fun, celebration, or welcome.  The dances involve lots of posturing with knees and elbows akimbo, rhythmic chanting and slapping of chests/thighs, and facial contortions like showing the whites of one's eyes and sticking out the tongue.  A vaguely creepy version of a hula dance.

There is also a war haka.  Fur-clad, be-speared, facially-tattooed warriors performed this prior to going into battle, preferably with their opponents worriedly watching from a distance.  The odd postures and unsettling facial expressions are exaggerated relative to a non-violent haka.  Lyrics are aggressive and delivered loudly in an antagonistic style.  The idea is to suggest to the other guys that they might wanna re-think their plans, because they're dealing with some guys who are not only awfully big, but also clearly crazy and will not be fooling around with this business of fighting.

Fittingly for their game strategy of 'winning isn't enough, we want the opponents to have to be carried off the field,' the All Blacks perform a haka prior to every rugby match.  So the French team or whoever stand there on the field with nothing to do but watch while these oddball New Zealanders go off their meds in front of them.  I bet a '1-2-3-GO TEAM' doesn't quite fire you up the same way after seeing that. 

Arram's accomplishment!

It was coming down sideways

Twenty minutes before the end of my workday, the skies opened up and it poured buckets.  Curses!  It's going to be a long walk to the train station.  But it's OK, I reassured myself, I have an umbrella and a jacket in my backpack--I always carry them.

So as I packed up for the evening, changing my shoes to sneakers a la Mr. Rogers, I reached for my jacket.  Whoops, not there.  No matter, my umbrella is in here, just a little lower, just.. need.. to... find it... what the?  No umbrella either.  Yeah.  Not a good day to have been absent-minded in the morning.

It really WAS a long walk to the train station.  Oh well.  It was refreshing, yeah, that's it.  And I haven't been made of sugar for quite some time, so I didn't melt.

And on the way home, I watched a really bright double rainbow.

Sports

If you know me, you know that I don't exactly follow professional sports.  So this blog post represents absolutely everything I know about NZ sports.  And some of it may be wrong, because I am unable to summon the motivation to fact-check.  Here we go.

Soccer is called soccer here.  You can enroll kids as young as 18 months in soccer classes.

Nobody plays basketball.  If you must toss a ball in the air, you play netball.  Netball hoops have no backboards, and there are some different rules about traveling or dribbling or something.  

Rugby is THE sport.  It is a rough game played without helmets or other safety equipment, and as a result, NZ has a higher proportion of sports-related brain injuries than most other countries.  It involves a chunky oblong white ball that must be moved to either end of a field by large, fast men trying to murder each other.  THE team in NZ is the All Blacks.   They were originally called 'The Originals' (how original).  But then a complimentary article on the sports page said that every member of the team was equivalently murderous as the depraved animals playing the kill position:  they were 'all backs'.  An unfortunate typo later, the name stuck.

Cowboys!

Check out our little cow pokes!

Nothing too exciting here, but couldn't you just hug them.

The meat pie!

I can't believe I've done all those food posts without including the meat pie!  Here's a fine example.  They're always this shape, always this nice-little-solid-handful size.  Flaky crust, and fillings all soft suspended inside a gooey gravy.  This one is steak and cheese. 

Take that, kiwano.

New pajamas!

Made of 'wincey cotton', whatever that means.  Fluffy fabric, I guess?

Amiri got polar bears and snowflakes.  Arram got dinosaurs.  They were happy and hugged.  They will be nice and warm at night.

Maybe he needs a little work on his pronunciation, but he's got the right idea.

Happy Mother's Day to me!

The nice thing about having kids in school is the precious bits of junk that they make for me during arts and crafts time.  Today, the Friday before Mother's Day, they went all out.

They both cooked for me!  Amiri helped make a batch of cookies from scratch, and then he spread frosting to make them into sandwich cookies for me.   Arram's class made scones, and I saw a photo of him concentrating really hard while dumping the cup of sugar into the big bowl.  Then the treats were wrapped up nicely and proudly presented at pick-up time.

Amiri also made me an awesome card.  Unfortunately, the picture of his face fell off.  Arram found it on the floor.  As is his wont to do with his brother's art projects, he tried to eat it and I had to fish it out of his mouth.

Now THAT'S tired

We had a very big day of exercise outside.  Amiri needed to use the potty upon arriving home.  But he was so worn out...

That's right, he's asleep on the toilet.

'But what of fashion,' they asked...

Remember the rat tail, also known as the Timid Mullet? 

There are a shocking number of rat tails in New Zealand.  They tend to occur in young men of Pacific Island origin, who tend to co-localise with low socioeconomic status areas.  The rat tail is clearly one of those cross-cultural universalities, if it can link residents of the South Pacific and Tennessee.

A brush with fame

I picked up the boys from daycare as usual this afternoon.  As we left, I pressed the button to open the automatic door.  Amiri asked to be lifted up to push the button, but I told him no, that the button was only for grownups.  'When will I be a grownup?' he asked.

As we left the building I explained to him.  'Grownups are over 18 years old.  So when you turn 18, you will be a grownup.  Now you're three.  So you have 15 years to go.'

A man who was also leaving daycare overheard us.  He stopped, looked at us pointedly, and asked, 'Is your son's name Amiri?'

I was a bit startled because I didn't recognise him as one of the other parents, but said yes, and asked how he knew.  He told me that his wife works in the front office at the daycare, and Amiri is famous there.  Everyone knows Amiri's name because he's unusually polite, and helpful, and smart.  He said that he and his wife had been talking about Amiri just the other day at home, after our little boy had been paraded around the office by his teacher who wanted to show him off.  Of course, he thoroughly charmed the man's wife and they'd theorized that Amiri's parents must talk to him like a little adult in order to make such a precocious little fellow.  And when he overheard my matter-of-fact explanation, and saw a 3-year old boy with curls, he put two and two together.

I told him he'd just made my day.  My mama's heart was bursting with pride!

A fine assortment of cutes

Amiri was having so much fun playing that he didn't want to stop for his nap.  Then nature intervened, and he slumped right where he was.

And then here's our little mischief-maker, after his latest accomplishment.