Just Around the Block...and Over the Tasman Sea

I've moved to a new flat, just around the corner from the daffodil yellow cottage that I arrived at on my first day in Christchurch. The morning that I moved, I drove my old housemates--a couple from Austin, TX who were leaving NZ after 8 months abroad--to the airport. My first two and a half months in Christchurch were well spent in this home filled with other travellers from around the world, but I was ready to plant myself in a flat with Kiwis, without the comings and goings of expats and exchange students. After packing up my belongings without attention to organization, my friend Rebecca from Auckland helped me load my red Subaru and followed me on my bike to my new home.

Without sheets or a duvet, I once again enclosed myself in my sleeping bag. For a change, sadly though, I was not on a mountain, in a tent, or below a sky plump with stars. I'm in my new bed at 337 Armagh, across the hall from my new Kiwi flatmates: Sarah, Chris, and Basil the cat. As I learned from my first night at home, they leave the house very early, always before 7am to get to work: Sarah works as a barrista at Vanilla Bean Cafe and Chris is an electrician at the airport. But this morning I beat them as I was out the door by 3:50am to hop on a shuttle to the airport to begin my journey to Sydney, Australia and the Somatechnics conference on bodies, technologies, and society (http://www.somatechnics.org/conference).

It was my first time moving through Christchurch in the thick cloak of darkness of a sleepy weeknight. The streets were clear of cars, cyclists, pedestrians, and even sex workers. Only airport-bound travellers with droopy eyes and overstuffed baggage stood in the easy glow of streetlamps. After paying my departure fee, I headed for gate 32, which was quite empty until at least 40 Korean tourists excitedly and happily filed in. I was glad for their enthusiasm and bubbling energy at such a delicate hour. They made up for the rest of us who were quiet, sleepy, reserved, and slumped in our chairs awaiting our boarding call.

I shut my eyes for taxi, fell asleep for take-off, and dreamt as we cruised over the Tasman Sea. I seemed to wake up in line at Australian immigration and standing in the "Others" line: Czech, German, British, Middle Eastern, East Asian, South Asian, frat boys, sorority sisters, veiled mothers, Irish expats, and me. We moved slowly as the parade of aircraft personell--pilots and flight attendants--passed us by. Against the wrinkled and shlumpy masses, these professional flyers gleamed in crisp, color-coordinated perfection.

Attempting to find my shuttle to the backpackers, I hear my name called out. I whip around towards this suspicious sound and see a man with gray hair and glasses who's face is strangely familiar and misplaced. Another look behind him reveals Jenny, my long lost mate from Barnard, whose arrival in Sydney wasn't expected for another few weeks. The man is her father, Tom, tagging along and offering help as she settles into her life down under. I'm still in shock and unsure if the encounter was real. Perhaps I was still in a sleep-deprived daze after traversing the Tasman. Anyhow, I should be meeting up with my Australian mirage of a friend later in the weekend.

Later, frazzled (and frizzy: it's terribly muggy here). I walk into the first Somatechnics keynote address by Michele Goodwin from DePaul University. I catch enough of the last half of her talk "Black Markets: Supply and Demand of Body Parts" to know that I'm in the right place among academic friends. Skipping out on one of the afternoon sessions, I find a cheap internet cafe down the street. After checking and sending some emails, I found myself drawn to the NY Times website and reading about the victims of this week's massacre. Their photo's--displayed across the page in yearbook format--are disturbing, touching, uncanny, and alluring all at once. I read a brief description of each portrait and life. Perhaps each click of the mouse, scrolling down the page helps to reclaim these lost lives through this practice of cyber-eulogizing. Just hours ago, 'The Victims' were a mournfully opaque black box, without faces, names, hobbies, or origins. Through the magic of the internet, they've been humanized, their ghosts have been conjured up, and their lives have been invoked through school photos and shrapnels of biographies from Myspace and Facebook pages.

Most were students, some faculty, and a fair amount were international. Peru, Romania, Egypt, Indonesia, India, and other nations have lost bright and ambitious individuals to one man's struggle with rage and a nation's struggle with gun control. They were an aspiring airforce pilot, a holocaust survivor, musicians, dancers, a valedictorian, a saluditorian, sons, daughters, fathers, partners, athletes, christians, muslims, jews, scientists, and engineers. Dying at the hands of a weapon technology and resurrected by the identity-forming technology of the internet, so that I, in Sydney, surrounded by Chinese gamers, can learn, share, and attempt to make sense of my nation's grave loss. Oh what a glorious and tragic somatechnical world.

Cheers,

D

Passover NZ

The Jewish scene in Christchurch is fairly unsubstantial. According to my sources, there are approximately 150 Jews in the entire region of Canterbury (pop. ~ 530,000), which includes only 3 observant families. So, the Canterbury Hebrew Congregation--which is located in a beautiful, new, stone building just north of city centre--can only support traditional Saturday morning services and progressive Friday evening services every other week. Most of the congregants are secular with young families and are recent arrivals to New Zealand. One Friday evening service that I attended drew about 20 people, at least 5 of whom were travelers or non-members.

Friday night services are mostly in English and are led by a British psychologist who has lived most of her recent life in the American Southwest, American Northwest, and France with her husband, a San Francisco Bay area native and sociologist who is currently on Faculty at Lincoln University in Christchurch. At services, I also met Eyal, an Israeli who arrived in New Zealand 7 years ago to go to university in Wellington, and decided to stay. Now, he is a dual citizen of New Zealand and Israel and is working towards a degree in audiology at Canterbury. I also spoke with others: Australians on holiday, Egyptians, Kiwis, Americans, French, secular, converts, chabadniks, and more Israelis. The warmth of this patchwork community is reflected in the absence of a defining movement or denomination, and is strengthened in its lacking of a Rabbi.

The Passover seder that I attended was led by an older British man on holiday with his wife. He encouraged the participation of all the children (who made up at least a third of group), and added his own memories and interpretations of certain songs and rituals. Just as my family does, we went around all of the tables, taking turns reading a paragraph or two of the Hagaddah. Some in English, some in Hebrew. Some read like my mother and grandmother: slow and deliberate, adding punctuation and accents as if telling a bedtime story. Others rushed hastily through with hunger on their lips. It was amusing to listen to the many international voices, traditions, and tunes attempting to blend. Ultimately, in an attempt to unite, our discordant and scattered phrasings, tunes, and harmonies disrupted one another and created a sonic diffraction pattern echoing our motley crew.

We ate a delicious three course meal complete with haroset and maror, all prepared by a restaurateur/chef in the community. I chatted with the psychologist, a couple of Kiwi university students, a French girl studying at yeshiva in Sydney here on holiday. (As I will be in Sydney this coming weekend for a conference, I may spend a meal with her and her friends.) The evening ended rather informally as a young rabbinical student from Australia led the grace after meals in a rich tenor vibrato.

Soon after, I hopped on my bike, rode home, and thought about the differences between this community and the U.S. In contrast to the North Island and New York, the Canterbury community has no divisions and no need for denominations. We were all just Jews of various colors, observances, and nationalities who were happy to have found a small gathering of other Jews with whom to spend the holiday. Abroad, especially in places like New Zealand, certain markers of religiosity--a skirt, a kippah, a black hat, pants, a beard, shomer shabbat, an accent, yiddish, kashrut--are no longer signs of difference, exclusion, or inclusion, they're merely personal tokens of the diversity of our communities, beliefs, and convictions.

Autumn approaches down under. The leaves are changing and the air is crisper. I feel like Thanksgiving should come soon, but in an odd turn of events, Easter and Passover have just past and we're heading straight for the chill of May and June.

Cheers,

D

Canterbury Day Hikes

The last few weeks of my life have been occupied by midterm essays and reading, punctuated by weekends passed at farmers' and flea markets, and local day hikes. On my car's first trip outside of the greater Christchurch region, Emily, Tiffany, and I joined a group of students with the Canterbury tramping club (CUTC) to climb Little Mt. Peel in the Peel Forest. Listed as an "easy" 4-6 hour day hike, this mini mountain was hardly an effortless stroll through the bush. It turns out that the CUTC rates walks based on time, not elevation or gradient.

The long, steep, and unrelenting slog up the well worn path was made all the more painful by a mixed blessing of blue skies, unmoving air, and an unseasonably strong autumn sun. Falling into rank within the moderate pace pack, through sweat-stung and squinting eyes I watched the faster climbers disappear into the bush leaving a wake of swinging ferns, spaniards, and mountain grasses.

After 2-3 hours of climbing and taking photos, we joined the nimbler climbers and ate lunch sitting at the base of a wooden tower marking the summit. After food, water, and rest, half of us--a mixture of the speedy and moderates--decided to descend the mountain via an alternate, steeper, and faster route. After about an hour of painful, knee-pounding descent, we lost the track and found ourselves enveloped in darker, damper, and thicker bush. Attempting to follow the least severe contours of the ridge, our minor slips became tumbles, falls, and acrobatic slides down eroded and humus-littered slopes. Making light of our wayward exploration of the bush and our frequent missteps and fumbles, we fell in style. My falls were quite comical and rated highly on our collective scales--standards were based on distance, amount of contortion, use of the environment, and airtime.

With the help of some more experienced trampers, including Alex, whose parents work for the Department of Conservation and has himself worked as a guide, we found our way down the ridge. Once we relocated the track, order was restored and the unruliness of the bush--and ultimately our walk--resolved into the clear-cut footpath of a well marked trail. Because of our detour, we reached the bottom after the other group, but we had more of an adventure and found comradery in our foibles.

My second day hike trip of this month was around Godley Head above Taylor's Mistake, a favorite surf beach south of Christchurch. The trail wound around the peninsula towards the ocean, tucking back into the bay overlooking Lyttleton, a commercial port town. Imagining that the area was larger, we overshot our turn off to return to the trail head and ended up on the Anaconda mountain bike path headed north to Sumner Beach. After talking to a couple of mountain bikers, we realized our mistake, relocated the walking trail and returned to the Taylor's Mistake carpark. Again, our detour wasn't at a loss--a one hour walk became a 5 hour hike through the Port Hills, where we wandered among the endless sheep, watched glider hobbyists launch their aircrafts, and passed by old military outposts and sniper shelters.

Since I'm playing catchup, there'll be more soon on my epic trip to Fiordland National Park in the southwest and our subsequent road trip up the West Coast.







Cheers,

D