Sad

I’m in a bit of a funk.  It started Saturday night.  I was at Maureen’s house watching a movie.  I left her house and walked home.  What a gorgeous night!  The mountains behind my house stood out strongly and the stars were beginning to shine out.  I just started crying.  I didn’t really know why.  I figured I was just tired.  A lot of times I’ll start crying for no reason or for a stupid reason.  All I need to do is go to sleep to feel better.

But then on Sunday morning I still felt really down and I spent a lot of time crying.  I just kept saying to myself, “But I’m happy!  I’m so happy here!  I’m happy!”  I couldn’t figure it out.  Finally it dawned on me that it might be culture shock or homesickness.  When I went to my orientation in Auckland they said that sometimes if you just start to feel sad and don’t know why, then it’s probably culture shock.

Culture shock is a weird thing for me to be feeling though.  I mean the culture in New Zealand is different, but not that different!  Plus I feel really at home here.  I looked culture shock up online and the article said that the first three months can be a honeymoon period.  After that sometimes you feel different.  I feel sad, lazy, and I don’t want to do simple tasks like washing the dishes.  These are apparently symptoms of the second phase of culture shock.  

The thing is I don’t feel shocked.  Maybe it’s a misnomer.  Shock doesn’t seem to describe what I feel.  I just feel tired and sad.  It probably didn’t help that my roommate Josh left this morning.  Lainey, my new roommate also ended up leaving because of a family emergency.  Maureen left this morning for a couple days too.  So I feel totally abandoned.  I think Josh leaving is the hardest.  Maureen will come back and I hadn’t bonded that much with Lainey.  Josh was here to welcome me when I came to Fox.  He was kind and patient with me when I tried to learn the ins and outs of the dinning room and kitchen.  He was very sympathetic.  

It’s hard to have friends leave me behind.  I remember feeling this way when Rachel and Richard left when we lived together in Colorado.  I got up early in the morning and our roommate Lydia made us pancakes for breakfast.  Then Rachel and Richard left and the apartment felt empty without them.  They’d brought a lot of fun and laughter and now there was quietness.  

It was the same this morning.  I got up early to see Josh and Lainey off even though I could have slept in for the first time in a long time.  I try not to show my sadness anymore when people leave me.  I try just to be happy for them.  They left within ten minutes of each other and the house was silent.  

Anyway, I’m sad. I don’t think I’ve ever felt like this before.  It’s a weird, overwhelming feeling.  It just sits on me.  It’s like it has settled in like a bad cold.  I don’t know what to do about it.  I’m hoping this feeling will just pass.

Hokitika Day Two

January 27, 2010

So I woke up bright and early in Hokitika and after a nice shower I headed to the hotel restaurant for breakfast.  The restaurant was little more than a diner, but they had exactly what I wanted: pancakes.  You may not remember, but back on my birthday I wanted pancakes for breakfast and the only place in town with pancakes was all out.  So my new goal became to get pancakes after I reached my goal of running for 35 minutes straight. By the time I made it to Hokitika I’d surpassed that goal and I made it to 39 minutes.  But I still hadn’t taken myself out for pancakes.

So I had my pancakes finally!  Then I went to the real grocery store.  When I packed for this short trip I left a little room to bring groceries back with me to Fox Glacier.  My idea was to go through the produce section and buy every kind of vegetable and fruit that I like.  I went crazy!  I bought nectarines, apricots, kiwis, broccoli, cauliflower, eggplant, and avocado.  I would have bought blueberries but I didn’t think they’d last the trip back to Fox Glacier.  

When I checked out of my hotel I left my luggage with them to pick up later.  The lady at the desk suggested I go to the free greenstone talk at one of the Jade shops in town.  Jade is found in this region and they’ve really turned it into a tourist activity.  I personally don’t think Jade is that pretty, but I learned a lot about during the talk.  I also stopped in the used bookstore on the way and traded in some books for a new book. 

At noon I met Maureen at the bus stop.  She had also planned a trip to Hokitika and our paths crossed for a couple of hours.  We got coffee together.  I ordered an iced coffee.  Apparently an iced coffee here isn’t just hot coffee poured over ice.  My coffee came with whip cream and a scoop of ice cream in it!

Maureen and I walked on the beach and took pictures of each other next to the driftwood sculptures.  They were having a special festival on the beach of driftwood sculptures.  The sculptures were very creative!  The running, screaming man was the best.  It looked like he was yelling at someone across the ocean!  It was great to share this experience with Maureen.

We also just sat on a piece of driftwood and watched the ocean waves roll in.  I wanted to soak it all up and enjoy it.  I knew that in a few hours I was going back to Fox Glacier.  I wasn’t ready to go.  I wanted to just keep watching the ocean.

Eventually Maureen and I said our goodbyes and I caught the bus back home.  Once I was on the bus I was a lot more excited to be going home.  It’s nice to have a place I can call home here in a foreign country.  I was surrounded by tourists on the bus and I felt like a local!  Sometime it’s nice to go to a place that you’ve never been to before and sometimes it’s nice to go to a place where everything is familiar.

Hokitika Day One

January 25, 2011

I left Fox Glacier.  Not for good, not yet anyway, just for a night.  One glorious night!  My boss gave me two days off in a row and I decided it was about time that I got out of Dodge.  I booked a night at a hotel in Hokitika.  Hokitika is a West Coast town only a few hours north of Fox Glacier.

My boss suggested that I email some hotels in Hokitika and ask if they have an industry rate.  One of the hotels had a room for $70.  Chris, my boss, got me a free ride to and from Hokitika on the Intercity Bus Line.  Everything was in order.

The top of my to-do list in Hokitika was going to a real grocery store.  I also wanted to sit on the beach and watch TV in my hotel room.  I wanted to eat out and enjoy all the wonderful things a city has to offer.  Hokitika has about 3,000 people.  So it’s not really a city, but it felt like one.

Right away when I got off the bus I was struck by the number of cars.  I had to remember how to look carefully both ways before crossing the street!  I headed to my hotel hoping they would let me check in early.  I knew the hotel had two wings.  One wing is older and has more of standard rooms.  The other wing has ocean views.  I was really hoping I’d get upgraded to an ocean room.  And I did!  

It was amazing.  I paid $70NZD for an OCEAN VIEW ROOM!  I also got to check in early.  After checking in, I walked around town to get the feel of it.  I went to the used bookstore and a cafe for a lemonade.  I walked around on the beach, but it was really hot.  I decided what I really wanted to do was go to the grocery store, get junk food, and hang out in my sweet room.

I’m finding that making decisions is difficult for me.  I wanted to go and eat junk food from the grocery store, but I felt guilty about missing out on such a beautiful day and a beautiful place.  Finally I decided to just do what I wanted to do.  It was stupid to do something I wasn’t enjoying.  

So I spent the afternoon just watching bad TV and eating potato chips and my favorite New Zealand candy, Jet Planes.  I did eat some blueberries so it wasn’t all bad.  I woke up later from a nap craving an ice cream cone.  Unfortunately it was after 5 PM.  After 5 PM almost all stores close.  So I ended up back at the grocery store buying the next best thing, an ice cream bar.

I went back to the beach and enjoyed my ice cream.  Then I went wild and took off my socks and shoes and walked up and down the beach.  It felt so good to let my toes sink into the soft, gushy sand, or slap on the hard, dark sand.  There were tons of people around.  The night was lovely and pleasant.  It wasn’t as hot as it had been in the afternoon and I enjoyed the low sunlight. 

After my beach walk I went back to my sweet hotel room and enjoyed more junk food and bad TV.  I fell asleep to the sound of the waves hitting the sandy beach!

The Soundtrack of my Life

The other day I was cleaning the bathroom in one of the hotel rooms and we’d turned on the radio in the room to listen to some music while we worked.  There is one radio station in Fox and I can only describe it as kind of like a Bob radio station.  They play weird stuff.  As I was scrubbing the tiles a Katy Perry song played on the radio.  It came to me in a flash: this part of my life will always be characterized by Katy Perry music.  

Do you experience that too?  A song comes on the radio and it takes you immediately back?  I’m not a very musical person.  I don’t remember most band names or song names or which song is by which artist.  I remember my life through songs though.  Certain songs will always bring back memories.  Any Jack Johnson song, and I mean ANY Jack Johnson song, will bring me back to my freshman year of college.  My roommate Tanya always played Jack Johnson’s CD while we studied in our room.  

Any punk rock song that was popular on the radio when I was in middle school or high school will make me think of my sister and her car.  We used to listen to a lot of music in her car.  When she got her license she would take me to movies and on the way there and back we’d listen to the music she liked.  For a while we only listened to Santa Monica by Everclear.  She had gotten a CD from Costco that had that song on it and we didn’t like any of the other songs on the CD so we just listened to Santa Monica on repeat.  It’s still one of my favorite songs.

I’m constantly reminded of these times here in New Zealand because our one radio station plays a lot of Jack Johnson and a lot of old punk rock music.  (Although I’ve never heard Santa Monica yet, but I’d love to!)  They also play a lot of Katy Perry music.  I can’t say Katy Perry is my favorite artist.  But they play her stuff so much that I know from now on whenever I hear Teenage Dream, California Gurls, or Firework I will remember Fox Glacier.  (Just as I was writing this I realized one of the songs I thought was by Katy Perry is really by Christina Perri.  How confusing is that?  See I told you I wasn’t good with songs and artists!)

Firework is probably her most uplifting and edifying song.  It encourages you to be your best.  Don’t let the world get you down.  This is encouraging when one is cleaning a bathroom floor!  If you haven’t heard this song you should at least look up the lyrics.  I’m sure they will uplift you too.  Not only has this song encouraged me but it has given me a memory that I will hold onto forever.  Even if that memory is of me cleaning a bathroom!

Teleportation

January 16, 2010

I’ve just been sitting at a table on the front porch of a coffee shop on the main road of Fox Glacier sipping a coffee.  It’s been a very Glacier, WA-like experience.  Today it’s raining, but it’s very warm.  Close.  I watched the little bit of traffic drive by and the few tourists, who have stopped in town, running through the rain.  I saw a little baby walking out in the rain followed by her grandfather.  She fell down and he picked her up.  It made me think of Samuel.  Although he is probably now a lot bigger than that little baby.  

I wish I could transport my friends and family here to New Zealand even if it is just to have a cup of coffee with me on the front porch of Cafe Neve.  They could have a little cup of coffee and laugh with me and then they could go home to their normal lives.  Or I could transport home just for a little visit, maybe to play with Samuel or go out to dinner with friends.  Then I could come back home to Fox Glacier and my job and friends and life here.

The Little Things

There are a lot of little things about life in Fox Glacier that I haven’t written about.  For instance we never lock our front door except when we go to sleep at night.  In fact during the day we routinely leave it open.  Anyone could walk in.  At first this was so crazy weird to me.  I’d never lived anywhere where you wouldn’t lock your door.  Now this is normal to me.  In fact while I have a key to the house I never need to use it.  Which is actually fortunate because on the few instances I’ve tried to use the key it wouldn’t open the door!

I don’t have a car in New Zealand, but here in Fox Glacier you don’t really need one.  I can walk or ride the old mountain bike just about anywhere.  I don’t use a purse or a wallet anymore.  There’s no need.  I just stuff my EFTPOS card (it’s like the original debit card) or some cash into my pocket and I set off for town.  

When I was younger I always wanted to live in a place where I could walk to the grocery store.  Growing up the nearest grocery store was a ten minute drive away.  Now I know that really isn’t very far, but imagine walking that.  That would probably take me a couple hours there and back.  Here in Fox I can be to the general store in about three minutes.  The main problem with the general store though is that it is expensive.  In fact my roommate Jessica calls it the evil store.  Just about all of my friends now refer to it as that!  “Hey, I’m running down to the evil store real quick wanna come?”

These are just a few of the simple little differences about life here that I’ve come to accept as completely normal.  There’s also the laundry.  When it isn’t raining we hang our laundry out to dry on one of those old fashioned laundry lines.  It’s the kind with a central pole and arms stretching out of it.  Between the arms are lines for hanging your clothes on and below the main pole is an old bucket filled with clothes pins.  At home in the States I never used the clothes pins in the kitchen drawer to hang up my clothes!  Now I do it all the time!

Tomorrow marks two months in New Zealand.  Time has flown.  I still have many months ahead of me.  I want to make it work.  I want to be able to stay for a while.  My fear is that after this job ends I won’t find another one and I’ll run out of money and have to come home.  Which would be fine, I guess.  But I want to make it!  I want to stay!  I want to experience more little things like this that are so different from home and yet eventually become normal.  I want to stay. . . 

Big Two

January 6, 2010

“Even in some small place we can learn some principle.”

Jessica just said this to me after playing cards together all night.  She is my roommate/co-worker from Taiwan.  Her native language is Mandarin and she came to New Zealand primarily to learn English.  

Tonight she learned the word “opponent” and she did very well incorporating it into her vocabulary immediately.  

“You are my best teacher in New Zealand,” she said to me between plays.  But even while I help her learn English and help her practice, she teaches me too.  

Jessica is only a couple years older than me, but she is very wise.  We’ve been playing a game called Big Two for weeks now and I’m still not very good at it.  Usually she wins or Josh wins.  If I win even one game it’s a big deal.  Tonight she was trying to explain the finer points of strategy to me.  I’ve never been good at strategy in any game.  When I missed the chance to play a good card she gave me a good talking to about it.

She said, “Why didn’t you play this card here?” motioning to an earlier play and my card that would have beat her.  

“I didn’t want to play it in case I needed it later,” I said.

“But you should play it now when you have the chance.  It won’t do you any good later at the end with all the cards in your hand!” she exclaimed.  

“But sometimes I do take the chance and play the card and then later I wish I hadn’t and that I still had it!  I still end up losing,” I whined, resting my head on the table in frustration.

“You play the card and then you go from there!  You take the risk and then figure it out later!  You fall down, you get back up again.  You make the mistake and you learn from it!”

The whole time she was giving me this speech I couldn’t help but think beyond the card game.  I began to think more about life.  “You take the risk and then you go from there.”   I was hearing her but my mind was not on the game.  Even in life you take the risk and go from there.  I’m very good at taking risks from time to time, but like with this card game I think, “what if I hadn’t taken this risk, then I would be there instead of here.”  I often second guess and regret the risks I take.  Instead of learning from it and moving on, I get upset because I feel like I haven’t won.

Sometimes I don’t even get far enough to take the risk and I hold onto my good cards that would win me the game.  I just hold onto those precious cards and believe I’ll be able to use them later.  But what is the point of having a winning card if I never use it to win?  Then I get to the end of the game and I’m still holding onto this card, but it’s meaningless now.  The game is over. Lost.  The card has no value anymore.  Wow, Jessica has a great point.  I don’t want to get to the end of life holding onto my winning cards.  I need to play them while I have the chance even if it means taking a risk and feeling like a loser along the way.  Better to take the risk now and learn from it than never take the risk at all.

We shuffled the cards and dealt them again.  It was my turn first.  “Okay, Jessica, I’m going to be daring,” I said as I pulled out a great play that I normally wouldn’t play early in the game.

“Daring?  What’s daring mean?”

“Daring.  Just like we talked about: taking a risk.”

“Oh like dangerous?”

“Yeah kind of.”

“Oh, okay, daring.”

And we kept playing our cards.  If I can’t start taking risks in a game, when will I start taking risks?  Like Jessica said, “Even in some small place we can learn some principle.”

Oreos

January 3, 2010

I did it.  I opened the other box of Oreos.  I was tempted by a book which mentioned them.  Not only mentioned them, but the author went into great detail about how he and his brother would devour a whole bag of them when their dad would try to hide them in his office.  

My mind raced when I bit into the first chocolate cookie filled with creamy Oreo goodness.  The taste of a normal Oreo (not a double-stuf one like the first box had been) immediately brought back memories at Lake Chelan.  I don’t really remember eating Oreos when visiting Lake Chelan, which we did every summer as a kid.  I remember Koala juice, mac and cheese, licorice, and Fun Dips.  I don’t remember eating Oreos, but my tongue does!  We must have had them!

When my mom asked me what I’d like sent to me here in New Zealand I said Oreos.  We almost never had Oreos growing up.  I remember the one time I convinced my mom to buy some at Costco I ate them so fast that my mom said she’d never buy them again.  And really I can’t remember her ever buying them again!

Oreos are only an indulgence I allow myself from time to time.  Mostly because if I sit down to a box of Oreos they will be gone in a very short period of time.  So short that I’m too embarrassed to mention the exact time it takes.  

I wanted Oreos because they don’t sell them here in New Zealand.  At least I haven’t seen them in the stores.  Josh says that they sell them in small packs of six.  But even these I haven’t seen.  

New Zealand does have some great cookies, but there is nothing in the world like an Oreo.  My mom sent me two boxes.  The first box was the double-stuf kind.  These are my favorite and ever since I began my adulthood these are the kind I buy.  The second box was a regular Oreo.  I was surprised, but dug in anyway.  I was more surprised when I immediately thought about Lake Chelan.

I think I remember most summers at Lake Chelan in one whole memory.  None of the summers there were very different from each other.  We pretty much always did the same thing every year: pitched our tent in the same place, went with the same people every year, and had a set schedule for every day of the week.  

We all drove up on Sundays after church, pitched our tent and basically set up camp.  Every morning we woke up in hot tents (well, except for the year it rained all week) and took our floating mattresses down to the beach.  Along the way we’d pick up snacks at the snack shack.  We’d spend all day at the lake.  Then in late afternoon we might head back to the campsite to munch on some peaches or apricots that we picked up on our drive out.  Then I often took a nap covered in several sleeping bags in the hot sun.  Even now the thought of how warm and perfectly happy I was just makes me want to repeat every nap I ever had there!

Each night of the week had a special significance.  One night was the parents’ date night.  All the parents would go out to eat and the older kids would cook for us and look after the younger kids.  I remember my sister whipping up mac and cheese in my cousins’ motor home.

One night we all went to the Alpenhorn for greasy burgers, cold ice cream and a round of miniature golf.  We would go to the special movie nights put on by the state park.  These were not the big summer blockbusters, but a simple presentation on nature and that sort of thing.  On another night we had a huge fire and everyone would toast marshmallows.  We’d go into town with our cousins and get pizza on another night of the week.

Lake Chelan was such a wonderful place because it was the same every year and there was such tradition and repetition.  Tradition and repetition are important to kids.  It makes us feel safe.  It made me feel like life would always be like this.  Eventually things did change though.  The state park didn’t want big groups booking out the campground for a week and we had to move to a different state park.  Our family went to the new park but nothing was the same again, and eventually we just stopped going altogether.

Except now, when I bite into an Oreo cookie, my mind reminds me of all these memories and I can go back and relive them with every bite.  Even though I am so far away from home, Lake Chelan, and my childhood, I can remember. I can think over those times and enjoy them again.  I may never get them back, but now I know if I ever want to remember I can just buy a package of Oreos.  But I’ll try not to make a habit of it!  Or who knows how many packages I'll eat!

Day One

January 1, 2010

Isn’t it funny how the things you dread the most sometimes turn out to be the best parts of your day?

This morning was my first full day in housekeeping.  I was dreading it a bit because the last few times I’ve just helped in housekeeping I’ve felt incompetent.  And really who can’t make a bed?  (Me.)  But it was just Jess and me.  She was so patient with me that by the end of the day I felt like I had actually learned how to make a bed well.  I’m starting to get this whole housekeeping thing down.  This makes me feel really good!

The second thing I was dreading today was the wine hosting in the evening.  Actually, I was rejoicing because Chris is finally back from vacation and he can do the hosting now.  The wine hosting is just someone from the hotel giving a glass of wine to each guest who shows up in the lounge at 6 o’clock.  The point is to give the hotel more of a cozy oh-this-hotel-really-cares-about-me feel.  What I think the real point is is to get people from the wine hosting into the restaurant!  But that of course doesn’t always work.  

So I was saying to Maureen at lunchtime how glad I was that I didn’t have to do the hosting tonight because Chris is back.  Then I got to work and Chris said he wasn’t coming back for the hosting because he had friends in town.  I was deflated.

But then when I set up for the hosting people actually showed up and they were the interesting people (as opposed to the annoying or snobby people)!  All my guests were from the States.  Two were a couple from Manhattan on their honeymoon and one guest was from Orlando.  Her husband was out hunting.  We just had a grand time talking about New Zealand and travel in general.  The couple from New York were not conceited or stuck up like most New Yorkers I’ve met are.  I was actually quite surprised that they came because most honeymoon couples skip the hosting.  

Spending time with other Americans put me in such a good mood.  We talked about the snowstorms in New York, traveling in Alaska, visiting Fox Glacier, driving in New Zealand, and cruising in Hawaii.  Something about talking with people from my own country just made me happy.  They were even east coasters!  Back home I almost never get along with guests from the east coast.  But in New Zealand we are all just Americans and we can get along over a glass of wine and travel talk!

So the things I was dreading today turned into my joy makers!  Yay for the first day of 2011 being such a good day!