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. . .