The Yanks Have Landed

After three years of concerted effort, we're finally here! Here being Mapua, a charming village situated halfway between Nelson and Motueka (the biggest cities in this region) with the estuary on one side of the main road and groves and pastures on the other. As I type this, the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and the rain is pouring. Back in Santa Monica this would be considered a torrential downpour; here it's "liquid sunshine." To give a sense of just how liquid it is, a town to the south of us had 16" of precipitation yesterday (about an inch more than Los Angeles gets in an entire year).

Our first few weeks were taken up with all the details of settling in a new place as well as a foreign country - while trying to monitor the location of the rest of our belongings which remained, stubbornly, in Los Angeles. Many emails and overseas calls later, they were on a container and crossing the Pacific to Auckland in a record 7 days, where they were immediately impounded by Customs. Apparently, by packing a few bottles of Nyquil, we had raised the question of whether we might be bringing in supplies for a boutique Meth lab.

Two weeks, and many calls and emails later, Customs reluctantly released our belongings. Which then went into a truck and on an all-expenses paid tour of New Zealand. Although we haven't got an exact location, we are reasonably sure that they're currently residing in Christchurch - about a five hour drive southeast of here - and there's an even chance that we will actually get our winter clothes before spring.

While Jim has been busy riding his bicycle, checking out all the breweries/pubs in the area, and setting up satellite TV so that he won't miss out on any of the Formula One races, I have been out seeing something of the countryside. When I expressed this interest to our friend Tim, he immediately packed me off to a friend's winery where they were frantically trying to bring in their grape harvest before it got ruined by all the “liquid sunshine.” So there I found myself, snips in hand, harvesting grapes as fast as I could – a job that I would never have been allowed to do in California, where I would have been pegged immediately as a left-wing, union-organizing radical and escorted off the premises. Here, I was welcomed along with the other workers (mostly young mothers with time on their hands while their kids were in school). We spent the day chatting while we picked, discovering who we knew in common (more on this in a later post), generally enjoying the sunshine, the beauty of the vinyard, and trading information on all the interesting things going on in the region. Here is where I first learned about NZ's thriving barter economy. All of us were “friends of friends” and we worked for a Ploughman's lunch, a cheese and wine tasting at the end of the day, and a case of excellent wine when the harvest was over.

Next Post: Foraging in New Zealand, or why Kiwis never go hungry...