As I mentioned in my last post, I spent the past few days in New Plymouth playing for team Wellington in the first of three national Women’s Basketball Championship tournaments. We ended up in seventh place (out of ten), which wasn’t a bad result considering we’d only put the team together a week before. It took us a few games to find our feet and we lost our first three before winning the final two. I came away from the tournament fairly pleased; five games in three days was brutal for someone as old and lazy as myself, but I pushed through and ended up having a great final game, nabbing 12 points and a few blocks.
Not many of you knew me when I was last a competitive basketball player. I stopped playing in 2001 at age 17 after years of serious training, games, tournaments, summer camps, fall ball, ice buckets, and creaky knees. By the end of it I was burned out, just another okay player from a string of underachieving teams. I never really looked back. Even at the UW, where a basketball band spot was pretty coveted, I didn’t bother to audition.
So you can imagine how strange and wonderful it is, ten years on, to be playing at a national level. I’m not sure how long this will last – I am not the player I used to be – but it is certainly fun to get a second chance at all this. Even if I do have to deal with an annoyingly over-sized key and things like the above photo, which I can only assume is an elaborate So D-Vine reference!
For some reason this song (from the fabulous Local Hero) has been stuck in my head all week. Including in the middle of basketball games. So now I am passing the savings on to you!
Here are some updates on my life since I last blogged about a billion months ago…
I’m working full-time now, doing e-learning nerdthings for a big gov’t agency. A stable paycheck is a magical thing.
I bought a scooter! It is bright yellow and its name is Dr CC and it is pretty much the best thing ever, and then some.
Some of Club IMDb flew over to visit for Easter week (yonks ago!) and we roadtripped across the South Island. I briefly drove a car and managed not to kill anyone.
No idea if it’s boredom, motivation, or mental illness, but I’ve been playing a bunch of basketball. And by a bunch I mean 3 practices and 2 games each week. I’m playing with the city team this weekend in a national tournament up in New Plymouth, which is weird and wonderful all at the same time.
Facedowns, the travel photo project I’ve been working on with my brother and my friend Amy for the last 4 years, has been getting some love on the internest recently. We’ve been spotted by someneatblogs, internet TV in Germany, radio in Salt Lake City and Bremen, news in Greece, the Korean equivalent of Yahoo, and a few other sites aroundtheworld in the past few weeks. And today we were profiled in the Seattle PI! I wish I could say this now means I am rich and famous and never have to work again, but as far as I can tell I still have to go to my temp accounts-payable job on Monday. Shame.
At any rate, it’s been pretty awesome to watch our work fly around the virtual world! Now if somebody would only pay us to do the same in the real world…
Yeah, so I’ve been neglecting this blog thing for a while, but you know, blogging and traveling is hard, whine whine whine whine. But you two readers (hi mom! hi dad!) are in luck, because tonight I am taking a break from being utterly trashy (see above photograph) to recap my last few months in the middle of nowhere.
Avid readers will note that this blog last left off as I was packing to leave my home in Melbourne, whining about the 90 degree heat. As of late I have become a professional flee-er of summer, so should not surprise anybody that I landed in Auckland just in time to experience its famed 60s-and-raining weather. After a couple days in NZ sprawl, I caught a Stray bus north to Paihia in the Bay of Islands. I spent a week up there, hiking, sand-boarding, boating, eating pies, and brushing up on my beer pong skills. I saw whales, waterfalls, cows, and best of all, an east coast sorority girl try to explain the concept of rush week to the English. It was great.
The weather started getting too warm (UPPER 60s!), so after my week in Paihia I packed my bags and headed for Seoul, S. Korea to visit Our Lady of Catface for Thanksgiving. My friend Amy, who some of you may know as 1/3 of Facedowns, has been teaching English out there for the last year. This was our second expat Thanksgiving – previously, we taught the Irish about green bean casserole and garlic mashed potatoes and gluttony despite the Great Chip Pan Fire Incident of ’06. Fortunately, this time we didn’t lose our intended kitchen three days before the feast. And we’re quite proud of our massive achievement – the upstairs neighbor called the cops on our party at 7pm on a Saturday! Result!
Disinterested in any further run-ins with the law, I fled back to New Zealand and commenced a bus tour of the North Island’s tourist hotspots. Highlights included boogie boarding and flying fox-ing in Raglan, blackwater rafting in the caves of Waitomo, rafting down a 7m waterfall in Rotorua, walking around White Island (an active marine volcano) in a gas mask and hard hat, and the ultimate NZ tourist activity, skydiving at Lake Taupo. I had a fantastic time, and met some great people, but NZ is hard on the pocketbook, so a week before Christmas I headed down to Wellington to resume working. And in typical me fashion I’ve been funemployed ever since! Actually, that’s not true – I’ve been doing a bit of temping, but (don’t tell my agencies) I don’t consider that real work (or fun!).
The upshot to being underemployed is that I have been doing a bunch of cooking. In the last few months I’ve successfully made fresh pasta & ravioli, peanut butter, jam, dill pickles, pulled pork, barbecue sauce, scones, muffins, applesauce, roasted chicken & stock, tomato sauce, and all kinds of other delicious things. I am going to try to blog a bit more often, and hopefully share some recipes as I try them.
More updates soon (so I promise) about what I’ve been up to in Wellington and etc…
It’s getting warm here in Melbourne. Today it hit 90, which was a bit high for my weak winter constitution. Our little backpacker hovel doesn’t have air conditioning, so I’m doing the next best thing and moving to New Zealand tomorrow!
My work contract ended last Friday, and in the past week I’ve wasted no time getting into vacation mode. I spent the weekend in Sydney, and was surprised to discover that I actually like it up there. Melbourne & Sydney have a fierce rivalry and usually folks like one or the other, but despite my love for Melbs I think I could really enjoy living in Sydney. I managed to pack quite a bit into the weekend – everything from a 10k coastal walk to some Prokofiev at the Opera House. And I even got to ride a ferry!
Back in Melbs, I spent a couple free days doing classy things like watching ethnographic films at ACMI and eating delicious meals. Then it was off to the Great Ocean Road for 2 days, where I took the above photo. Also, in what is beginning to be a trend, I took to the skies over the 12 Apostles, in a helicopter this time. Don’t worry, though – despite all this height-related tourism, I’m not jumping on (off?) the skydiving bandwagon just yet.
It’s kind of funny to be excited to leave a city I really like, but I think New Zealand is going to be great fun. And it certainly helps that I’m planning to come back here in a couple years. I’d write about my thoughts on moving around at more length, but I think the heat has completely fried my brain. Time to pack the carryon, I think, and drink some wine!
Stefan Sagmeister, designer extraordinaire, talks about his practice of taking a year off every seven years for creative purposes. Not that anybody should be surprised, but I enjoyed the hell out of this talk. We’re using it as kind of a catalyst to get our travel blog project off the ground – but more on that later, when we’ve got everything in place.
Despite some recent setbacks, I am still enjoying my time here in Melbourne. For those of you who didn’t hear, my camera (the big one) and mp3 player were stolen two weeks ago. I’ve managed to get replacements for everything, and it’ll be all covered by insurance in the end. But let me tell you – being without those things for a week and a half was brutal! I’m just considering it all a reminder that I need to be less comfortable and more aware when I’m overseas…
More excitingly, this month brought the Melbourne Arts Festival, which has been pretty much excellent so far. Peter Greenaway was in town for a couple film screenings, lectures, and most importantly, his installation around Leonardo’s Last Supper. In addition to all that, I got to see the London Philharmonic, and on Saturday I am going to a big event all about Tropicalia, with music and documentaries and such. So I’ve been feeling rather cultured lately!
Speaking of cultural activities… one of my housemates plays on a rec netball team, and since basketball was on break, I agreed to give it a try. I know I’ve always said netball is a sexist sport – take a look at its history, or perhaps this article – but I figured I’d give it a try, since it’s such a big thing down here. My current goal is to not suck at it, which is more difficult than it sounds. The sport just has SO MANY RULES! For example, when you’re playing defense, you can’t have your hands up, and you can’t be any closer than 3 feet from the person with the ball. “Intimidation” is against the rules. And before you start playing, the refs actually check the fingernail length of all the players. It’s hardly the kind of game you could ever play pickup, but so far I’m enjoying the challenge of learning a ridiculous new sport.
Oh, and I’ve got SIX WORKING DAYS left in the ENTIRE YEAR. Just to rub that in!
It’s a funny thing to think about, but I’m in the same position right now as I was on my last day at Amazon in May. In a month and a half, I will be leaving Melbourne for New Zealand. Astute stalkers will note that I haven’t done a lot of travel so far – I haven’t even left Victoria. I’m finding that Australia is just too big for ambitious weekend trips, and as a contract worker, I don’t have any holiday time that I can use for three-day weekends. Instead I’ve been setting my sights on November & December as the big travel months. In some ways, my real “quit my job and took off traveling” adventure starts then, as my time in Melbourne has been pretty normal.
My work contract ends 30th October, after which I have a week left in Australia. I figure I can’t really justify four months here without at least visiting Sydney, so I’ve got a 3 day trip planned up there. I’m also taking advantage of free midweek days by taking a 2 day trip to the Great Ocean Road, which everybody says is spectacular. And then, on 8th November, it’s off to New Zealand. From the 8th – 19th, I’ll be basing my travels out of Auckland. I’m planning on spending a decent chunk of time exploring the northern tip of the island; according to my Kiwi housemates, the Bay of Islands is a must. Then on the 19th, it’s off to Korea for 2 weeks of ridiculous expat Thanksgiving shenanigans, courtesy my friend Amy, who’s an English teacher out there. She is quite resourceful and has discovered that we can pre-order a turkey through the US Army base in Seoul. And we have lots of practice with overseas Thanksgivings – three years ago we successfully introduced a handful of Irish to our proud American tradition of gluttony. If I still meet airline weight restrictions after our feast, I’ll be getting back to NZ on 2nd December. The next day, I’m heading off to my new home for the next year, Wellington, by way of tourism. I am planning for this journey to take about 2 weeks but am not committing to anything; travel with deadlines is no fun at all! I’m using a backpacker’s hop-on hop-off bus called the Stray Bus to do the North Island circuit. Here’s a map of it all:
The idea is that I get to Wellington somewhere around mid-December, and spend a while hanging out and enjoying the summer until January, when I’ll get back out into the job market. I haven’t fully sorted this out yet, but I am hoping to spend New Year’s Eve at the Rhythm & Vines festival and Christmas in the cinema watching In the Loop with a hip flask. Ambitious plans, I know.
So what else have I been doing in Melbourne, apart from planning my escape? Here are some things:
Kiwi parties. Winning trivia nights. Hanging out at my new favorite place in Melbourne – the ACMI Mediatheque. Cooking enormous meals. Steffi, I have baked 3 things – be proud! Playing squash and soon netball during the basketball break. Watching the Huskies win, and win, and then lose horribly. Avoiding AFL (this is difficult). Eating kangaroo, drinking Cooper’s. Battling with my employer, who have not been taking tax out of my paychecks. They deserve every bit of their bankruptcy proceedings. Meeting up with a college friend who happened to be in town. $4 pizzas at Bimbos. Telling myself I’ll meet the YHA folks in the city at 8:45 on Sundays for hikes, and then deciding to sleep in. Drinking from goon bags. White wine that tastes like red wine (and not in a good way).
