Two weeks of poking around all the neighborhoods near Auckland left the entire family frustrated, exhausted and irritable. All the advice provided by all those lovely people familiar with Auckland was sound and interesting and helpful... if we were moving directly here from Seattle. Blockhouse Bay is similar to West Seattle. Howick is similar to Issaquah. Ponsonby reminds me strongly of Capital Hill. It's all good. We recognize it. Had we moved here directly from Seattle and our busy lives there, it would be perfect.
But we didn't. Betwixt here and there are years of living on a boat, living small, and ... perhaps more importantly... living away from city life. Every time we would point the car north towards the city, shoulders would hunch and snippy comments resound from the back. So on a lark one day, we turned the car south to the country. We drove away from Auckland and away from our house hunt, escaping into the surrounding farmland and rural communities. We weren't looking for a place to live so much as quiet, sunshine, and fresh air.
After a half hour, we arrived in a town called Pukekohe which is about 20 minutes south of DrC's office and about 40 minutes south of Auckland proper. Now, like all the other neighborhoods we've visited, Pukekohe is a mirror world parallel of a community with which we were familiar when we lived in Washington. Like the equally unpronounceable Puyallup, Pukekohe is a rural town, the county seat of a predominantly agricultural district. The primary schools are sharply divided between those on the right side of the tracks (in this case the south side of town) and those on the wrong side. However, the town is too small to maintain that separation at the Intermediate and College levels where the decile drops to middle ranges reflect the fact that absolutely everyone in town goes to the same schools. The box stores have been relegated to one road out of sight. The center of town includes a city hall, incredibly large and lush parks, and all the major schools backed up against each other.
Pookies -- as incredibly enough these people call themselves -- pride themselves on not really being a part of Auckland. However, Pukekohe is the fastest growing urban area in New Zealand. The schools have nearly doubled over the last decade resulting in facilities with many new buildings and all new computer, science, art, and music equipment. It's about half Pakehas and half mixed other. As part of our walk about town, we visited all three of the schools the girls would attend. At the intermediate, the principal and his wife went of their way to spend time talking with us and answer our questions. With no transition and all but perfect unity, we immediately started driving by all the available rental properties. Something about the town, the quiet, the charming prettiness of main street, and the fact that the sidewalks completely and utterly rolled up on Sunday afternoon appealed at a bone deep level.
The girls and I fell in love with Chicken House. Chicken House is about two blocks from the town center on the edge of the main park in the south part of town and when we drove by the first time, someone's domestic chickens were snacking in the front yard. It looks like a funky little chopped up Victorian era working class house with a backyard, a front yard, and three odd little outbuildings. Which is exactly what it is inside plus a whole skanky tangle of cat piss laced carpet. The layout is higgledy piggedly, haphazard in the way that only old houses with parlors and solars can be. Despite the smell, the family fell in love and threw in our lottery ticket with the realtor.
We got back to our hotel room a little dazed with what we'd done. In four hours, we had completely upended our housing hunt, shifting from an apartment in the city to a bizarre little house with chickens in the country. Everywhere in Auckland you can see the water or boats. In Pookie, we could live for months and never see a body of water larger than the bird bath in the back yard. But the vibe and the need were so strong that the family stopped looking north entirely; We canceled all our appointments to look at properties near the city.
When the broker called the next morning and said the house was ours, cheers broke out. Cruising is about going where you want when you want, about not being tied to a convention that says, "Do this because you're supposed to…" Apparently, what we want is to again send our lives careening off at an angle completely orthogonal to all our prior experience. None of us have ever lived in the country before. In Pookie, we're likely to sample lots of other new experiences: small town life, raising chickens, growing veggies in the back yard, drying our clothes on a line, and walking to school.
I might even try baking cookies for the kids when they get home from school. I draw the line at wearing a June Cleaver skirt, however.
Showing posts with label happiness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label happiness. Show all posts
Monday, April 05, 2010
Tuesday, March 09, 2010
First Impressions
So Toast… what are your first impressions of New Zealand?" - Steve of OceanBlue
We arrived in New Zealand two weeks ago. So now is probably the best time to just blurt out those first impressions without the influences that will filter in after a few weeks, months, or years to digest. We'll touch base in another six months or so to see if these initial impressions play out.
Green -- DrC describes it this way, "Wet Southern California -- palm trees and eucalyptus with lichen. Weird." Lush. Summer warm, sunny, and beautiful. Strong winds, vigorous gardens, and a whole lot of grass. The Kiwis -- to their eternal credit -- are park, sport, and recreation mad.
Multicultural -- American hubris strikes again. When you live in the U.S., you think we're multicultural. These folks put even Berkeley to shame. I've never seen so many nationalities and races rubbing cheek by jowl on a regular basis. It's incredible.
Immigrations R Us -- This goes with the prior thought, but it feels like native folks -- both Maori and Pakeha (or NZ European as they like to call themselves on all the paperwork) -- are by far the minority here in the Auckland area. Everywhere we go, we're interacting with people who arrived like us without furniture. As a result, this is a very sympathetic environment to the newly arrived immigrant. However, we Yanks are by far the minority; The majority are from the Pacific Islands, India, and China.
Expensive -- Distorted dollar perception or simply post-Mexican culture shock, it feels heinous. Looked at analytically, it's about the same as Seattle. So, I'll say it again, Auckland is expensive.
80's Flashback -- No insult to the Kiwis, please, but the culture feels like we've taken a step back in time to high school… both the positive and the negative bits of that era.
Small -- Again, without dissing the Kiwis or their country, this place is so small compared to Mexico or the U.S. The entire population is roughly that of Washington State. National news feels local. The upside? If New Zealanders want to do something, they just do it. The downside… no neighboring states or federal presence to fall back on when problems are big and intractable. This WA State to NZ comparison, btw, keeps popping up. DrC is attending a conference in a few weeks of all the ophthalmologists in the country. The meeting anticipates roughly the same number of attendees as the annual WAEPS conference (WA's eye doctors).
Seattle Echo -- There can be no Aucklander or Seattlite who would feel displaced swapping places. They should be sister cities. Size, economics, neighborhoods, traffic patterns, social ills, social benefits. I'm not saying this because Seattle was our homeport and familiar. DrC and I have lived in six major metropolitan areas during our lives and visited many others. Tick for tick, we've never seen two cities more similar in character.
Weird Light -- So we'd read about the high levels of U.V. down here. The articles do not do it justice. You can fry your neck and arm sitting in a car on the 10 minute drive home from work from the sun glancing in at an angle through the window. The UV is extreme and dangerous. There is a national campaign to Slip, Slop, Slap: Slip on sun glasses, slop on some sun screen, slap on a hat. Cruising Puddle Jumpers, take this VERY seriously. The Congers have the deep tan only cruisers of many years in the mid-latitudes can boast, and we've all five seen our skin redden in very short exposures to the full sun here. But where I'm going with this is that you actually notice a difference in the light. Everything feels slightly too bright to me… as if I'm looking at it through clear glass.
Too Much.
And with that I'll finish my first impressions because it's not fair to New Zealand or Auckland to say it's too fast, too commercial, too modern, too stressful, too urbanized. It's a beautiful city, and three years ago I'm certain DrC and I would have mortgaged our souls to the devil to buy a house in Ponsonby and settled in with verve and contentment. After spending years progressively shedding our middle-class, type A personalities -- during which we let our stress levels leak out our toe nails over successively more beautiful sunsets in nearly silent anchorages -- it's absolutely impossible to be happy living in Auckland. Every time we drive north towards the city, I can feel my shoulders bunch and a low grade headache start. All those beautiful little mirror-world pocket neighborhoods, so like our familiar haunts in Ballard and Fremont and Bellevue, are just too full of loud noise, fast moving people, and pressure.
Pressure. The pressure is intense. To get into the right neighborhood so you can get into the right school. To get the right job to afford the right neighborhood. To buy the right things to fill the right house in the right neighborhood with the right schools. Two weeks and we're already running screaming for the hills. Fortunately for us, Auckland is (again like her mirror sister Seattle) surrounded in stunningly beautiful farmland a mere 20 to 40 minutes outside the city boundaries. DrC's job is 20 minutes south of the city, so we found a neighborhood 20 minutes south of that in the middle of rolling hills, lush green farmland, and miles of trees.
Kilometers of trees.
Metric. *shudder*
We arrived in New Zealand two weeks ago. So now is probably the best time to just blurt out those first impressions without the influences that will filter in after a few weeks, months, or years to digest. We'll touch base in another six months or so to see if these initial impressions play out.
Green -- DrC describes it this way, "Wet Southern California -- palm trees and eucalyptus with lichen. Weird." Lush. Summer warm, sunny, and beautiful. Strong winds, vigorous gardens, and a whole lot of grass. The Kiwis -- to their eternal credit -- are park, sport, and recreation mad.
Multicultural -- American hubris strikes again. When you live in the U.S., you think we're multicultural. These folks put even Berkeley to shame. I've never seen so many nationalities and races rubbing cheek by jowl on a regular basis. It's incredible.
Immigrations R Us -- This goes with the prior thought, but it feels like native folks -- both Maori and Pakeha (or NZ European as they like to call themselves on all the paperwork) -- are by far the minority here in the Auckland area. Everywhere we go, we're interacting with people who arrived like us without furniture. As a result, this is a very sympathetic environment to the newly arrived immigrant. However, we Yanks are by far the minority; The majority are from the Pacific Islands, India, and China.
Expensive -- Distorted dollar perception or simply post-Mexican culture shock, it feels heinous. Looked at analytically, it's about the same as Seattle. So, I'll say it again, Auckland is expensive.
80's Flashback -- No insult to the Kiwis, please, but the culture feels like we've taken a step back in time to high school… both the positive and the negative bits of that era.
Small -- Again, without dissing the Kiwis or their country, this place is so small compared to Mexico or the U.S. The entire population is roughly that of Washington State. National news feels local. The upside? If New Zealanders want to do something, they just do it. The downside… no neighboring states or federal presence to fall back on when problems are big and intractable. This WA State to NZ comparison, btw, keeps popping up. DrC is attending a conference in a few weeks of all the ophthalmologists in the country. The meeting anticipates roughly the same number of attendees as the annual WAEPS conference (WA's eye doctors).
Seattle Echo -- There can be no Aucklander or Seattlite who would feel displaced swapping places. They should be sister cities. Size, economics, neighborhoods, traffic patterns, social ills, social benefits. I'm not saying this because Seattle was our homeport and familiar. DrC and I have lived in six major metropolitan areas during our lives and visited many others. Tick for tick, we've never seen two cities more similar in character.
Weird Light -- So we'd read about the high levels of U.V. down here. The articles do not do it justice. You can fry your neck and arm sitting in a car on the 10 minute drive home from work from the sun glancing in at an angle through the window. The UV is extreme and dangerous. There is a national campaign to Slip, Slop, Slap: Slip on sun glasses, slop on some sun screen, slap on a hat. Cruising Puddle Jumpers, take this VERY seriously. The Congers have the deep tan only cruisers of many years in the mid-latitudes can boast, and we've all five seen our skin redden in very short exposures to the full sun here. But where I'm going with this is that you actually notice a difference in the light. Everything feels slightly too bright to me… as if I'm looking at it through clear glass.
Too Much.
And with that I'll finish my first impressions because it's not fair to New Zealand or Auckland to say it's too fast, too commercial, too modern, too stressful, too urbanized. It's a beautiful city, and three years ago I'm certain DrC and I would have mortgaged our souls to the devil to buy a house in Ponsonby and settled in with verve and contentment. After spending years progressively shedding our middle-class, type A personalities -- during which we let our stress levels leak out our toe nails over successively more beautiful sunsets in nearly silent anchorages -- it's absolutely impossible to be happy living in Auckland. Every time we drive north towards the city, I can feel my shoulders bunch and a low grade headache start. All those beautiful little mirror-world pocket neighborhoods, so like our familiar haunts in Ballard and Fremont and Bellevue, are just too full of loud noise, fast moving people, and pressure.
Pressure. The pressure is intense. To get into the right neighborhood so you can get into the right school. To get the right job to afford the right neighborhood. To buy the right things to fill the right house in the right neighborhood with the right schools. Two weeks and we're already running screaming for the hills. Fortunately for us, Auckland is (again like her mirror sister Seattle) surrounded in stunningly beautiful farmland a mere 20 to 40 minutes outside the city boundaries. DrC's job is 20 minutes south of the city, so we found a neighborhood 20 minutes south of that in the middle of rolling hills, lush green farmland, and miles of trees.
Kilometers of trees.
Metric. *shudder*
Saturday, January 09, 2010
So Long and Thanks for All the Fish
The hardest part is saying goodbye. It's a dirty secret in cruising that we say good bye all the time. Every time we leave an anchorage, there is a strong probability we will never see our fellow cruisers again. Every time we enter a new harbor, there's a chance we'll see long standing friends or go through the process of making new ones. It's a complete roulette wheel. We all either adapt to this constant flux of known and unknown, or cruising instead devolves into sequential trials of the heart as people we respect and admire disappear from our lives.
For some, this itinerant life poses no great challenge. Either their relationships with their boat family are so strong and sufficient as to require no supplemental entertainment, or they don't like people anyway. DrC falls into this category. It's not that he's asocial. Exactly. He's just very self-contained. Mera, too, finds very little trouble drifting from one set of people to another. Neither of them easily or quickly create strong bonds so we rarely spend enough time with any boat to build the kind of trust and closeness required to make our departure difficult for my husband and middle child. When they do place their trust in someone, the relationship is forever. DrC can still go on a rant because kids he knew in high school are not responding to his friends request on Facebook. He is an incredibly loyal and persistent friend for whom distance, time and absence mean exactly nothing. Noey, Uncle Glenn, Hbunny and Greg better keep this in mind. A similar pattern is evolving in Mera.
Other cruisers become social butterflies, making friends rapidly through exchanged confidences and culinary tidbits but easily trading one group of friends and boats for another. This is a highly adaptive approach which opens the decks of many boats to new conversations and ideas. Jaime and I fit this mold. While for the most part, we do not develop deep or lasting relationships, we sincerely appreciate and enjoy the people we meet. We regret saying good bye to friends, but we know that we'll either see them again... or we won't. It's not a problem. We delight in each other's company for the time that we have and when it's time to leave, we simply move on. This is not to say that either Jaime and I have not developed strong relationships with some of our fellow cruisers. However, these are actually the exception which prove the generally fickle rule. And most of those friends for whom we feel a lasting bond are those we can easily and readily access via the Internet. Jaime and I are truly digital natives.
Another group of cruisers find a compromise solution in the buddy boat. These cruisers identify like minded traveling souls with at least roughly similar interests and boat performance and travel together everywhere they go. You frequently see this pattern with kid boats who will move in groups of two, three or even more, but you see it in the older couples as well. The advantage is that the comfort and stability of your ongoing relationship with your buddy boat offsets the temporary sadness and loneliness engendered by leaving friends behind over and over again. I think that in the long run, even DrC would have to come to grips with this model if we were going to continue cruising, because on our boat we have one of the most challenging personality types.
Unfortunately, Aeron falls into another category of cruiser entirely. She loves deeply, immediately, and passionately. She is loyal and generous with her heart. Her charm and ready smile endear her to cruisers of all ages, and she rewards their time and attention with her trust and wit. However, each departure rips her apart. It's not just the kid boats, the little girls friends like Skylar (Ocean Blue) or Caroline (Windfall). She cried when we left Meerkat, Endless Summer, Victory Cat, and Profligate last spring. She was nearly hysterical leaving behind Beach Access and Precious Metal last week. These weeks leading up to leaving Don Quixote and Mexico behind – probably forever as a family – are chipping away at her soul leaving her a sad parody of her normal bubbly self. Each time we leave a port, I brace myself for the tears and the deep sadness. It wrenches the heart to see our baby so horribly off kilter.
This is part of cruising I welcome putting behind us. For at least a year, we will stop moving, stop saying good bye every few days. My little girl will grow a full year in the company of the same group of children and adults. I hope that if we do take up a gypsy hiking or biking lifestyle again after our year down south, Aeron will have grown and matured sufficiently that it doesn't hurt so much. Or maybe it is more accurate to say that we will not take up a nomadic lifestyle again until Aeron is emotionally ready to undertake the challenges, or she is off to college and her happiness in her own hands.
For some, this itinerant life poses no great challenge. Either their relationships with their boat family are so strong and sufficient as to require no supplemental entertainment, or they don't like people anyway. DrC falls into this category. It's not that he's asocial. Exactly. He's just very self-contained. Mera, too, finds very little trouble drifting from one set of people to another. Neither of them easily or quickly create strong bonds so we rarely spend enough time with any boat to build the kind of trust and closeness required to make our departure difficult for my husband and middle child. When they do place their trust in someone, the relationship is forever. DrC can still go on a rant because kids he knew in high school are not responding to his friends request on Facebook. He is an incredibly loyal and persistent friend for whom distance, time and absence mean exactly nothing. Noey, Uncle Glenn, Hbunny and Greg better keep this in mind. A similar pattern is evolving in Mera.
Other cruisers become social butterflies, making friends rapidly through exchanged confidences and culinary tidbits but easily trading one group of friends and boats for another. This is a highly adaptive approach which opens the decks of many boats to new conversations and ideas. Jaime and I fit this mold. While for the most part, we do not develop deep or lasting relationships, we sincerely appreciate and enjoy the people we meet. We regret saying good bye to friends, but we know that we'll either see them again... or we won't. It's not a problem. We delight in each other's company for the time that we have and when it's time to leave, we simply move on. This is not to say that either Jaime and I have not developed strong relationships with some of our fellow cruisers. However, these are actually the exception which prove the generally fickle rule. And most of those friends for whom we feel a lasting bond are those we can easily and readily access via the Internet. Jaime and I are truly digital natives.
Another group of cruisers find a compromise solution in the buddy boat. These cruisers identify like minded traveling souls with at least roughly similar interests and boat performance and travel together everywhere they go. You frequently see this pattern with kid boats who will move in groups of two, three or even more, but you see it in the older couples as well. The advantage is that the comfort and stability of your ongoing relationship with your buddy boat offsets the temporary sadness and loneliness engendered by leaving friends behind over and over again. I think that in the long run, even DrC would have to come to grips with this model if we were going to continue cruising, because on our boat we have one of the most challenging personality types.
Unfortunately, Aeron falls into another category of cruiser entirely. She loves deeply, immediately, and passionately. She is loyal and generous with her heart. Her charm and ready smile endear her to cruisers of all ages, and she rewards their time and attention with her trust and wit. However, each departure rips her apart. It's not just the kid boats, the little girls friends like Skylar (Ocean Blue) or Caroline (Windfall). She cried when we left Meerkat, Endless Summer, Victory Cat, and Profligate last spring. She was nearly hysterical leaving behind Beach Access and Precious Metal last week. These weeks leading up to leaving Don Quixote and Mexico behind – probably forever as a family – are chipping away at her soul leaving her a sad parody of her normal bubbly self. Each time we leave a port, I brace myself for the tears and the deep sadness. It wrenches the heart to see our baby so horribly off kilter.
This is part of cruising I welcome putting behind us. For at least a year, we will stop moving, stop saying good bye every few days. My little girl will grow a full year in the company of the same group of children and adults. I hope that if we do take up a gypsy hiking or biking lifestyle again after our year down south, Aeron will have grown and matured sufficiently that it doesn't hurt so much. Or maybe it is more accurate to say that we will not take up a nomadic lifestyle again until Aeron is emotionally ready to undertake the challenges, or she is off to college and her happiness in her own hands.
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