Six Months and Counting

It’s been two weeks since we submitted our formal application for permanent residency, so this morning we called our case manager. He said our application hadn’t been rejected by the centralized document reception group, which is an acknowledgement that all the basic components were there, but he hadn’t seen the file yet. When asked when he might be able to tell us more, he said to call back in a month. Yikes.

We’ve been here six months today; it’s pretty amazing how fast we’ve grown accustomed to our new home. And it really does feel like home now. At least in the day-to-day sense. A couple weeks ago we rented “I, Robot,” a run-of-the-mill Hollywood movie, but set in a very cool, futuristic-but-totally-identifiable Windy City. My knee-jerk pride of place reaction left little doubt that my kinda town, Chicago is. Although my heartstrings are tugged even harder when I think about Seattle. And, while I never fell in love with Philadelphia, I made some great friends there, so I’ll always have fond associations with the City of Brotherly Love. I really have got to thank my lucky stars: I’ve lived in some wonderful places.

During the past several years we’ve moved around enough that I’m getting used to getting used to new places. I was hoping to be able to pinpoint the moment when a new place feels like home, but I couldn’t catch it this time, either. When we came back after our holiday trip, I noticed that our townhouse really felt like home for the first time; that was just past the three-month mark. Sometime since then I stopped feeling like a stranger in a strange land. I not only don’t get lost anymore, I frequently tell tourists where to go.

The faces at my grocery store and my gym are familiar, and I know some of my neighbors and all of the neighborhood cats. It helps, of course, that things here really aren’t that strange, suntans at Christmas and pumpkins at Easter aside. Not having any significant language or cultural barriers to overcome has made it a pretty easy transition.

Now if we can just get NZIS to hurry itself along . . .

Cheers,
Sandie

Cultural Cognitive Dissonance

It was a slow day at the gym, and a couple guys who work there were bored. One had a tennis ball, the other had some kind of stick – it looked like the handle from a golf club. They looked around sheepishly - no boss in sight - before one wound up for the pitch and the batter assumed his stance. But then something weird happened: the ball hit the ground and bounced up, the batter scrunched his shoulders and turned the bat down, vertically, to strike the ball. Their motions were fluid, completely natural, since - of course - that’s how they’d been playing ball all of their lives. But it was so, so wrong.

After suffering through one of the wettest Decembers on record, we’ve been enjoying glorious weather all summer long. But the forecasters have been warning that the tropical high pressure ridge we’ve been living under was breaking down, and we should expect rain all weekend. And sure enough, Friday morning it felt like the monsoon had arrived.

I’ve gotten back into the swing of studying, spending my days at U of Auckland’s law library (and hiding books from the poor undergrads as necessary). So I was rather surprised and disappointed that the library was to be closed for four days. (And Ali was dumbfounded: U of C’s libraries were open virtually every day of the year, and geeks like him had access 24/7 – 365 days a year.) But it certainly was nice not to have to go out in the rain.

Yesterday was Good Friday, but I was surprised that the entire country shut down. No mail. No newspaper. Liquor licenses of pubs and restaurants were suspended. Foodtown – our local supermarket: closed. Even the Chinese grocery store closed for the day.

Easter, of course, is that time of year we all associate with bunnies and chocolate eggs, pumpkins and . . . haunted houses? (At the Royal Easter Show, a big country fair-like event with farm animal judging and giant produce competitions, carnival rides and candy floss, one of the favorite attractions is, indeed, the Haunted House.) And it’s the season when the days are getting shorter. We abandoned daylight savings time last weekend, so it gets dark early now, by 6:30. But there’s consolation, too. The markets evidence the season’s harvest, overflowing with massive amounts of eggplant, peppers, grapes, apples and many varieties hard-shell squash (all referred to here as pumpkin) and kumara (Maori for sweet potatoes - it was their staple food).

The biggest news story all over the world this week was the Terri Schiavo travesty. But locally we’ve been following another story, about the progress of a New Zealand woman with severe motor-neuron disease who went to China for stem-cell therapy. Within 3 days of surgery, she had not only regained the ability to swallow, but was walking about and was beginning to speak intelligibly for the first time in months. She was obviously a vibrant person, who’d been struck down by a debilitating disease. Her speedy recovery was nothing short of miraculous. The irony that this woman went to China, not the U.S., for leading-edge medical treatment, should be lost on no one.

Cheers,
Sandie

Eid-eh Shoma Mobarak!

Happy Persian New Year to You! NoRuz, the Iranian New Year, begins at 1:33:24 a.m. NZ time tonight. It's the First Day of Spring (in Iran) and, yes, they're really that exact about it. Ancient Persians were the best astronomers around, remember the Three Wise Men? We probably won't stay up for it, I haven't prepared a proper Haft Seen and it's actually the First Day of Autumn here. Oh well, that's part of living in a topsy-turvy world - we will be celebrating the spirit of the day. And where ever you may be when it arrives, you have my deepest wishes for a Happy, Healthy and Prosperous 2564.



It's a wonderful holiday, with lovely customs and traditions that reach way, way back in time. If you're interested in learning about them, check out FarsiNet's very cool website to learn more.

Sad Saal be in Saal-ha and Cheers,
Sandie

It's Been A Quiet Week

Top stories in the national news this week (honestly): Troubled Cambridge High School is having to re-advertise for a new principal . . . More flu vaccine doses have been purchased after concerns there would be a shortage this winter . . . And, my favorite: Rotorua district council says rollerblading fairies will be allowed next Christmas after all. (Apparently a Xmas tradition commissioned by a local business, from mid-December through year-end a pair of rollerbladers would skate around town topping up people's parking meters. Last year, however, the district council’s Scrooges decided to enforce a bylaw that bars skating in the CBD. Fortunately, the Spirits of Christmas are alive and well in Rotorua.)

My week began at Auckland’s 13th Annual Pasifika Festival, a blast of Polynesian music, food, and . . . well, that's enough, really.



During the past week I’ve continued to bone up on NZ contracts law which, interestingly enough, is reasonably interesting. They start in the same place as U.S. law: Merry Olde England. But, whereas the U.S. broke away from English law about 200 years ago, NZ continued to track England closely until the 1970’s. Since then, however, they’ve implemented a lot of reasonably innovative statutes, in an effort to rationalize the common law, at least in some respects. (God love ‘em for trying.) So, I’m getting to brush up on fun stuff like Carlill v. Carbolic Smoke Ball Company (forever linked in my mind with the law school winter formal, known, of course, as the Carbolic Smoke Ball); feel smug about how superior American law is to modern British law (at least in the sense that U.S. law gives people much better opportunities to sue and be sued); and study NZ’s Prostitution Reform Act of 2003 (yup – that’s legal here – so contracts for solicitation are no longer in the realm of illegal contracts).

Ali & I also went to see “The Aquatic Life with Steve Zissou,” which I liked pretty well up until the last 10 minutes; it was zany and charming and weird. But then, in the last ten minutes, the movie transcends itself. When Bill Murray's character says "Eleven and a half - that was my favorite age," the whole thing came together for me. By the time the credits rolled, and I realized that the vaguely-familiar-looking Bond Company Stooge was Bud Cort – aka Harold, from “Harold and Maude,” I was completely smitten. It’s about Life, Death, the Sublime Dignity of Angelica Huston and The Meaning of It All. Simply brilliant.

We also managed to submit our formal application for residency this week. Cross your fingers and press your thumbs, our case manager said he could process an application in as little as 4 weeks - from the time they had all the required information. I sent everything I thought they could possibly want and then some, although I’m sure they’ll find something to surprise us with. It would be nice to get this finalized, of course, since then I could get serious about applying for a job. I've heard they need a new principal at Cambridge High.

Cheers,
Sandie

Confessions Of A Republican

Big news item of the week: Prince Charles was in New Zealand, visiting an endangered albatross colony, a down-trodden Maori neighborhood and school children. Lots and lots of school children. At a cost to NZ taxpayers of $50,000 per day, it's no wonder Kiwis were underwhelmed. But I was surprised at the outright hostility: he was consistently referred to as a "right Charlie," which (in local slang) is like calling him a dufiss, even an idiot. The small size of the crowds who bothered to come out to see him was constantly referred to, as was any inattention he paid them. And there were jibes a-plenty at Camilla, of course.

I think Prince Charles is the single best argument anyone needs for becoming a republic, but polls here consistently indicate that about 67% of Kiwis favor keeping Dominion status, i.e., leaving the British monarch as the head of state. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." (Seems to me more like, "Even if it is broken, leave it be, ignore it, and we can pretend the problem isn't there.") The current Labor government has republican leanings, but to really push in that direction is considered the political kiss of death.

One of the problems of becoming a republic would be the need to write a constitution, and Kiwis are skeptical about having a written constitution, too. From an American perspective, of course, I find this truly astonishing. After all, how do you even have a "constitution" which isn't written? They apparently have something called "constitutional conventions," which I gather are customs that have gained the force of law. But I can't read the phrase without picturing Jefferson, Madison, et al. sweating out the details in the heat of a muggy Philadelphia summer. (Since the NZ Legal System is part of the local bar exams I'm studying for, however, I'll have to find out eventually. But I'm putting that bit off as long as possible. Who knows, maybe after Prince Charlie's visit they'll change their minds?)

I did read a sort of libertarian argument against having a written constitution, that said having a single document which spells out people's rights and freedoms would somehow limit people's current rights and freedoms. The idea being that, under the current system, people somehow have more rights and freedoms than they would if those rights and freedoms were clearly spelled out somewhere.

To be honest, I didn't get it either.

Cheers,
Sandie

44

It's a strange thing to be celebrating my birthday at the end of summer, but it's nice to be able to do it at an outdoor pub. With a pint of Kilkenny, down by the harbor. Yeah, it's different, but it's ok.

In Chicago, on my birthday I'd visit the garden at the Art Institute on my lunch break to see if the daffodils were starting to come up yet. Most years they'd be there, the first green shoots pushing up through the ground. Some years, one or two flower buds would be starting to form. Other years, the snow would make it sort of hard to believe spring was ever coming.

Last year was the first time that I wasn't working for the bank on my birthday in 17 years. I remember thinking I never wanted to work in an office again. A year later and, although it's been great to have the time off, with no structure at all my days all kind of run together. I'm still not dying to work in an office again, but last week I began studying for the local equivalent of the bar exam. Been to the law library every day for a week. It's a lot like being back in law school. Not exactly fun, but it's interesting.

Another weird thing occurred to me "on" my birthday - I didn't know which day it was. New Zealand is right next to the international date line, hence the East Coast tagline "First to see the sun." But I was born on the other side, and it wasn't March 4th in Chicago until 19 hours - almost a whole day - later.

I chose the obvious solution, and celebrated twice! Besides taking me out for a pint, Ali got us tickets to a couple shows. This is AK05 week, Auckland's bi-annual international culture festival. It's funny how much it resembles Philly's international culture festival, as if they were both designed from the same template. They probably were. I understand there's a whole industry now, putting together events using entertainers who do a regular circuit of festivals around the globe. Works for me.

On Friday we saw "Cabaret Decadanse," a very adult cabaret show from Montreal. With puppets. Of every shape, type and size imaginable. There was an exotic dancer with a kind of Betty Boop thing going on, and an erotic incarnation of Josephine Baker. She wriggled out of her sequined gown to dance topless, wearing only a skirt fringed with bananas. Turned the place into a XXX theatre. A transvetite sang torch songs a la Edith Piaf, and there was an "Argentine" emcee with a face like the Wicked Witch of the West. My favorite was a googly-eyed sock puppet, who conveyed all the pathos and urbane wit of a sophisticated gay nightclub entertainer whose day job was on the set of Sesame Street.

Saturday was "Bush," a remarkable show by Bangarra Dance Theatre, an Australian Aboriginal dance troupe. A couple years ago in Philly we were completely wowed by another Sydney dance company (only wish I could remember their name). Even though it's a pretty limited sample, I'm tempted to say Australia is developing some of the strongest dance companies in the world. Good on 'em.

Cheers,
Sandie