Travelling Round New Zealand

One of the things I have always appreciated most whenever travelling around NZ is the opportunity to meet people from all over the world that come to NZ on a working visa to work in the orchards and see what life is like here, as opposed to there, wherever there may be.


This weekend, on our quick trip from Christchurch to Dunedin, then onto Cromwell to watch my super-son’s* cricket match, my husband and I met a woman travelling on her own from Berlin. We stayed up until almost 2AM (so much for temperance) talking nonstop about her version of what life was like for her and her family in Germany and cross-comparing my husband’s family life here in NZ, as well as my own family roots in the USA.

One thing we all had in common was our awareness that our educations were all limited by our individual national recollections, which the German woman translated by tapping on her head and saying...

“How does one say it”, tap, tap, tap...

“Brainwashing”, I offered up...

“Yez...that tis it!” as she pounded the table.


I had to throw temperance to the wind as this was a rare and ‘one off’ opportunity to share with another human being what we each found being in this world to mean. She is a pacifist, as am I...and, that is not something I stumble across very often. The table was the only thing we agreed need be beaten in this life now, past or future. I felt emboldened for having met her. Thank you my new friend, you know who you are.

Now about my super-son*, which is what I prefer to call him as opposed to a step-son. A super-son is one you inherit by marriage, not to be trodden upon, but appreciated for the unique advantage of not having had to push them from one’s own body, but merely embraced as one of the many opportunities life offers up without physical pain. I enjoyed watching his cricket match, the first match I have ever seen, being under the misguided impression that cricket was boring and impossible to understand, coming from baseball indoctrination.


I found that I liked watching cricket and can see that it will afford me many moments in the future to learn new strategies of how to play chess with a funny looking bat.

I must mention that my husband and I took our ‘fur kids’ with us. Now that we are two adults on our own again, with no children at home to take with us, Mr. Taffy and Tuppy, are now our privileged guests on mad dash weekends away. They loved it and we found taking the dogs to be much easier than carting children. There were no arguments, car sickness, or endless requests, just lots of wagging tails and tales of our own making, without the interrupted versions of childish versions that suggest we didn’t do one thing they thought fun.

We will take them again.




Tuppy



Mr Taffy under cover



Mr Taffy