Day 1: Biosecurity, lazer guns, and Buster Keaton

Posted over breakfast on Monday, July 26

Today has been a peculiarly elongated day where we skipped straight from Friday night to Sunday morning, with no discernible Saturday. And, between Chicago Friday and Auckland Sunday, Claire and I have gone through so many ups and downs. Thirty hours ago, I wasn't sure that I was even going to make it to LA in time to get to Auckland. Claire was sitting on a park bench in LAX with no idea why I was running five hours late. And now, here we are, in our hostel, trying to get our minds over the fact that we are living seventeen hours in the future. (Taken another way, most of you are living seventeen hours in our past. We have flying cars and world peace. Catch up!)

The plane ride was fine. Claire and I managed to finagle our seats together, and it was a more or less uneventful thirteen hours. One of our attendants looked like Alan Davies playing Jonathan Creek playing an Air New Zealand flight attendant and another was named Yoshi and looked like Dr. Pu Kim. Both of them were delightful and charming. One row over, there was a man who was well over six feet and looked like a giant among the scaled down economy seats.

Getting out of the airport was an interesting experience, in that New Zealand security puts a huge emphasis on biosecurity. They have signs everywhere making sure that if you're bringing anything that could even possibly bring harm to New Zealand flora and fauna, you either dump it or declare it. I'd read that people can get held up for hours for something as innocuous as a packed apple, so I quite responsibly declared the granola bars that my sister had made and packed for me. (Happily, they did not seize them as a high risk item, allowing me and Claire to later eat them as an afternoon snack. Delicious and satisfying!) They also check things like hiking boots, so Claire was held up in security for a bit to ensure that she was not bringing in suspicious Canadian dirt. (She wasn't. At least not in apparently harmful quantities.)

After finally being declared biosecure, we headed out into the vast unknown. Airbus to the hostel, checked in, and then walked around. There was also time in there to make a few phone calls and write a few emails.

(On the bus, there was a sign that said something along the lines of, "IN CONSIDERATION OF YOUR FELLOW PASSENGERS, COULD YOU PLEASE REFRAIN FROM EATING DRINKING SMOKING?". In the States, there'd be a sign saying, "EATING, DRINKING, AND SMOKING ARE PROHIBITED.")

By 1:30, we had our stuff settled so we went for a late lunch and a walk. We meandered around the Central Business District for a few hours, just trying to shake thirteen hours of plane ride and the thirty plus hours of travel. The first thing we noticed was that the streets, as of two to five thirty pm on a Sunday afternoon, were eerily empty. Given that we started off on what should have been the busiest street in the country, the entire place seemed like the setting for a post-pandemic film. It was to the point where I started to feel really uncomfortable. No big city should have main streets that you can comfortable jaywalk without someone giving you the finger. Much to my relief, people did appear on the streets by six, and it started to feel like a real place where real people lived.

I'd also like to take a moment to talk about how wonderful the walk signals are here. They click when you shouldn't walk, and then make a really delightful ZING pew! pew! pew! pew! pew! when you should. Every time we walked across a street, it sounded like small children were enacting lazer battles. On the few occasions we crossed the street without the approval of finger guns, we had to seriously think about which way we should look out for traffic.

We then made a leisurely tour of all convenience stores in the greater Auckland area, in search of shower shoes and a small pat of butter. We managed to find shower shoes (a pair of pink ones that fit Claire in a strangely Asian grocery store and a pair of NEW ZEALAND RAH RAH RAH!!!!!! ones in an inexplicable costume shop) but no butter.

To top off our cultural experience for the day, we also managed to catch what I think was the closing film for the New Zealand Film Festival, a double feature of two Buster Keaton films, a short called "One Week" and a longer piece called "Sherlock Jr." The Auckland Philharmonic played the orchestral accompaniment. We managed to snag the last available seats to the sold out show, and we had a surprisingly awesome view in the lovely Civic Theatre. There was a little introduction by the director of the film festival, and then it was onto the films. Buster Keaton, for those of you not in the know, is wildly attractive and would be played by Hugh Laurie (circa 1990) in a modern biopic. His films are from a completely different era of filmmaking, where special effects are really just insanely dangerous stunts. The storylines are all pretty simplistic, but I don't think anyone goes to see silent film comedies for their psychological insight. They're just fun and charming in a way that movies rarely are today. By the end of "One Week," all I wanted to do in life was bashfully hold Buster Keaton's hand.

Anyhow, we're went back to the hostel and that has taken us to now. Claire has succumbed to two nights of unrestful sleep, and I am starting to take two-second blinks.

Tomorrow, we are theoretically getting bank accounts, tax numbers, and cell phones. We'll be real people in New Zealand! We will walk the streets at six!