Taste of Waiheke

Three of the other international students and I left for our first trip outside of Auckland last Friday. With no Friday classes and a full day to do whatever we pleased, we all took a wine tasting trip out to beautiful Waiheke Island, which is about a 45 minute ride on the ferry from Auckland.

It should be noted that this was not exactly meant to be a wine tasting. Perhaps it was for the fifteen or so other people in attendance (mostly couples), but not for four college-age guys studying abroad for a semester. We were absolutely and unabashedly trying to get drunk, with the exception that we'd be drinking good wine as opposed to whatever comes cheapest at the local liquor store.

So at 11 am we set out for Waiheke Island, almost missing our ferry but getting on just in time.

Speeding away from Auckland

We booked an entire package, which included our ferry tickets, and which would end up taking us to three separate wineries and an olive oil vineyard on the day. The ferry ride was beautiful, and a nice way to be introduced to what New Zealand looks like when you're not in a city. As you can tell from the above photo, the water is amazingly clean looking, especially considering its proximity here to the country's largest city. I've gotten so used to looking at black water next to the big cities back home that it's easy to forget sometimes that the ocean is, in fact, supposed to be the beautiful shade of turquoise that I saw on Friday. Back home it's usually nice if the water in the ocean close to a city is even blue. It looks remarkably pure and untouched here.

At around 12 we were greeted on the Waiheke docks by Horst, our tour guide, who drove us around the island in a bus, taking care to describe the surrounding scenery through a headset as he took us to each of our four stops. My description of Horst probably won't do the man justice, but he was pretty amusing. A bearded, graying German immigrant who's been living in New Zealand for twenty years, he hasn't picked up any accent other than the one he was born with. The volume on his headset was always set too high, and after each time we got back on the bus he'd generally say something pretty weird and funny. Each time he began speaking into his mic, with an accent that sounded kind of like Bruno, it was good for a surreptitious laugh and several knowing, amused glances by the four of us in the back of the bus.

When we got on the bus for the first time, Horst pointed out that "ish a very nishe day, yesh it is. A very. Nishe. Day." When we got back on the bus after the olive oil vineyard, Horst's voice boomed into the mic and reminded us that we'd be going to taste more wine. "Weesh about to tastche some more good vine, yessssh, some very good vine. Yesh ze vine here ish very gooood. Ze red vine ish very good for you. Here on Waiheke weesh likes to drink ze vine here every day. Try nots to drink too much because ze vine here is very goood."

A day of listening to Horst alone may have been worth the cost of our trip out to Waiheke. Aside from the laughs, though, he was about as knowledgeable as you'd expect someone who's been doing this for twenty years to be. Between the olive oil vineyard and the second winery, we passed a large flock of roosters. Normally, I probably would not have given much attention to an seemingly ordinary flock of roosters, but Horst pointed out that back in the 60s a bunch of hippies moved out to Waiheke and some crazy guy brought roosters and introduced them to the island. Over the years the rooster population grew, was decimated, then recovered. Now roosters are a protected species on Waiheke Island. I'm not sure about this but I'd have to assume that Waiheke could be the only place in the world where the rooster is a protected species.

Roosters aside, I felt sort of bad the whole day. Was I missing the point? At each wine stop, some very nice and knowledgeable person would describe the intricacies of making wine, why wines are called what they are, and how this or that wine had a very particular or fruity taste. I didn't dwell much on the details. I was there to drink as much wine as possible, and if anything appreciate in a very sort of primal way which wines simply tasted better than the others. Referring to music, Duke Ellington once simply said: "if it sounds good, it is good." I guess you could say I'm from the Duke Ellington school of wine tasting.

First winery

Not that any of the people at the vineyards seemed to mind. All of our tasting guides were happy to help my group and I taste wine to our heart's delight. And of course, I pretended to know what I was talking about. At the end of the day I'm pretty sure I was able to convince a few of the guides and the other people on the trip that I at least knew the difference between the different types of red wine.

One interesting point: I hadn't been aware of this previously, but most wines you buy in the store, even the expensive ones, aren't actually pure. In other words, if you buy a Merlot, or a Cabernet, or a Shiraz, or one of the other ones, it's rarely only what it says it is. Most of the time the most pure wines are still a proportional mixture of various types of grapes. The best Merlot might actually be only 85% Merlot. How about that?

And while I may have been a bit distracted at the wineries, there were decidedly fewer things in the periphery to draw my attention away from learning all about how to make olive oil. For example, apparently many olive oil vineyards actually manually comb mass amounts of olives off their trees. There are actually olive combs, the basic designs for which have probably been around for thousands of years, that people still use to scrape olives off the tree and collect them in a big tarp. From there the olives are fed into the massive machine (see below), that removes any excess leaves, turns the olives into a paste, then squeezes the oil out, all in one remarkably streamlined and efficient process. There's no temptation to poach any random olives from the trees, because olives apparently don't actually taste good before they've been at least slightly processed. How's that for a defense mechanism? And olive paste, which is one of my favorite spreads to put on a fine Italian sandwich, turns out not to actually be the result of any specific intent but instead a byproduct of the olive oil-making process. Who knew?

Olive oil-making machine

And I definitely had no clue there were so many different varieties of olive oil. In the span of five minutes I probably tasted about six different kinds of oil that couldn't have tasted much less like each other, especially given the fact that they all had one pretty important thing in common.

As for the wine, I'd like to say that my pleas of ignorance toward the wine making process are exaggerated. But it actually is remarkable how little I learned on the day about wine and how to make it. Something about grapes, and pulp, and removing skins that float to the surface...and not a whole lot else. I guess I'll just have to attend more wine tastings, and maybe open my ears a bit more on focus on the learning and tasting part.

In any case, we finished tasting wine at about four, and stuck around Waiheke for a couple more hours. We had bought a couple extra bottles at the second place, and we took those along with a couple liters of beer down to my first New Zealand beach to help us out while we watched the sun go away for the day.

Pictures from Oneroa Beach, Waiheke Island, NZ

At around six we hopped back onto the ferry, zooming back towards Auckland for the night. A modern and nice-looking high speed ferry, the boat had three separate passenger decks. It was a little chilly, not to mention dark, and so no one happened to be sitting on top. It didn't take long for the four of us to turn this to our advantage, and with the wind literally ripping across the top of the boat we had the entire upper level to ourselves for the whole trip back. Let's just say T Pain would have been proud.

I'm on a boat!

At one point, with a cold and fast gust smacking me in the face, I stared ahead toward the city as it got closer and closer on the horizon. All jokes aside, it was one of those moments that reminds you, in case any proof is needed, that you are in fact alive. I was reminded, as I struggled against the wind to fit my sweatshirt hood over my head, of how much I love the sea, and how lucky I am to be in New Zealand amidst all this natural beauty.

Of course, for a bunch of guys who were 12 and 13 in 2001, anything resembling the words "I feel alive" will always have something of a separate connotation. It's not every day that you find yourself singing a butchered version of a P.O.D. song on a boat deck.

****

Author's note:
I spent brief portions of about four days writing this post. I currently face what I like to call a "keeping in touch deficit," which in plain English means I owe about three people long emails, so its been hard to find time to write the blog. But given the delay in getting this one up, I'll try to post something else soon. Stay tuned, and thanks as always for reading.

Additionally:
Click here for my facebook photo album from the day. All of the photos I've included in the post can also be enlarged by clicking on them. I would highly recommend doing this with the panoramas especially as the smaller size doesn't quite do them justice.

T Pain image courtesy of thumbnails.hulu.com

Learning to live backwards

Getting used to Auckland, on most levels, hasn't really been particularly difficult. Like the United States, New Zealand is a modern, westernized country, and the people here, at least in the country's largest city, have a pretty similar lifestyle. There are subtle, if still incredibly noticeable, cultural differences, but at the end of the day I haven't found that getting myself established here is any different from the times I've gotten acclimated to a new city back home. My first day in Auckland actually felt a lot like my first few days in Washington, DC, when I lived there during my year off a couple falls ago.

In New Zealand, however, every day is opposite day.

First, there's the conspicuous fact that July here is not the heart of summer - barbecues, trips to the beach, and all - but the dead of winter. As I mentioned in my first post, an Auckland winter isn't particularly intense. It gets much colder on the south island (I'll return to this in a second), but up here the temperature pretty much hovers around 55-60 degrees during the coldest time of the year. Given that I spent my last week in the United States in San Francisco, where even when it's supposed to be summer the mercury doesn't spike much higher than 60, this hasn't been too much of an adjustment.

Still, it's winter. There are no leaves on the trees. It gets dark at 5:30. November will be some of the best weather I see while I'm out here. Meanwhile, it was rainy and a bit colder last night; the vibe outside walking around had the look and feel of the gray bleariness that generally accompanies the late fall back home.

Which in turn begs the question: if Axl Rose had been a kiwi, would the world be singing along to a cheesy yet legendary rock ballad about the cold July rain?

And coming back to the subject of the south island: yes, it does get colder the further south you go. Auckland's winters are mild, like those of the lower mid-Atlantic states in the US, not because of a more southern orientation but instead because it is one of the northernmost places in the New Zealand.

When hopes and dreams go sour here, do people lament that their best laid plans have gone north?

North is south, up is down, winter is summer. My world, or at least my natural perspective on things, has literally been turned upside down. And yet, while getting used to the new seasonal normal has been somewhat of an adjustment, it's not nearly as weird as seeing cars drive on the other side of the road.

To be sure, this isn't true of every location in the southern hemisphere. It's more of a British thing, and like Australia, New Zealand was, in fact, colonized by the British. Still, when I first got in the car at the airport on Monday morning, the first thing I did in my head was question why cars here have two steering wheels.

Of course, cars here don't actually have two steering wheels. It was just weird to see our driver sitting behind the wheel on the right, rather than the left, side of the car. After a week, this is still probably more strange than the actual sight of cars driving on the left, which looks surprisingly natural. I still haven't ridden shotgun, but whenever that happens, I shouldn't be blamed if I'm somewhat of a front seat driver. Culture shock.

The hardest thing to get used to about the driving, though, is all the little things that go along with it. We've been taught since we were children to look both ways before we cross the street, but has anyone ever paid attention to the fact that we're also conditioned to look a certain way first? In the United States, where we drive on the right, we look left first when we cross the street, then right. Here, needless to say, it's reversed, which makes crossing a little dangerous at first. I keep looking left, seeing nothing but tail lights, then looking right again, only to jump back quickly at the sight of multiple cars zooming toward me in an unfamiliar lane. My jaywalking instincts have been scaled back significantly as I do my best not to qualify for a Darwin award.

The fact that we drive on the right in the states means that you're supposed to keep right and pass on the left. In New Zealand, you can get a ticket for that. We're also predisposed to keep right in any kind of foot traffic. Here, as I found out walking up the stairs at the movie theater yesterday, this too is reversed. It took a couple of perturbed, what-the-hell-are-you-doing sort of glances for me to realize that I was indeed supposed to be walking on the left.

As it turns out, then, left is also right. And they sell their beer in 15 packs. I never really realized it, but back home, we buy and sell ours in multiples of 6 (12, 18, 24, 30). Here, the only way you're getting 30 beers is by buying two 15 packs.

Actually that's not backward. It's just weird.

What is backward, however, is the difference here in the way toilets flush. Is there a difference? This was probably the most frequent question I was asked in the weeks leading up to my departure, and I must say, I haven't yet gotten to the bottom of it. Before I left home I established that toilets do indeed flush counter-clockwise in the States and, presumably, the rest of the northern hemisphere. So do they flush clockwise here?

The one in my flat appears to, but I can't quite tell. There's a big blast of water, and while it looks to be spinning the other way, at the very end the water clearly spins back counter-clockwise before stopping. Random quirk, or mythbuster? You be the judge...

(Image courtesy maps.google.com)

My lost day

Sunday, July 12, 2009 never existed for me. I jumped from July 11 to July 13, all in the space of one 12 hour and 10 minute flight.

My flight here was essentially a red eye. Not that different from flying back to the east coast, really - I left San Francisco at 9 pm on Saturday night and got to my destination at 5 am the next day. Sounds reasonable enough, except for the fact that when you fly far enough west that it actually becomes east, it is in fact the next next day. We arrived in Auckland in the early morning hours of Monday, July 13, 2009. Amazing. The International Date Line sure works wonders.




I must say that Air New Zealand did a phenomenal job helping me cope with my lost day. I may have been more upset had it not been for that fact that I was given two free meals on my flight, along with all the wine and champagne I could possibly ask for. My flight attendant came around with a jug of water in the middle of the night, just for refills, but saw my empty wine glass and asked if I wanted another. I nodded yes, he returned with a full glass of wine, and I promptly slept for four more hours.

Really though, the flight could not have been more comfortable. No crying babies, at least not near me; this stands in stark contrast to my flight from New York to San Francisco last Monday morning, where the screaming toddler two rows in front of me may have been the most personally effective condom advertisement I've seen in a while. And in addition to the wine and champagne, the crew was on top of both service and refills for tea all night and coffee the next morning. And the food they did serve was actually pretty good. I did my best to copy down the flight attendant's description of the dinner menu, which was served about 1 hour in flight:

Air New Zealand supper menu:

-Choice of spicy chicken with pesto and ricotta cheese, or braised beef in red wine sauce (I chose the chicken)
-Appetizers: Potato/egg salad with "mustard mayo." Cheese and crackers. Hot roll
-For desert: A delicious orange cheesecake

Yeah, wow. It was nice to fly on a foreign airline. Most of the flying I've done has been domestic, and domestic airlines can treat you like crap because they run so many flights and at the end of the day, you really have no choice but to fly on one of them if you're traveling within the US. You buy your ticket, and after that the rest is on you. Foreign airlines, however, are often more specialized. Especially the national ones, like Air New Zealand. Air New Zealand's bread and butter is their ability to offer really good customer service on trans-pacific flights. If they flew to many more places, or had less of a specific focus, they probably wouldn't put as much emphasis on the quality of the flight experience.

With food, sleep, and a comfortable window seat, I had pretty much everything I needed. I'd be lying, however, if I said that unlimited TV access to 30 Rock and Eastbound and Down weren't nice to have as well.

The worst thing that's happened to me so far was probably blowing a fuse in my room this afternoon, after I'd gotten to my residence and taken a long nap. New Zealand electrical outlets are different, and I had to get an adapter to convert my American equipment, and while I was trying to plug in my power stick I heard a huge POP and all of a sudden the entire room smelled like an electrical fire. Whoops.

Despite the electrical hazards, I did arrive across the world this morning, safe and sound. It was interesting. Yesterday - two days ago, on Saturday - I was about to take a shower and get ready to go the airport, when I started thinking about how I wasn't going to see America for five months. Although I thought of the exciting adventure I was about to embark upon, my heart still sank for a second. Five months is a long time. But before getting in the shower, I decided I should probably open the window to let more air in and prevent the mirrors from fogging up. I opened the window, thinking wistfully on my last day in the United States about hot dogs, baseball, and Ray Charles' brilliant cover of America the Beautiful.

And then, and it couldn't have happened more smoothly or perfectly, the very first thing I saw when I opened the window was a hardcore American flag, with the intimidating-looking eagle and everything. And since I opened the window only about 8 inches, this American flag/banner was actually one of the only things I saw when I opened it. What are the chances? I busted out laughing, taking care to appreciate the fact that it will surely be a little while before I see another one of those banners.

It may be, but I've got bigger things to worry about in the meantime, like whether or not New Zealand actually has more sheep than people. You'd have to figure I'll know sooner or later...

And do the toilets really flush the other way?

Come one come all

My name is Matt Buccelli, and I'll be spending the coming semester studying abroad in Auckland, New Zealand.

If you're following this blog, it means you're at least somewhat interested in what I'm doing during my time away. If you expected me to keep in touch with you over the next five months, I hope you'll read it every once in a while, because let's be honest here: chances are I wouldn't have found the time to write you an email.

That's not supposed to be as harsh as it sounds. I just mean that, you know, I'll be a little busy while I'm out here. And I suppose that's why travel blogs are so useful. Not because you care any more than you would ordinarily about my day-to-day actions or observations just because I'm not in the United States anymore. And not because I couldn't have kept a journal without the help of a popular blog-hosting website. No no, I'd have to say that the number one reason I thought it was a good idea to do this whole thing is because now when there's something I think is worth telling people back home about, I can write it here, save myself time, and not feel guilty when I think about everyone I haven't talked to in a while. Really, if you think at any point that I should be doing a better job staying in touch, it's actually your fault for not checking my blog. Interesting how that works. I kind of like it.

Anyway, I'll try to put something up here once every week or so, so stay tuned. I'll be posting pictures periodically as well, but I'll probably put most of them on facebook, so you'll want to either check that or I'll try to post links if I decide to go that route.

I hope everyone is having an excellent summer. Here the sky is a hazy shade of winter; although with an average daytime temperature of 55 degrees Fahrenheit, it's nothing compared to January on the east coast.

Talk to you all soon!*

-Matt



*If and only if you read my blog