I'm now in Rotorua, a touristy town south-east of Auckland. There's some bonkers volcanic weirdness going on in the ground below, so everywhere you walk there are big steaming lakes, boiling pits of mud and naturally warm pools people swim in (a one-handed woman at the tourist information centre strongly emphasised I was not to put my head in the hot water, lest I pick up some weird diseases. She was so adamant about it, I was fairly sure her lack of left hand was a result of an earlier head-dunking).
It's a quiet town for the most part, although it some stores do open later than four o'clock, making it an orgy of activity by New Zealand standards. The boys of the town seem to be having a bad time; every time I've walked past the town square, I've seen a massive throng of them hanging out, bum-puffing cigarettes and half-arsedly spooking the elderly. Their hardness is significantly reduced by their proximity to an oddly empty Starbucks and the tourist office.
The girls of the town seem to have things a little better, spending all their time checking out the stacks of clothing stores, wearing weather-inappropriate short skirts and big sunglasses.
If you come to New Zealand, don't even consider visiting the town of Napier. In 1931, a giant squid, or killer bees, or an earthquake or something levelled the town, killing four people and destroying all the old buildings. They rebuilt the town in the Art Deco style of the day or, more accurately, a dumb bastard version of it presumably picked up from a book a local architect saw once in a library once.
So now the town is the most pretentious place in New Zealand, packed full of losers who think they're living in some fantastic 30s wonderland, with flappers roaming about and guys in monocles drinking champagne out of velvet slippers. Apparently they haven't noticed the town looks like every other country town in New Zealand - worse actually, because most of the original Art Deco buildings seem to have been painted in the 1980s, so aquas and pinks and grotesque piss-yellows abound.
They have cheap, mass-produced bevelled mirrors everywhere, and ugly posters boasting about about the town's ye olde charms, which are advertised to everyone, and evident to no one.
Every night for the past week I've slept next to a beach, with a big werewolf moon overhead, a monster fire blazing, and huge mountains rising from the waters. Pretty incredible.
In other news, I'm loving that Rudd took out Beazley. But are the dumb bastards really that confident in the charisma of this Mandarin-speaking Brissie boy that they don't feel the need to come up with new policies? It's easy winning over the voters when there isn't an election on, especially when they've grown used to an dull, seemingly cursed, pathetically blusterous dude like Kim Beazley; convincing the voters to actually vote for your party on election day is another matter. If they don't come up with some big, memorable, sellable policies soon, they're fucked. And Labor's track record - can you remember a single major policy innovation in the past ten years? - isn't good on that front.
It's a quiet town for the most part, although it some stores do open later than four o'clock, making it an orgy of activity by New Zealand standards. The boys of the town seem to be having a bad time; every time I've walked past the town square, I've seen a massive throng of them hanging out, bum-puffing cigarettes and half-arsedly spooking the elderly. Their hardness is significantly reduced by their proximity to an oddly empty Starbucks and the tourist office.
The girls of the town seem to have things a little better, spending all their time checking out the stacks of clothing stores, wearing weather-inappropriate short skirts and big sunglasses.
If you come to New Zealand, don't even consider visiting the town of Napier. In 1931, a giant squid, or killer bees, or an earthquake or something levelled the town, killing four people and destroying all the old buildings. They rebuilt the town in the Art Deco style of the day or, more accurately, a dumb bastard version of it presumably picked up from a book a local architect saw once in a library once.
So now the town is the most pretentious place in New Zealand, packed full of losers who think they're living in some fantastic 30s wonderland, with flappers roaming about and guys in monocles drinking champagne out of velvet slippers. Apparently they haven't noticed the town looks like every other country town in New Zealand - worse actually, because most of the original Art Deco buildings seem to have been painted in the 1980s, so aquas and pinks and grotesque piss-yellows abound.
They have cheap, mass-produced bevelled mirrors everywhere, and ugly posters boasting about about the town's ye olde charms, which are advertised to everyone, and evident to no one.
Every night for the past week I've slept next to a beach, with a big werewolf moon overhead, a monster fire blazing, and huge mountains rising from the waters. Pretty incredible.
In other news, I'm loving that Rudd took out Beazley. But are the dumb bastards really that confident in the charisma of this Mandarin-speaking Brissie boy that they don't feel the need to come up with new policies? It's easy winning over the voters when there isn't an election on, especially when they've grown used to an dull, seemingly cursed, pathetically blusterous dude like Kim Beazley; convincing the voters to actually vote for your party on election day is another matter. If they don't come up with some big, memorable, sellable policies soon, they're fucked. And Labor's track record - can you remember a single major policy innovation in the past ten years? - isn't good on that front.
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I miss you.
It's my birthday! I'm not too rowdy yet!