Return To Wisconsin

After somewhere between 10 and 11 of the hardest months of my life, I decided that my best option was to return to Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin to visit all of the people and things I've missed so much since last June. As a result of this decision, I scheduled an appointment with the US consulate in order to obtain a 6 month visitor visa, booked flights from Auckland through to Chicago via San Francisco and skipped the country I've come to loathe.

I've been back in Fort for a little over a month now and the experience so far has been a mixed bag. It's fantastic seeing everyone again and being able to hang out with the friends I'd been missing so much but I've been horrendously busy virtually since I touched down. I've barely had time to touch base with New Zealand, as far as I can gather they're not falling apart without me.

I've been roped into playing guitar for the showchoir band for the end of year jazz di pasta show that they perform in which involves me being at the high school every day and before that I was singing with the chamber choir because they're low on men this year. I also helped out behind the scenes as a crew member for this years spring play which was "Noises Off." My ex-girlfriend was one of the stage managers and things between us have been pretty volatile since I've been back so that was an interesting one.

Right now I'm helping Kathy Ihde (who was my AFS liasion person) move into her home for the next 6 months in Copper Harbor, Michigan. We came up earlier this week (7 and a half hour drive) with a packed car and trailer full of things to make her new house more accomodating. It's awesome being right by a different part of Lake Superior and seeing the UP (Upper Peninsula) for the first time ever. I'll be staying with her husband Jeff for the remainder of my time here while she lives and works up in Copper Harbor.

I've been doing a little bit of creative writing recently but not as much as I'd like to be so I'm hoping to make time for that in coming weeks. I'm also hoping to keep my youtube channel going with fresh videos on a regular (hoping for weekly) basis, I just went up to 50 subscribers this week so I'm pretty excited about that venture. I've got a trip to DC planned in a couple of weeks with my best friend Beckett to see the US play Germany in a soccer match which I'm looking forward to.

I definitely made the right call with coming back to Wisconsin when I did. Things in New Zealand were going nowhere for me and I was getting more and more frustrated with my situation. This trip has restored a lot of my ambition and life goals that I was ready to give up on and I'm excited to see what happens in the next few months.

The Hobbit Premiere

I meant to get onto writing about the premiere of "The Hobbit" a while ago but shortly after typing up my Sydney posts my 6 and a half month long distance relationship sadly came to an end. Right after that Christmas also happened and my family decided to be awful to me. All in all it's been a pretty crushing couple of months and I haven't felt like writing anything aside from a couple of poems. I guess this post means that I'm slightly on the mend which is a nice thought.

The first thing I'm going to do is give you a brief overview of the pre-premiere hype that went on in the city, starting with the airport and moving on to the central stuff.

Wellington as the capital of New Zealand was "officially" renamed "The Middle of Middle Earth" much to the amusement of locals such as myself. In accordance with this theme, the airport had a few displays to aid the authenticity of this claim. 

A giant Gollum statue was crafted and suspended from the ceiling of the cafeteria in an effort to terrorise all diners in the vicinity. As if the sheer size and realistic detail on this sculpture weren't freaky enough, it was set up alongside dangling bubbles with a fish grasped tightly in its gruesome hand. I'm not sure I would have wanted to lunch beneath a hungry Gollum on the prowl for fresh meat but I was happy to appreciate the craftsmanship nonetheless.

Aside from Gollum fishing in the dining area upstairs, the good people at Wellington Airport also decided to deck out their baggage claim area on the ground floor. The conveyor belt that the bags come out on had various decorations around it to give the whole area the appearance of a hobbit-hole. Along the raised centre of the conveyor belt where ordinarily there would be a variety of advertisements were windows with backlit pictures of Ian McKellen's Gandalf, Martin Freeman's Bilbo Baggins and various dwarves designed to give the feel of looking into their dinner party at Bilbo's hobbit-hole home.

Moving away from the airport and closer to town, the Embassy cinema also had their own giant Hobbit-themed sculpture. The Embassy was one of two central cinema's to screen the premiere, is a historic cinema that has kept it's vintage feel throughout its years of operation and is generally regarded as the best cinema in Wellington. Atop the facade at the entrance to the cinema, an enormous Gandalf sculpture was painstakingly hoisted to eventually stand at the door to Bilbo's hobbit-hole. The hole was adorned with a multitude of grass skirts apparently imported from The Phillipines to give the appearance of overgrown grass coverage around the "entrance".

Next to the embassy, a wonderful canvas poster was put up on a large building which had a landscape shot of "Middle Earth" with a condensed representation of Wellington (including such landmarks as the beehive) as the centrepiece, sticking with the incredibly cheesy theme of the capital city as not only the middle of New Zealand but as the middle of Middle Earth itself.

The only other notable themed attraction I can recall was a valiant effort by the Starbucks on Courtenay Place who created a scene on the outside of their shop using the same easily removable window paint as is often seen on shop windows around Christmas time. The scene included a hobbit-hole and a number of cute furry creatures adorning the top and surrounding grassy mound.

Moving on to the day of the premiere itself, town was an absolute madhouse. I went in early with friends to attempt to cash in on the crowds by performing around the waterfront area. It was a hellishly hot November day with virtually no wind and after a couple of hours and not making all that much money with the guitar we decided to join the masses along Courtenay Place.

We got there a good two hours before the stars were due to walk the red carpet and there was barely a free spot to stand in.  The surrounding streets were jam packed with people either waiting in place for the celebrities to turn up or attempting to wade through the human sea. The only free spot we could find was on the corner of Courtenay Place (the street that the stars were walking down) and a side street. It was an okay vantage point and probably the best we could have found without getting there 5 hours early.

After a long wait in the heat (which I do not deal with well) we were just about ready to abandon our mission especially since the programme appeared to be running about half an hour behind schedule. Finally, the man I was there to see came down the red carpet and I managed to squeeze out a "MR FRODO!" in all my excitement. We also saw a well dressed Cate Blanchett before we decided that we had really only come to see Elijah Wood and returned to our playing along the waterfront. I should mention that we briefly saw Andy Serkis as well but I've seen him before and thus wasn't overly excited about him (sorry Andy).

Luckily for us, a lot of other people decided to make an early departure and we cashed in pretty nicely on the crowd of people that opted to take the waterfront route back to wherever they were parked, so carting my freakin' heavy guitar case around town in hideous heat was worth it in the end.

Basically, Wellington city went crazy with the premiere of "The Hobbit" and with all of the celebrations and cheesy "Middle of Middle Earth" hubbub proved that with our movie-making hub image (thanks largely to Sir Peter Jackson and Weta Studios) we are committed to becoming as much like Hollywood as possible. While that may come across like a dig, I quite like the feel of tinsel-town as a flashy place where magic is made, it gives tourists something to marvel at and locals something to laugh at, a win-win really.

The premiere gave us something to be proud of as New Zealanders and more specifically as Wellingtonians, resulted in some awesome art instalments and enabled me to see Elijah Wood, who I may one day marry or abduct (same thing, really). On top of that I came out of it slightly richer in the monetary sense, which always feels good.

I've no idea what my next post will be about, we'll see what happens.

Sydney (Part 2)

On day 3, we planned a cruisy day. We thought we'd sleep in, then catch a ferry to the suburb that my aunt's (Russell's partner) parents lived in and hang out with them for the afternoon. After Russell and Karen (my aunt) finished work they would meet us there and we'd have a big family dinner.

Tony and Julia (Aunt's parents) picked us up from the ferry terminal and we had coffee at a nearby cafe. We had Jack with us and thought after making him endure the boredom of adult conversation for so long we'd better do something a bit more on the fun side.

 Tony and Julia live across the road from a bay and have a boat house with several kayaks and a dinghy with an outboard motor in it. The oldies were quite content to stay around the house chatting, so I decided to go kayaking with Jack. It was a really hot day again, so paddling around the bay seemed the perfect way to spend the afternoon.

After dinner, another plan was hatched. Russell decided that he would take and Karen's brother, who had been with us at dinner, and I to town to give me a taste of the night life in Sydney and to see the Art and About Exhibitions that were only around at night. At this point, I hadn't even explored the Wellington night scene so I was quite excited to be heading into a big city after dark.

We got driven to the nearest train station where we jumped a train into the city. Nathan (Karen's brother) had a hell of a time with a self service ticketing machine which wouldn't take his card and when he finally got his ticket, the gate wouldn't scan it to let him through. Our train was at the platform as we arrived so we didn't really have time to mess around with it. He jumped over the barrier and probably looked pretty shifty doing it but we made our train so all was well.

The Art and About exhibitions were first on the agenda. We went to the park that the signs with faces and photo exhibitions were set up in because in a different part they had a night exhibition. The piece was basically three different projections of different peoples faces onto trees to make it look as though the trees had faces. To add to the spooky factor, they weren't still images of faces, they were blinking, sleeping, yawning, wrinkled, expressive faces. It truly was an amazing spectacle and quite freaky seeing big faces on trees. They looked so alive.

The other exhibition we saw was a series of projections at various locations around a city block designed as a recreation of the old Australia Hotel which was once a hub for societies elite and was demolished for more modern buildings to be put in. It was a cool concept but the projections were small and grainy. The execution was quite a let down compared to what they could have done with it.

The first bar we went to was a nothing sort of a place. We basically just went in to have a beer and think about a plan of attack. We tried to get into one place that Russell had thought could be fun. It seemed pretty cool when we started getting close, there were drag queens everywhere in massive platform shoes and most of these guys/gals would've been tall people without the help. Unfortunately they had a private function going on so that was the end of that plan.

Instead, we ended up at the coolest bar I've ever seen. Russell remembered that there was this hole-in-the-wall type place somewhere down a little side street so we went there. We spent a couple of minutes walking up and down the street before a guy who looked like just an ordinary guy came up and asked us if we were looking for "Shady Pines." We told him that we were and he opened what had previously been a wall but was now a door to reveal a busy little bar.

Their set-up was very small town American, there were license plates, deer heads and native american statues all around the place. It was the size of a small house but there must have been about 150 people in there. We had a couple of bourbon and cokes there and watched an awesome couple dance like pros for about 45 minutes. It was surreal being inside this place, a world away from Sydney and then stepping back outside into the silence of  the dimly lit side street.

For our last stop of the night we took a taxi to a different part of Sydney and ended up sitting in an Irish pub. They were screening an international cricket match which New Zealand and I think Sri Lanka were playing in. They had a guy playing covers in the corner there who was rather good as well. We had a couple of beers there and watched New Zealand get beat in an extra over game before heading home for the night.

I woke up bright and early the next morning to pack up all my stuff. We didn't have anything exciting planned for the day other than putting me on my flight home. Grandma, Jack and I ventured to an indoor market they have in Gladesville and bought some nice stuff to have for lunch. After lunch we had Tony and Julia pick us up to take me to the airport.

When we got to the airport I said goodbye to Jack, who was having a hard time pretending not to be sad at my departure and was on my own. I checked in, cleared customs and had a quality meal at McDonalds before heading to my gate and boarding what ended up being a smooth flight home.

My trip to Sydney was a much needed getaway from Wellington and put me in a good head space. I had a lot of fun seeing the public art around the city and being in a big place that reminded me so much of America.  It was also nice enjoying some summer weather as at the time New Zealand hadn't really come out of winter yet. All in all it was a lovely 4 day holiday. Next post will be about the premiere of The Hobbit.

Sydney (part 1)

As I briefly mentioned in the last post, In late September I was given the wonderful opportunity to travel to Sydney, Australia with my grandma. Despite being a short-lived venture as was also previously mentioned, it was a lot of fun and was definitely a much needed getaway. It also provided a sort of cosmic assurance that quitting my job was a good move as I would not have been able to go had I still been working at the time.

The night before our trip, we stayed in a hotel next to Auckland airport. I'd taken to insomnia like a fish to water from early September virtually until present (December 4th) so it was an awful night for me. I didn't sleep until about 3am and we had to be up around 5.00 to get ready and check in by 6.00. After check in and a McDonalds breakfast with my dad and grandad we cleared customs and eventually boarded.

We arrived to a wonderful Sydney day, the temperature was about 25 C (77 F) which was a whole lot better than the NZ winter temperatures we'd been getting at home at the time (somewhere between 10-14 C , 50-60 F) My uncle who we were going to stay with came and picked us up from the airport along with his dog Cherokee. We went for a cup of coffee with uncle Russell at a cafe not far from their house and spent the rest of the day relaxing at their house in the suburb of Gladesville.

Our first real day in Sydney we decided to take my ten year old cousin Jack over to Manly for a walk around the beautiful coast there and to have a look in a few of the shops. This was a particularly fun trip as we used the Sydney ferry system to get around for the day which is a novel thing for me. We took one ferry into the Darling Harbour area (pretty much the central terminal) and from there it was about an hour to an hour and a half's trip across the water to Manly. When we got to Manly, grandma surprised us both with a visit to a cafe that served chocolate exclusively. I had the best hot chocolate of my life along with the richest brownie I've ever eaten. Jack and I loved it but vowed never to eat chocolate again after that, a pact I'd bet we've both since broken.

After our chocolate overload we went on a long walk around the coast, which was absolutely spectacular. It was bloody hot out and so the beaches were packed with gold-skinned people mixed with water that sparkled in the sunlight. Jack enjoyed having the opportunity to run around and climb on the rocks while grandma and I enjoyed the sights and the natural beauty of the place. We spent a few hours in Manly before catching the ferry back to Darling Harbour and from there back to where we had left the car, near Gladesville. I think it'd be safe to say we all slept well that night.

On day 2 we sat down with Russell who had some ideas about what we could have a look at around town. There was an art festival on called Art and About which we thought could be fun, so we mapped out a couple of exhibits we could have a look at. We took Jack with us again and caught the bus into the heart of Sydney.

The first thing we wanted to look at was a piece featuring a house which had been set up in a public space and equipped with a holey roof and a sprinkler system so as to make it rain constantly inside. When we got there, Jack decided he wasn't keen any more but I was intrigued with the concept. I had to take off my shoes, roll my pants up to my knees and put on a raincoat to prevent myself from getting too wet. The place stank of rotting wood but it was interesting to see a fully furnished house this way. The sink full of dishes was overflowing, the toilet was filling up, the bed-sheets had puddles forming and it was extremely gloomy. Being inside the raining house even just for the minute I was in there for was actually quite depressing which was the artists intent. It was supposed to portray the hostile feeling when a relationship inside a household is bad and people aren't talking to each other, which it did frighteningly well.

Unfortunately, most of the other things that had looked interesting in the flyer were night pieces only but we did manage to see an excellent photo exhibition set up on big sheets of canvas by a park including a section of works by children which were awesome. There were also a series of electronic road signs set up in a different part of the same park which were programmed to display different "facial expressions" from : ) to o.O kind of thing. The whole festival was very well put together.

I didn't realise this trip would turn into such a long post so I'm going to split it into two to save you the trouble of reading a massive post in one sitting while still doing the trip justice so I'll end this one here with a to be continued...

An Update on Life

I haven't blogged in two months and that's partially because the things worth writing about happen too infrequently to post more regularly and partially because I don't very often have the motivation to write a few hundred words on things that have just happened. It's nice to take some time between living something and remembering it. Anyways here's an update on things that have happened in the last two months.

 In August I got a job at McDonald's which I worked roughly 3 days a week for a month before quitting due to a huge personality clash with one of the managers who ended up being rostered on all the same shifts as me. It was an interesting experience, I can't really complain seeing my bank account is $1000 up on where it would've been had I not been working there.

A couple of weeks after resigning from McDonald's I got to tag along with my grandma on a trip to Sydney, Australia which was awesome and I'll go into detail on that in the next post. Unfortunately I was only able to spend 4 days there, as I had to be back in the motherland for my grandfather's 70th birthday party.

I'd been a little bit depressed due to not having a job and missing Wisconsin which are an awful combination of things. Missing Wisconsin means I need money to get back to Wisconsin and not having a job means no income which means I feel awful because I'm not getting any closer to home that way. The trip to Sydney helped to take my mind off of that a little bit.

When I got back from Sydney, mum said that the research project she works for needed someone to do some data entry for them. To make a long story short, I'm now working there most days doing that. I have a stack of questionnaire things to enter into their database which should take me another 4 weeks from now.

As if that wasn't good enough news, I had another short term job opportunity come up doing office temp work for a company that someone I babysat for once works at. I'm working there Wednesdays 9 to 5 for 5 weeks. It's on the 12th floor of a building in the middle of the city so I get amazing views while I'm at work and I'm able to have lunch down on the waterfront which is pretty awesome.

Aside from that I turned 19 yesterday, an age at which nothing exciting happens whatsoever. I went out for dinner at a nice Japanese place with family last night and plan to go to town with friends tonight which could be a slightly dangerous venture.

That's about all that's happened in the last couple of months of life in NZ. The next post will be about my trip to Sydney.

One Month at "Home"

It's been just over a month since I touched down in Wellington airport. In all honesty not a whole lot has happened since I got back. It's a little weird having nothing to do for the first time ever and having to actively seek employment to fill in time as much as for the money. Nothing much has changed around Wellington in the time I was away. Friends have found new hang out spots and social routines that I'm enjoying becoming a part of.

It seems strange to be back in a place that's changed so little in the last year while I've changed dramatically. I see things from a new perspective so it's almost like experiencing them anew. Probably the easiest way for me to tell I'm seeing things in a whole new light is the amount of poetry I've written since I've been back. I've been writing almost every day and have at least 6 poems written in the last few weeks that I've redrafted and edited to a point where I'm entirely happy with them. Having a proper writing desk set up in the corner of my room is definitely helping that cause.

Exploring the bar scene is proving to be quite enjoyable also. There's a lot of live music around town on a weekly basis and it's generally pretty good. Aside from music, I go to a pub quiz in town every Thursday night which is a lot of fun. I also discovered an interesting pool hall down a side street which is an awesome hang out spot and pretty chill place. I went there with some friends when we were in town a couple of weeks ago on a Friday night. They have a bunch of free play pool tables set up and at the time they had a band playing who were decent followed by a DJ who also wasn't bad. All in all it's fun being a part of the night scene for the first time ever.

I really haven't been motivated to do a whole lot and pretty much all the socializing I've done has been people inviting me to things and me just saying yes to everything which is kind of nice. There are people I'd like to see that I haven't bothered to contact yet but it's taking me a long time to begin to adjust to being back here. When I'm totally comfortable with everything that's going on with me, I'll step out and initiate things myself. Until that happens, I'll do what I have to do for me and go with the flow whenever friends invite me out to do stuff.

Skype is a wonderful thing and I'm really enjoying being able to talk to Blair (girlfriend) and other people from Wisconsin to keep up with what they're up to over summer and such. I don't know what I'd do without it, probably mope a whole lot more. As they enter into their preparation camps for marching band and show choir I'm once again reminded of how much I love those things and how much I miss them now. It's a weird feeling after having lived 17 and a half years in total ignorance of their existence. Now, I'd do anything to be able to have one more season with either of them.

The most challenging part of the first month at home has been keeping myself entertained. After a couple of weeks, sleeping past noon and not leaving the house terribly often kind of gets old. The next few months of life are probably going to be taken up by work which hopefully means they'll go a lot faster than this last one has and I'll be able to put money away to go towards my return to Wisconsin.

Oh, I almost didn't mention that we got a kitten a couple of weeks after I got back. She's beautiful, mostly black with white feet and underside. I chose her and decided on a name that Blair suggested: Sasha. I think it fits her perfectly. She's annoying as anything and constantly knocks everything in the house that she can down from where it's supposed to sit but she makes up for it by being adorable.

That's pretty much the important parts of the first month covered. I'm excited to start work at Mcdonald's on Tuesday this week and excited to get paid this week for a couple of odd days I did temping in an office last week. I'm working 12 hours this week, so nothing at all strenuous but enough to get paid decently for it. Hopefully I'll pick up more shifts after I finish training.

Returning

As our plane began to land in Auckland, I was hit by an overwhelming mixture of feelings. There was excitement at being back in a familiar country and not feeling so brutally alone any more, there was sadness as I realised how ridiculously far away I now was from everyone and the amount of time it would be before I'd be able to return and there was pure exhaustion in every sense of the word. I very nearly cried as we touched down. It's nigh on impossible to try and describe the emotional roller coaster involved with returning to the land you grew up in after spending ten and a half months on the other side of the world.

By the time we actually got off the plane in Auckland, I had one thing on my mind, duty-free booze. Chelsea and I were both fairly anxious to put our new legality to good use as soon as we possibly could so we both stopped in at the first duty-free store we saw. I picked up a bottle of J.D. for my mum and a bottle of vodka for myself. Being able to walk into a bottle store, pull bottles off of the shelf and buy them was a hugely empowering feeling. At this point I was more than happy about New Zealand's 18 yr old drinking age, although it's little consolation for being so far away from everything I've grown to love about Wisconsin.

Once we had our alcohol, we claimed our luggage and cleared customs. I was extremely pleased to see that my guitar hadn't sustained any damage in transit. We didn't have much time after clearing customs before those of us that were catching domestic flights had to be at our gates. We said our goodbyes before rushing through customs as fast as we could without looking suspicious and walked the 15 minute trek from the international terminal to the domestic. Chelsea and Baylee were both stopping in Auckland, so walking to the domestic terminal with me were Lily and Laura. Lily was flying to the south island and Laura was flying into Palmerston North. 

The other two weren't sure on their domestic flight details whereas I had all my ticketing information with me so I left them at the information desk once we got there. I checked in my bags, said a quick goodbye to the other two who had managed to sort out their flights and went up to my gate, where my flight was due to board in five minutes. I was, once again, brutally alone. I'm not ashamed to admit that as I sat by myself for the first time during the whole travelling process, waiting for a flight to my final stop, I broke down in tears. Exhaustion set in and the excitement of plane hopping across the world had all but worn off, it's fair to say that this was pretty much the low point of the long trip back.

On the flight back to Wellington, I had another beer and a small packet of chips. As the city lights came into view and the plane began it's descent over Miramar, I had tears of joy in my eyes. I'd missed this place immensely and here I was, flying over the ocean, minutes away from reunion with my family and friends.

I knew it was going to be a long time before I got used to being back and that once normality set in, I was probably going to go through a relatively rough time but in  that moment, I was back after the experience of a lifetime. I was excited to have the opportunity to share the new and improved me with the people who had known the old me. I felt like a much more fulfilled person than when I left, I had found a part of me that had always been missing.

I stepped off the plane and was greeted by my mother and a group of five friends who had been at the airport to see me off back in August of last year. Emotion set in again and I cried in the arms of my mother, for want of a land I knew I would see again but would have to wait far too long to return to.

The journey back to New Zealand was physically,mentally and emotionally draining. I've never left so much, so far behind in my life and it's a tough thing to deal with. I know I'll go back, I left far too much of myself in Fort to not go back, I'm somewhat rooted there. I will also, however, make the most of this brief homecoming and take my time to reacquaint myself with the land I once called home.