The service at the Cook Islands Christian Church did not disappoint…
The service was mostly in the local Māori dialect, but every now and then we got a little explainer so we could sort of keep up. The church, built in the 1820s, was the standard rectangle shape. But the altar was in the middle of the long side… religion in the round.
The best was the singing. Here’s a couple of snippets:
The choir / congregation was always led out by a startlingly beautiful, keening soprano voice. Then everyone else joined in, one part at a time. Magic. And they sang every verse of every hymn, so you really got the experience. I never saw a conductor, but there may have been one around the other side.
We got our money’s worth… a full hour and a half. The sermon was about David, and how even when the world is against you, God is still with you. Seems like a good philosophy… although I can’t help thinking that the ruling class would really really like the workers to buy into it.
It’s not actually Bali, but “Aitutaki hai” doesn’t have the same ring to it.
We are joining a dozen other ocean swimmers, three of whom we know, for a week in this particular version of paradise.
How do you know you’re on a tropical island? Roosters everywhere! However, for reasons shrouded in legend, there are no dogs allowed on Aitutaki. This is a good thing.
Aitutaki is part of the Cook Islands, which is technically a country but very tied to NZ. We flew 3 1/2 hours to the main island, Rarotonga, and then another 40 minutes to Aitutaki. There are about 2,000 residents, and something like 40,000 visitors per year.
Our bungalow is about where the yellow dot is. Here’s our view…
Today I’ll start with attending a service at the Arurangi Cook Islands Christian Church, the oldest church in the Pacific apparently, renowned for its singing and the ladies with their flowery hats. Then a short afternoon swim.
We had a few minor snafus getting in and settled last night. But they helped speed up our mental adjustment to being on island time. As our tour leader explained… everything works out here, but almost nothing goes according to plan.
… when there’s a perfectly good chase scene in a movie or show and suddenly they turn the corner and there’s a marching band?
Well, I’ve now experienced it in real life. Minding my own business in between sessions on a work-adjacent trip to the Capitol this week, I turned a corner and there’s the Falun Dafa crowd, holding their own parade, with a big marching band and anti-CCP banners and all the rest.
I don’t have a clue about the actual issues in their long feud. The Falun Dafa people look sort of dimly harmless doing their exercises, so if they really are being tortured and enslaved and having their organs harvested, that should stop!
Normally there’s plenty of rain in Wellington, somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 inches a year. So water hasn’t been something to worry about… they don’t even have water meters.
But last summer was dry, and people had to start conserving a little bit. For someone who grew up in Southern California, the water restrictions imposed on Wellingtonians were laughably easy to comply with, but the whole thing made them very upset.
It came to light that something like a quarter of all their water was being lost to leaks. And that without a substantial increase in local taxes, there’s no way those leaks are getting fixed this decade. It’s never been a problem so they just kind of let things get a bit out of hand.
I’d never noticed the many leaks before, but you know what? They’re everywhere down there!
There’s more political context… one of the divisive issues in the last election was the Labour Party trying to a do a big, difficult, expensive thing to make water infrastructure better and more fair. They lost bigly to the National Party who said, Nah, let’s just cut taxes and the infrastructure will sort itself out.
So, the rains came back, and the people sorta forgot / gave up, and the water still gushes out of holes in the pipes.
I wish there was a happy ending here, or some way to not see this story as exactly what’s going on with lots of big expensive difficult issues we face as a society.
On my morning walk around Brisbane the sun shone golden through the mist. And in the evening the Story Bridge and the highrises turn the world into a futuristic fairyland.
Less than 36 hours after getting home from Dallas, I was back on a plane to Brisbane for a couple days of teaching software developers about the intricacies of sending health-related data between computer systems.
On the plane, I had to fill out the little arrival card that you always have to fill out when you go to a foreign country. Although NZ has recently digitized that, which is nice. But anyway, somehow, and I still don’t know how, that card disappeared. So, I was rooting around under the seat, trying to find it. I never did. But I did find a Starbucks gift card, and it turned out to have a $5 balance on it. So now I am at Starbucks, having a mocha and a croissant for breakfast. Of course that was way more than $5, but at least I got a discount.
My brother in law’s Ford Maverick hybrid truck, on the right, is a pretty good-sized vehicle in my view. But everything is relative: when we pulled into Whataburger, it was apparent just where we fit in the overcompensation hierarchy.
After we got to my niece’s house, everybody’s cell phone made the startling emergency warning noise… tornado warning!
In their snug home it didn’t seem that bad, so instead of taking shelter in an interior room, I stood by the window and took video of the wind. In hindsight, perhaps not the best idea.
A million people lost power, including us, but luckily we had a generator that kicks on automatically and runs off natural gas.
Once the storm passed we drove through the neighborhood and saw plenty of downed branches and water on the road. I stayed over with brother Frank, and there was less damage in his part of town.
I’m en route to Dallas for a week of standards development. That allows me a quick stopover in Houston to see the in-laws, including the bun in the oven that is very close to popping out and turning into my grand-nephew.
The flight was fine, and the Customs and baggage claim experience was amazingly fast. In fact the longest delay of the whole arrival was the 90 seconds or so that Mr. Customs Man spent staring intently at screens with my passport in hand. As far as I know, there are few people with less to worry about coming into the United States than me. So what was he looking at so carefully? No idea… At the end of this surprisingly nerve-wracking time, he just said thank you and waved his hand for the next person.
And so out to the curb while my ride navigates the traffic. It’s gray and the humidity softly slaps you like a sauna towel. There was a guy on the flight with a black cowboy hat and camouflage luggage, 6’4” and heavy, with a big bushy beard. I expected more like that, but here as we wait for our families and Ubers it’s mostly the same mix you’d see in Auckland, except with more Black people.
I had a 48-hour trip to Sydney earlier this week, a follow-up to the recent Melbourne jaunt. I stayed in a neighborhood I didn’t really know, although not all that far away from places I’ve been before. I got out for a couple of early morning walks… here’s some pics.
I saw a lot of architectural old-meets-new juxtaposition. I bet an architectural walking tour of Sydney would have really good examples of every style building from the 1880s to now.
The ibises are one of the most obvious reminders that you’re not in, e.g., Chicago.
Dead umbrellas.
This photo only works if you can zoom in to read the small sign on the door.
Street furniture. Someday I’ll look up why cities used these glass blocks, always now turning violet, in their sidewalks. Is it just to let in light to the basement?
This little plaque was part of a series on The Goods Line, which is a very cool space I walked along.
And finally… me helping one of the students in my class. Here’s what I look like in my usual habitat.
I visited Melbourne last week for work. What a vibrant and bustling city! Had a great time, plenty of good food, and the work thing went well. In the it’s-a-small-world category, I got to catch up with an Utah classmate from 25+ years ago with whom I will be working over the next year or so on a project.
I didn’t take a lot of pictures despite some nice walks and sunny days, but here’s a few.
There’s tonnes of art on the streets, some more academic, some less so.
“Commit no nuisance” in this alleyway.
A couple shots from the Queen Victoria market. I bought a hat from this shop on our first trip to Melbourne in 2017. I still like the idea of wearing a hat, even more so now that my scalp is mostly exposed to the sun’s evil rays. I think I look fine in a hat. But that said, I still look at an array of zillions of styles like this and walk away with nothing quite working.
In a place with so much nice early 20th century architecture, I expected more exciting access covers than I found. The design of this little water meter cover is workmanlike if not exactly snazzy.
Since joining the Bay2Bay swimming group I’ve heard about how great the Huka River swim is. Now I’ve done it and yes it is! We got a nice Airbnb room and made a weekend of it, along with about a dozen other Bay2Bay’ers.
The Huka flows out of Lake Taupō, starting just about 1km behind me in the picture above. It has a steady current which is regulated with a set of gates… sometimes they let out more water, sometimes less. The swim is with the current, so you can clock your fastest 3k ever.
The current was gentle – think lazy float with an inner tube – but a couple of km below where we got out, the river narrows to create the Huka Falls. The water is spectacularly blue and clear, and it’s close to the road, making for one of NZ’s most visited natural attractions. A few intrepid people have done the falls on a kayak… but mostly that’s just dumb.
That’s our gang on race day, including a couple of former members who’ve since moved away.
There were about 300 people altogether, supposedly divided into waves based on expected finish times. But I’m thoroughly average, and even more people think they’re average than actually are, so it felt like my wave was pretty big. The whole race was a jumble of other people’s elbows and feet for me. Meh.
After the race we did what we do even better than swimming…
In the afternoon many of us took a short hike and swim out to the Māori Rock Carvings, which are cool enough but would be even more impressive if they had been made in pre-colonial times.
We had a BBQ together at ‘the big house’ where many of the guys stayed (we were just fine having our own space, having registered for the event somewhat late).
The next day, I got up early and took the metal detector to the swim staging area. I figured 300 people squirming in and out of their wetsuits and clothing would yield some dropped treasure, but I didn’t find diddly.
Later, about half of us swam the course again, just leisurely this time. That was way better. We played around in the current, jumped off rocks, and even stopped for a soak in some hot springs that flow right into the river.
In the afternoon, Lee and I took the tourist boat trip back out to the carvings, where I confirmed previous experiments showing I can’t take good selfies.
Taupō is a tourist town pure and simple. There’s plenty of public art as you walk among the restaurants and souvenir shops, and if you turn your head, there’s the magnificent lake. I can certainly see the appeal of taking your family vacations there, but I think I would find it relatively confining after a relatively short time. I remember driving through Tahoe once and immediately thinking about living there… similar in a lot of ways.
Sunday afternoon when the others had left, we stopped at a glass-blowing studio and paid to walk around their glass sculpture garden. It was very nice among roadside attractions, but we’ve seen other glass sculptures and so this one didn’t thrill us as much as we’d hoped. Then we went to the geothermal spa pools at Wairakei, which was nice and relaxing.
It was our first weekend out of Auckland in quite a while, and we had a good time, a nice combo of hard swimming, chilling with friends, walking around and gawking at stuff, and doing nothing.
Next confirmed swim-cation is Aitutaki in September…
Four years (and a pandemic) later, the same conference happened in the same place. And so presented me with a prime chance to see how things are the same, and how they are different.
Last time, I was pretty snobby about Hamilton. I felt differently this time. The downtown seemed clean and spacious somehow. And although there are plenty of empty storefronts, there was also a lot of public art to catch my eye. A lot of the murals are recent… maybe an infusion of COVID relief arts funding?
The little plaza (actually a glorified vacant lot) where Riff-Raff stood is under construction, part of what looks like a pretty big project. But fear not, Transylvania fans, for Richard O’Brien now holds stiletto-heeled sway over the entrance to the Waikato Museum. It’s a spot where I would expect either a WWI memorial or an overly earnest pile of cubes and half-spirals.
I walked briskly along the river again, and the rowers are still there.
But I didn’t run around the lake, because even an hour of walking now leads to fluid leaking out of my knee joint. Time for my first ever surgery, methinks.
Last time, the big Christmas tree was just going up, but this time I got to see its full LED glory.
Last time, I gave a short talk and then manned the company booth. This year I led a 2-day workshop, manned the HL7 booth in my role as Chair, and then gave another talk yesterday. Movin’ on up…
Sadly, we didn’t get to go back to Hobbiton for the dinner. But supposedly next year…
All in all, a good trip. But I’m glad to be home in the hot tub.
Brattleboro Adventure – the Auckland Edition 