In which we find ourselves in another part of the world
New Zealand’s phased removal of single-use plastics continues to take effect. Grocery bags went away completely a couple of years ago, and things like straws and cotton swabs more recently. The latest damaging product to be removed is produce bags.
Paper is available, but we bought some (plastic!) reusable mesh bags. I wonder how many uses they will need before we start actually reducing plastic usage.
I know it doesn’t seem like much if you’re from the American west or any number of other places… but this baby-pea-size hail was pretty unusual for here!
The Christmas cactus blooming for an unprecedented third time this year. I guess it’s been so dark and cold…
Last weekend we got to join Emily and Brian for a Women’s World Cup game at Eden Park.
It was the USA vs Vietnam, and the outcome was never in doubt. You know the phrase “they never had a shot at winning”? Well in this case it was literally true… the Vietnamese team never had a shot on goal. The American players were all a head taller, sometimes head and shoulders taller, and sometimes more like head, shoulders and sternum taller. And proportionately bigger. And more experienced, and so on.
But even if the game was a bit boring, the afternoon most certainly wasn’t. I haven’t seen so much starring and striping in a long time. These two ladies took it upon themselves to lead our section of the stadium in song throughout mist of the second half. The wave was very successful a couple of times. The Vietnamese fans were out in big numbers, and ready to get into chant wars with the Americans.
We ate a lot of junk food, but still went out for tacos and a scoop of Ben and Jerry’s afterwards.
Tonight, the NZ Football Ferns drew 0-0 against Switzerland, meaning they’re out of the tournament. But the USA is still in (as expected), so now we can root for them with undivided loyalty.
Thanks for the tickets, guys, we had a blast!
For a long time, Lee has had this question: what is it about truffles? We’ve had truffle-infused and truffle-sprinkled things from time to time, but it’s not like you can just sit down and eat a truffle to really understand the flavor of the thing. And to the extent you do taste the truffle in your food, does it actually just taste like dirt?
And besides, when you get truffles in a restaurant or a packaged product, what are you actually getting?
For answers to these questions, we booked into the truffle hunt and truffle lunch experience by Te Puke Truffles and Kitchen Takeover.
At the truffle farm, about a half hour from Tauranga in the smack dab center of kiwifruit orchard country, we met Maureen and Colin, above, along with Jed the alpha truffle dog, below.
We’ve been on guided foraging walks before, and that’s kind of what we were expecting here… but it wasn’t like that. Instead, the dozen of us guests sat on their back patio for about an hour and a half presentation about the farm, about truffles, dogs, and so on. We got coffee, and a little sample of truffle scrambled eggs, truffle ice cream, truffle butter (smoked and not), truffle honey and truffle salt. It was informative and quietly entertaining… they’ve done this talk a few hundred times and it flowed well.
After that, we got a demo of the younger dog, Sam, practicing his training. Under some of the flower pots is an old film canister with truffle in it, and they lead him around sniffing each one. If he smells truffles, he sits and gets a treat. Going in, I was really expecting something closer to slathering dogs setting out after wild boars, Game of Thrones style, but instead it was this sweet poodle mix clumping about on his leash and sitting down from time to time.
And then on to the main event. We walked through a couple of paddocks, past the sheep, ducks, and beehives. The truffière is about an acre, with 200 oak and hazelnut trees planted in a grid. We had to stay behind the fence lest we contaminate the holy ground.
The trees were inoculated with the magic truffle spore before planting (17 years ago) and the soil heavily amended with lime etc to replicate the conditions most favorable to truffle production. DNA analysis is undertaken regularly. Books have been read, and many farmers and ag experts consulted. But still there’s as much art as science in this… there’s a lot unknown about how to make the magic fruit appear. It took 7-8 years for the first truffles to appear, and each season is quite different.
Jed the dog meandered along for a few minutes and sat down. Could it be, after all the expectation-lowering warnings we’d had due to the ridiculously rainy spring and summer???
Yes! As you know from the picture at the top, they found a smallish truffle and then another. At between $1 and $3 per gram wholesale, even that little harvest represents a good day. But Maureen and Colin made it clear throughout the morning that this is a hobby that helps pay for itself more than a way to make a living.
We dutifully bought three little jars of honey, salt, and butter on the way out. All in all, it was a lovely morning, if a bit less athletic and grubby than I expected. We thought back to our own country living adventures in Fulton, MO, 30 years ago (!!), where we imagined a lamb and raspberry ranch. If we’d stuck with it, maybe we’d have something on the same scale and as pleasant as Te Puke Truffles. But man oh man, what a lot of work they’ve put in. I admire Maureen and Colin’s efforts but am satisfied that farm life wasn’t the path for me.
Next stop, back to Tauranga for the truffle lunch.
The lunch was at Sugo, which was just a block or two away from our hotel in a little dining precinct. We’ve seen the same thing everywhere in NZ… there’s a pedestrianized block or two full of restaurants. It always feels a bit too planned by a civic improvement committee, but I bet the formula works. Every visitor can go there and find dinner.
Anyway… the food was great, very truffley.
Considering it was the end of a holiday weekend, we felt pretty good about only spending about 20-30 minutes in heavy traffic on the way home.
Overall it was a great weekend!!
Weekend before last we drove the three or so hours south to Tauranga for an overnight getaway. Above is the boutique hotel we stayed in… the old Post Office building. It was quite nice. We appreciated the mocktails in the beautiful lobby bar as our Dry July experiment continues.
Google recommended this fish n chips place. We were warned of the wait, which made it slightly easier… but still it took a looong time. The food was good, but actually, we’ve never had fish n chips that was any better or worse than any other. One’s perception of fried fish in NZ might be all about the day one is having, I think.
We walked around downtown, sleepy on a Saturday afternoon in winter, even if it was a holiday weekend. Some pics…
And then we had a good Vietnamese dinner that nostalgically reminded us of the surprisingly good Vietnamese restaurant near Bradley Airport that we used to go to sometimes.
But Sunday was the main event… a truffle hunt! Next post.
I got to go to the MedInfo 2023 conference in Sydney the week before last.
After all the rain we’ve had in Auckland, the sparkling blue skies were very welcome. I did get in some good walking around.
The highlight of the trip looks a lot less glamorous in pictures (since I haven’t mastered the exuberant selfie)… seeing a whole bunch of colleagues and colleagues who’ve become friends. But here’s a shot anyway… people I worked with in the Philippines and haven’t seen in person for six or seven years. It was so nice to catch up!!
And one of the conference organizers was just finishing her doctorate at U of Utah when I started there 25 years ago. She now lives in Melbourne… making the world seem small and huge at the same time.
I can’t say I miss traveling for work all the time. But it sure beats 8 hours a day on Teams calls!!
It’s Tour de France time. Yay!!
Now that I have a smart trainer and a subscription to the BKool virtual cycling platform, I have access to the “Stage of the Day”, where I can go on the back patio and pedal away on a course that simulates the day’s Tour stage.
Usually they just give us a portion of the route, since 7 hours on the stationary bike is not something most people do. But for today’s short individual time trial stage, I got to do the same effort as the pros. 22.6 km, with 644 metres of climbing. That’s a fair bit of climbing, actually, an average grade of almost 5%. But in reality it was two steep climbs and some flat / downhill bits in the middle.
It took me about 1:08… not my absolute best effort but pretty darn close. By comparison, the slowest TdF rider was just over 43 minutes. That includes riders who crashed, and riders who were told to save it all up for tomorrow. Even if I were riding on perfectly flat ground many of the riders would have smoked me.
And of course I would have been much slower in real life. On the trainer there’s no penalty for my civilian-quality equipment, my suboptimal aero position , or my cowardice through the corners. No heat, no wind.
I think I would enjoy watching the Tour anyway, but being able to see and feel just how amazing the riders are definitely adds another dimension.
And the race? I like Tadej more than Jonas, but I like Jonas’s Jumbo team more than the UAE squad. So I’m looking forward to a few more days of combat but either way works for me.
I saw five rainbows in one day last weekend… definitely a record!
That picture is from my recently deleted Untappd profile. 351 distinct brews over the last eight years… and that’s just the ones I actually recorded. Some of them are ranked among the best in the world. Others are deemed ordinary at best.
And it doesn’t count the cocktails and wines.
Lee’s story is similar… more wine than beer but otherwise the same. Every occasion includes a tipple of one sort or another.
So, time for a considered pause. Dry July is a thing here. Sometimes people use the occasion to raise money for a worthy cause, and others, like us, just use the catchy name for motivation.
So, we packed up the entire liquor cabinet and gave it to our housekeeping team, who were well pleased. So pleased in fact that they brought us this beautiful cake, complete with a cute spelling mistake. (although I’m not normally the kind of person to touch things that you shouldn’t, there was just something irresistible about that purple icing which turned out to be a lot more smudge-prone than I expected)
We’re two weeks in today, and so far so good. Hopefully we can last the whole month, and then we’ll see…
I woke up the other morning to find the cat acting a little strange. Normally, when she brings us a live present, she’s chasing it around and meowing a lot. But this time she just stared fixedly at a corner behind a bookcase.
Sure enough, the morning’s entertainment, an awfully large rat, was hunkered down, trying to catch its breath. I fished it out with a stick, and the chase was back on.
Man can those little guys run, and climb, and jump! Even with me and Misty coordinating our efforts, we chased it around without success for half an hour before I finally figured out to open the door and shoo the poor nasty creature outside. Whew!
To celebrate Jono’s big 100k swim, the Bay2Bay swim group took up a collection to give him a Māori carved greenstone pendant or taonga. Taonga means a lot of things, but the most common translation seems to be “treasure”.
You see these pendants fairly commonly in NZ… they are traditionally a symbol of respect and esteem, and are to be gifted to the wearer rather than bought by them. Greenstone (pounamu) was important and valuable in pre-colonial Māori life both for making sharp tools and weapons and for jewelry.
Jono’s taonga is carved in the form of a hammerhead shark. That creature symbolizes any number of big-predator virtues: strength, speed, leadership, etc. I’d say Jono has all those things… without being the least bit predatory!
Because of its cultural significance, there are strict rules and customs attached to any greenstone artifacts. You’re supposed to deal directly with the Māori landowners, only use properly recognized carvers, and make sure that the proper blessings are offered along the way so that the stone’s connection to the earth is honored. The picture below shows the blessing ceremony that was held a few weeks before the presentation.
Scott, who is doing the presentation and took a big role in organizing the whole thing, has Māori heritage and is active in Māori life. He had the connections to make sure this taonga has all the right vibes.
On the one hand, it’s a lot of silly hocus-pocus. But on the other, I’m super-glad we went to the extra trouble (and expense). Jono didn’t put himself through the madness of swimming for 33 hours just to show off his big lats… he wanted to use his loudest voice to remind us that we must regain a closer connection to the non-human parts of the planet.
Amen.
This is what it looked like a few minutes before I jumped in for a swim at Mairangi Bay last month.
There are any number of foods that divide the world in two: fruitcake, okra, minty peas, haggis, durian… you love them or, mostly, you don’t.
And in music, it’s the bagpipes, penny whistle, and those pan-pipe things played by Peruvian buskers. But the king of divisive instruments must surely be the accordion.
I’ve always had a fondness for accordion music. I mean, not all the time or anything, but I find accordions to be very expressive and versatile instruments. And I like fruitcake too so maybe I’m just wired differently.
Last month, the Auckland Philharmonia put on a concert featuring the work Dragspil by NZ composer Lyell Cresswell, featuring James Crabbe, for whom it was originally written 30 years ago. So we had to go (or rather I had to go and Lee is a good sport).
Overall, the concert was fine. But from where we were sitting in Auckland’s Town Hall, we couldn’t really hear well enough to know what the accordion was doing. The music is very complicated and very modern, and of course completely unfamiliar to us. So I kept wondering was that an accordion flourish or some oboe thing that was supposed to be in the background? Dunno.
Glad we went of course, but like other ‘special’ tastes, the classical accordion will require more study in order to be fully appreciated.
Brattleboro Adventure – the Auckland Edition 