a hongi and a hangi

Tena koe!

As Maori Language Week draws to a close, I'm pleased to report I've done both of the above.

At the request of the author, we attended a book launch this week at the local tertiary college, which has its own marae (like a big ole meeting house), and they had The Whole Ceremony prior to the launch.

As you approach the marae as visitors, the hosts (in this case the staff of the college) issue a chant, the someone from the visitors' group responds. Then you're allowed through the gate and there's another chant and response, and you approach the building with lowered heads.

Inside, the speechifying begins - a man from the hosts gives a verrrrry long speech and then they sing a song, then a man from the visitors responds with a speech, and the visitors sing a song. Then it goes back to the host, speech and song, and the visitors again. It takes, in the words of a woman who taught at the institute who I sat with during the meal "as long as it takes"...and that is very true! (to another of our dinner companions, also a teacher at the college, she said "only two hours over time," to which the other lady responded "as usual...") Anyway after the multi-speeching, everyone sort of gets a bit more jolly and that's when the hongi is. All the hosts line up and you move along the line touching foreheads and noses or kissing on the cheek. It does rather feel as if you've very much met everyone.

Thereafter the book was blessed, and there were innumerable more speeches, and after that came the hangi. This is a great big meal of slow-cooked comfort food from a big underground oven (because this is the world of thin-crust Earth, with the bubbling mud and the sulphur and the geysers and the steam). It's meat and potatoes and kumara (root veg somewhere between potatoes and yams, sorta), and pumpkin, which btw is in EVERYTHING over here, and stuffing and good solid winter food, also with bread and jam and sponge cake in custard on the side.

Fortunately, the rather large hill in the picture is the very first thing I cycle up every single morning to get to work. So I can definitely afford to eat at a few more hangi.

information overload

Here in the world of dial-up, you can't just throw pictures in like there's no tomorrow. You have to choose carefully, because it will be twenty minutes before it uploads. Faced with a difficult choice: knitting or New Zealand? Though I know you'd really rather see the half-done emergency motley slippers (motley because using up ends of yarn, emergency because I'm so. freakin'. cold) I went for a rather spiffing aerial shot courtesy of Chris and a cable car up the mountain.

Yesterday's comedy moment is that the lock on the laundry room door has seized and we can't get in to retreive our clothes. This brings the total of non-working keys on our keyring to six: three are unidentified; the back door and front-door keys don't open either door, and now we can't get into the laundry room either. For your information, because I know you're wondering, we enter the house through the french windows, a situation whch is perfectly normal according to the rental company, who assure us that one has actually never been able to get into the house via the doors. So that's okay, then.

I have been reading New Zealand Unleashed, an exhausting non-fiction state-of-the-world-today book in my quest to get a handle on the new country. I have only got halfway through, and the first half relates only a little to NZ, mostly describing how the world is changing at an astonishing rate and we'd better hold onto our hats . The degree to which things are moving on according to this book leaves me utterly breathless and I have to keep taking breaks and read something else. Apparently in ten years we'll have all computers more powerful than anything NASA has now (turns out our current laptops outpace anything they had for Apollo 11) processing gajillions of megabytes a millisecond, while we're simultaneously genetically-modifying our in-utero babies and becoming ever-poorer as China takes over the world and NZ becomes an LEDC. We are all suffering from information overload, that is, having way too much choice and less-than-reliable information on which to base our decisions (for example, we see some random article on the possibility that eating apples can lessen your risk of breast cancer, so we feel we ought to read up and find more articles to see if it's true, spending time and energy getting half-useful information that we think we ought to find out because we might need it in the future).

The tone of the book makes me read in a panic, rushing through to find out all I think I need to find out (ironically), as the second half purports to tell us "how NZ should be" to cope with the upcoming changes. I certainly agreed, on our first big shopping trip the other day, with the overload of choice, when the supermarket has not a chilled fridge cabinet but an entire chilled ROOM containing solely cheese and margarine.

One fortunate thing is, I won't be suffering from choice-overload in knitting terms. A lady bought a knitting magazine in the bookshop the other day, so I asked her where in town was good for getting knitting supplies. She replied "Hamilton". That's a city over an hour and a half away. Hurrah.

colder than Saskatchewan

Seriously. What's up with New Zealand and heating? Haven't they heard of insulation? I can see my breath in our house this morning. I am currently shovelling down gobs of hot porridge as if it's going out of fashion, in a vain attempt to create some inner warmth.

One other reason I haven't been knitting much lately is that I've been trying to catch up with the NZ literature scene. I fell upon the two Fleur Beale books that I couldn't get in Canada and devoured them; oddly enough, both girls (one historical, one contemporary) experience the same Big Chill as I am at the moment. One is packed off to a remote island off the coast as part of a reality-tv show; the other lives in the "real" old world before - gasp - heating! I was so pleased to see that _A Respectable Girl_ won the NZ Post book award - such awesome writing, such characters. Seems to me that families are Beale's major strong point - she just gets it. The respectable girl of the title is actually a kick-ass, no nonsense girl who you wish you could be like but privately know you aren't. Being this cold - which, really, isn't anything like a 19th century cold, and I know it - rather puts it in perspective. I'd have no hope of being that girl; I'd be the miserable delicate one who makes everyone cross by whining about how cold she is all the time. Wouldn't have time for kicking any asses, putting any colonials in their place, or marching through the woods barefoot - I'd be the one poking at the fire all day and wishing she had more blankets.

To be honest, that's mostly what I'm doing right now. Sorry for letting down the kick-ass side.

so then what happened was...

...well, you know how it is. Some days you just get up and think, sod it, let's move to New Zealand.

Okay. There's a little bit more to it than that, but the long and the short of it is we are now down under enjoying (?) a New Zealand winter. Hence the lack of posts for a while. All that moving and packing and unpacking and repacking and getting rid of everything we own and spending all our money and hopping on a plane and hopping on another plane, and hopping on a third, really big plane, and hopping on a bus and hopping on another bus and winding up on the other side of the world. As you do.

But what you really want to know is...what have I been knitting?

Piccies next time. As soon as we are off dial-up and it takes less than five hours to upload one.

In fact it is a bit difficult to post pics because everything I am knitting is a Christmas present for someone. I've done two pairs of socks since last we met, but both have been sent on as birthday presents with nary a snap of either one of them. I decided to only chance taking big fat plastic short needles on the plane and so ended up with three pairs of slippers. Since they are for kids I can safely trust they won't be bothering to read this and only their mum might see them, and she can probably be trusted to keep the secret till Santa comes.

Off to chuck another log on the fire. Very odd to note that, although I am sitting practically on top of the fireplace, wrapped in a duvet, with rain and wind lashing the house and howling down the chimney, out of the window I can see a tree that is actually bearing oranges. What a crazy country.