Miss and Won't Miss (Written in July of 2012)

Now that the end of our stay in New Zealand is drawing near, we think more and more about what we will miss about living here.  And what we won't!  Sometimes it helps to put some mental distance between yourself and something you love when you know you have to leave it behind.  So my list of what I won't miss is first:

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• Squeegeeing the floor of the shower every time we use it - the pan doesn't drain properly so 2-3 minutes of using the squeegee to get all the water down the drain is required
• Electric range - this is a lame glass/ceramic one that won't simmer
• Windows that don’t open - in our large 2 storey apartment we have no windows in our downstairs (bedrooms and main bath) that open.  It's either open the french doors all the way (due to wind they have to be secured open) or nothing. 
• No everyday organic options except milk
• Lack of variety in stuff
• Having the same line at the movie theater for tickets and concessions - this is our ha ha beef, but it is annoying
• Coffee prices and routinely paying 50 cents extra to have decaf, which I normally drink
• Lame chocolate chips - I can't explain this, but there is no semi-sweet chocolate, or bittersweet.  The dark chocolate found in the chocolate chips is really bland. 
• Lame Mexican food. Lack of salsa.
• Wind
• Red wine we like for under $10 - even at NZD prices we should be able to find stuff under $15, but so far, only a couple of Spanish ones do the trick.  For all the wine here, we have not found much NZ red that we like, and what we do like is all more than $25/bottle
• Internet service - oi it is slow!  and expensive!  You actually have to keep track of how much you download. 
• Paying 15% tax on all our food (on everything) - hey, we are all for the benefits of taxes.  But GST on fresh food is so regressive.  
• Having a glass dining table.  It is never clean.  
• Paying $90+ to fill up the car with petrol.  Hey, I think gas should be this expensive at home.  But I'm not going to miss it!  
• Everyone wearing the same black Kathmandu down jacket (this goes along with lack of variety)
• Kiwi accents (hmm, should I publish this one?)

 What I will miss: 

• Lack of variety in stuff - the same thing that is irritating is also kind of nice.  When you only have one option, things are easy. 
• Electric blankets - I don't know if we will bring ourselves to buy these at home.  But maybe we will.  The trick for doing it with our central heating in Seattle is to turn down the heat for the whole house and get into bed earlier with the electric blanket.  Not sure that is really doable. 
• Vogel’s bread - this is the best store-bought sandwich bread ever.  Ever! 
• Electric kettle - again, I don't know if we'll do this at home.  But they are so nice.  And fast. 
• Abundant art festivals
• Free museums
• fantastic coffee (that is something, coming from a Seattleite)
• Eggs
• Not working
• Sav we like
• Having books available at the library and movies and CDs
• Having tax and “tip” included in dining out bills
• Everyone wearing the same black Kathmandu down jacket
• A compact city where we can walk to everything easily
• amazing air quality
• Maori Kiwi accents
• Afternoons with Jim Morra on Radio NZ National

Olig Snush Died

Well, Olig Snush and Blueberry died. Apparently they didn't like the words that Ari Pierson Kanter was saying (Ari Pierson Kanter the engine). They are not coming back to life - they're just gone. Dutch and Dump, who are dump trucks, are sad about the demise of their friends. It's weird to be a parent and be attached to some imaginary person/thing your child has dreamed up. Evan and I were pretty fond of the concept of Olig Snush, particularly his name.

Luckily, Ari's main imaginary friend, Al, lives on. Al's parents come and go, but Al endures and has for over a year now. Al is in New York right now - staying in a hotel for a while, but maybe tomorrow he's going to come back. Al is going to give Ari four and half loogiers for Christmas because Ari lost his road bike. "I'm so sad that I lost my road bike" he says. "I want to get a new purple bike." Ari is going to give Al a new train set for Christmas. It will include Molly, Gordon, Henry and James.

Dutch and Dump had everyone over (including "Junior") for dinner this afternoon. They served french fries and "chicken meat." Dump had been in Africa and couldn't make it to Seattle but everyone missed him and he came back. Apparently Junior always makes a huge mess.

There has always been more to say about Al and about Anna, who became Ari's female alter-ego for a while at age 4 (or perhaps she arrived while Ari was still 3), but I had never gotten around to writing it, which is why this post sat languishing in the Drafts folder for years and years. I love reading something I wrote back in 2009 about a time in our lives that I never think about now.

Anna showed up on a trip to Vancouver, in a hotel room where we stayed near Simon Fraser University when Evan was giving a talk there. We aren't sure what exactly led to her arrival, but she was there "to clean the room" and unlike Al, she was not a friend. She was Ari. Looking back, Ari must have been 3, because there was still an issue with his sleeping habits in new places, and I have a memory of a mattress on the floor in a corner of the room, which seems to be something we did back then - put the kid on the floor because maybe we worried he would fall out of a bed?

When Anna would appear, Ari was always very clear that "I'm Anna" and Anna would hang around for a while, do various kinds of imaginary play (often cleaning but sometimes just talking), and then be replaced, without explanation or announcement, by Ari. We used to chuckle about it. Ari didn't appear to be trying on a "girl" persona or behavior - he was just a different person who happened to be female from time to time.

Al came along to New Zealand with us, but he started spending less time with us after we got there. I'm not sure exactly when Al departed. He had been spending some time in China, and he slowly faded out of the picture after Ari started school. When we would ask, we were told that Al was traveling a lot.

It is now July of 2017 and I discovered my original draft of this post after not having looked at this blog for several years. It had ended after the information that Junior always makes a mess. Evan called me from work just as I had started to write about Anna, and so I read him everything I'd written up to that point. I was laughing so hard as I read it that tears were streaming down my face. As funny as it was, of course they were not just tears of laughter. Listening to Evan's reactions on the phone, and feeling my own, it was hard not to experience some serious nostalgia and a little heartbreak about the kid that doesn't exist in our current time/space plane -- preschool Ari. We wonder if he would remember Al a little, as we both know he wouldn't have any memories of the rest of it. I can't ask him until tomorrow because he's at summer camp, something he's been doing for the last 5 years now. Just this morning I had this thought while scanning the posted camp photos -- that he's not a little kid anymore. Not by a longshot.

So it is probably perfect timing that Olig Snush and Dump and Dutch and Al and Anna have come to pay me a visit today. They are proof that what we imagine is real in a way, and what is real can also seem imagined. Memories recall real times that are no longer. They live on in our imaginations and are a beautiful reminder that one day is never really like another.

Tucker and Tate

Last night I was doing laundry and noticed the label on a couple of Ari's shirts that I had picked up at Nordstrom last year.  "Tucker and Tate."  How upper middle class.  How Nordstrom.  What's the chance of the "Jaden and Jerome" line?  How about "Rigoberto and Ibrahim?"  Yes, when I think of Tucker and Tate, I also think "how White." 

And what is the girl equivalent?  (Not having a girl, and not regularly kid-clothes-shopping at Nordstrom, I'll have to guess.)  Emma and Olivia?  Or is it Emma and Abigail?  I'm sure it's not Laisha and Yasmin.  Or  Crystal and Amber.  So trashy white girl. 

So Tucker and Tate.  Is that who Nordstom shoppers are, or who they aspire to be? 

Avulsion Fracture of the Olecranon

Possibly the last photo I'll have of myself with a completely straight left arm.

January 23, 2011.  Or to use the Kiwi convention, 23 January 2011.  I wonder how long it will take me to forget the date on which I broke my left elbow.  Just a few minutes after this photo was taken, while riding my (rented) bike on the Central Otago Rail Trail, I slipped in some deep gravel at one side of the trail and went down with my bike.  Or off my bike.  Or something.  I honestly don't remember the hitting the ground with my arm part, but I do remember that horrible feeling of "oh no, I am about to go down here."  Next thing I knew I was curled up on my side, having hit my head (I think), left shoulder, arm, hip and left knee on the ground.  I must have put out my left arm to stop my fall, because my injury was consistent with that.  You put your arm out straight, wrist braces you, triceps tendon becomes quite taut and is strong enough to rip off the point of your elbow, which it does in a nice clean break. Once on the ground I immediately began yelling "I'm OK, I'm OK" despite not really feeling OK, because I didn't want Ari and Evan to worry.  Ari was riding in a recumbent tagalong behind Evan's bike, which had been working really well, and the last thing I wanted was for them to crash because they were twisting their heads to look at me.  Fortunately, they stopped without incident.  I sat up and felt a lot of pain in my left arm, but it wasn't obviously out of shape or anything, so I didn't know what might have happened.  Evan came over to feel it and said "I think you may have dislocated it.  See, feel here -- a piece feels like it's missing."  I reached over to touch the back side of my elbow, the part I couldn't see, and felt a bit sick.  Something was definitely wrong.  Nothing for it but to get to an Emergency Room.  Pretty soon I insisted that they ride up to the next town to get help, and I sat by my bike trying to get over feeling nauseated and dizzy.  It was a hot day with no shade on the trail, and I didn't relish the thought of sitting in the sun with no protection while in this much pain, so after about 5 minutes or so I managed to get myself onto my bike and ride the remaining 5k to the next town on the trail.  The same feature of the bike that, in my opinion, led in part to the accident (extremely low entry frame - see photo),

allowed me to hoist myself up onto the seat using only one hand on the bars and holding my left arm awkwardly against my side, ride S-L-O-W-L-Y off the trail using only my front brake.  I was lucky that the trail sloped just slightly downhill at that point, so I barely had to pedal and barely had to brake (as you might guess, I was really nervous about braking with the front brake only and sending myself flying off the bike again). Anyway -- I managed it, somehow, and arrived just in time to find Evan and Ari setting off with our host/coordinator and another friend to pick me up.  On to the doctor I went -- apparently it wasn't obvious enough to take me right to the ER for an X-Ray, so I saw the GP on call in the small town of Alexandria, who sent me to the hospital at Clyde, the next town over, to find out what was going on with my elbow.

It was a hot weekend afternoon, so the place was completely empty except for me and the girl I'd shared the GP's waiting room with -- she'd been stepped on by a horse.  The ED (here they call it "Emergency Department") staff were really friendly and of course let me see the X-ray as soon as it was done. Ooooooh!!  Something looked wrong there for sure. The whole "point" of my elbow was up behind my humerus, as if it had been flipped back like a lid on a shampoo bottle.  Kind of like this →

They told me I'd need to go to the ED in Dunedin to see about having surgery, but as it was Sunday evening and the scrapes on my arm would doubtless need more cleaning, etc, I might as well just wait until the next morning to go there.  That seemed fine to me, as it was now after 6 pm and we were hungry and tired and exhausted, and I didn't want to hassle with finding a place to stay in Dunedin.  So the ED folks put my arm in a backslab cast and gave me a sling, and our hosts took us back to the small house we'd rented from them.  It was lovely and comfortable and boasted 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms and was more luxury than we needed, and somehow, I made some dinner while Ari went outside and jumped on the trampoline with Evan.  I was taking only ibuprofen and paracetamol but I guess it was fairly stable once it was immobilized and I was able to tolerate the pain with the help of a glass of wine.  It was quite nice having my own bedroom all to myself, and I managed to do OK sleeping.  

Ari & Evan hanging out with me in the Dunedin ED

Doesn't look so bad here, but yes, swollen

The next few days in Dunedin were spent with part of each day in the ED meeting that day's nurses and the orthopedic surgery registrars (residents) and having my wounds cleaned and re-dressed and a new plaster half-cast made every time.  Luckily we had planned to be in Dunedin anyway.  The registrars didn't want to do surgery for a few days in order to lessen any chance of infection from my skin abrasions mucking up the incision, so I decided I might as well wait and have the surgery back in Wellington when I arrived home a few days later.  Little did I know how that would pan out . . . . I bought some cheap fleeces and vests at a huge used clothing place in Dunedin - end of Jan can still be fairly chilly on the coasts of the S Island so I wanted some things I could cut off part of the left sleeves from - and I was thankful to have the distractions of seeing yellow-eyed penguins at the reserve on the Otago Peninsula, and immense albatross flying overhead that same evening, and the Cadbury chocolate factory to distract me from my discomfort and from not being able to move my left arm.  That immobility, more than pain, was what really bothered me during that time before surgery.  When Ari had broken his arm a couple of months previously, Evan and I had both commented on how we had never broken bones other than fingers or toes and had no idea what it was like to wear a cast and not be able to move.  Well, now I knew, and I hated it!  

Yellow Eyed Penguin wading out of the surf at the end of a long day of fishing

On the way back to Wellington we stopped in again at the Buskers Festival in Christchurch and enjoyed another night of performances.  Ari's favorite was a great physical circus/aerial act called Campground Chaos, which entertained us with amazing acrobatics and fun Kiwiana.  And I have never seen muscles like those on one of the performers, who was quite adept at cracking a giant bullwhip.  Apparently hanging out with a whip, and literally hanging out, gets one quite a six-pack. 

Check out image #30 in this set, for example (the fire eater).

The best thing, if there can be said to have been one, about when I broke my elbow, was that my mom arrived in New Zealand while we were still on the South Island.  The plan had been that she'd meet us in Picton and we were going to do a couple of days on the Queen Charlotte Track.  Instead, we had her stay in Wellington to await our return home, which we did a day later.  What a godsend!  Ari's school was about to begin and I could not really use my left arm.  Although thankfully I hadn't broken my right, I soon learned how many things require that second arm as a steadier, or a helper.  No using a knife, since I couldn't hold still the thing being cut.   No tying shoes.  No putting my hair in a ponytail.  No driving obviously.  

We  returned to Wellington on a Friday and reported in to the orthopedic clinic at Wellington Hospital.  More X-rays.  More waiting.  We were told it would probably be a couple of days before I could get in for surgery, as my injury was stable.  Not to belabor this, but that was the understatement of the year.  I ended up waiting a week, so that the total wait between breaking my elbow and having it “fixed” was 10 days.  During this time I was in a half cast with my arm in a sling and luckily in moderate, rather than severe pain.  The worst day was when I showed up at the hospital and was told early in the morning that I would be scheduled for surgery that day.  I was made to put on a hospital gown, and for the convenience of the registrar, or the nurse, I had an IV drip put in my arm, even though no one knew when I might actually hit the operating table.  Of course, this was now the 2^nd or 3^rd time I had been told the night before to forego all food and drink after midnight “just in case.”  There was nowhere for me to wait at that point, so I sat, in my hospital gown, on a guerney in the waiting room of the ortho clinic.  After an hour and a half, we asked about possibly moving and I was placed in the post-op room, where at least I had a bed.  However, having a bed here meant nothing, and I was basically ignored all day.  My requests about what the likelihood and timing of surgery might be went unanswered.  Eventually at 5:30 I demanded to see the orthopedic registrar on duty.  When he showed up, the first thing he said was “you should get dressed and go home.”  At that point, Evan and I both lost it.  The registrar kept saying “I understand” when we started complaining about the lack of communication  with the surgical team, and Evan started yelling at him – “No you DON’T understand!”  I have rarely seen Evan so pissed off.  We both told off the registrar and  got ourselves out of there.  That night, the consultant surgeon called us to apologize and promised that I would have surgery the next day.  True enough, on February 1, 2011, it finally happened.  Two pins and a figure 8 wire were wrapped around my olecranon.   It was Ari’s first day of school.  Again, I was unbelievably lucky to have my mom visiting.  Our negative impression of Wellington Hospital continued when I ended up staying in the hospital many more hours than necessary (I was there overnight for 2 nights) because the nurse forgot to start the IV antibiotic that I needed several doses of before I could leave.  Otherwise, it wasn’t memorable.  I went home with a half-cast and sling again but was told that in about a week I’d have the cast off and would need to start moving it.  That proved fortunate, because it allowed me to get on a plane less than 2 weeks after surgery and hike the Milford Track.  My two knights in shining armor, Evan and Edwin, carried much of my gear so that I was able to do the trip with only a large (full) daypack.  The sling became a kind of talisman for the trip, and I kept my arm in in most of the time.  

Crossing Lake Te Anau to the start of the Milford Track - 2 weeks after surgery

However, it was great to be able to take my arm out of the sling for helping with my balance on steep downhill parts of the track – basically the entire 3^rd day.  A blowup pillow under my arm helped me to sleep, as did earplugs and just the right amount of fatigue.  Evan kept reminding me I had just had major surgery and not to be surprised that I was tired, or sore.  Mostly I felt great.  

Over the next few months, I made progress on getting my left arm to straighten out, going to physical therapy after a while and gradually becoming able to lift things, put weight on it, and have a useful degree of range of motion.  By the time my mom left in mid-March, I was just starting to drive.  Even so, the pain persisted, especially while sleeping, and I slept with a pillow under my arm almost always.  It ended up being  much more of a mental drain than a physical one in some ways, because of the pain.  My arm was keeping me from driving, from lifting anything heavy, from running (too painful), from enjoying sex (paranoia about my arm hurting and it was always getting in the way, not being able to put any weight on it, etc), from sleeping on my left side, from being able to put my hair in a ponytail (I cut it short again) and then of course I couldn't do other things like kayak or bike or ride scooters with Ari or whatever.  I was definitely not in a space where I wanted to pursue anything other than getting physically better, and the timing was bad too -- I had gotten hooked up with Forest and Bird, one of the big conservation organizations here to do some more "high level" volunteering on projects through a former MP that we know here, and then just as I was supposed to start I had my arm in a cast for 3 weeks and couldn't type for longer than that, so I had to forego working for them.  Mentally I just wasn't there and ready to commit to exploring some of the things I had planned, which was disappointing.  In fact, the being mentally sidelined for several months really contributed to my wanting to stay here for another year.  Who knows?  Maybe that ended up being a blessing in disguise, although I'm guessing I would have agreed to stay, when Evan started suggesting it, even if I hadn't broken my elbow. 

Waiting to go in to surgery

On July 1st, 2011, I had a second surgery to remove the metalware in my elbow.  Thankfully this was able to be a scheduled surgery, done in a private hospital, rather than having to wait to have it done at the public hospital.  Basically, the surgery is so low on the totem pole of things that need to get done in an orthopedic surgery, that it would just never get done at the public hospital.  The consultant who supervised the initial surgery did the second one (a registrar did the first one of course - teaching hospital) and it was all quite easy.  In and out of my fabulous private hotel-style room in a day, with much less pain and swelling than the first surgery.  I'm not sure I even took any prescription pain meds afterwards.  (Did I mention that ALL of the medical care related to my elbow, multiple emergency room visits in those first days, two surgeries, follow ups, etc was free?  Free.  Under New Zealand's accident compensation scheme, you are entitled to free care for any injury that is the result of an accident.  Whether or not you are a resident, a citizen or a tourist.  Apparently even mosquito bites are considered to be accidents!  A fall from a bike definitely is.  So ultimately it is hard to complain too much about the wait I had for my surgery.  If we had opted to use our private insurance, I would likely have had it done a few days earlier, but in the big scheme of things, the wait didn't affect the outcome.) 

A year after the break, I had about 95% range of motion in my elbow and no real lingering problems.  However, my arm will never go completely straight, and it still is sore from time to time, and weaker than the other one.  I can do pushups though, and I've managed to get back on a bike without too much worry (although I still cannot really deal with the sound of bike tires on gravel and I have only road-biked).  I'm still wary of steep downhills when hiking, because I fear slipping and landing hard on my left arm, but otherwise I don't think about it.  This far out, it's hard to remember how painful it was for many months, and how it interfered with my life.  I just hope to never do it again. 

What's It Like Living In New Zealand (the short random version)

It is irritating to read that my last post was September 7, 2011.  Getting some more writing done is the main thing I regret not having done since we've been here.  I am SURE that is all going to change this week.  Sure, sure, sure.
Meanwhile, and if it doesn't, here at least are some thoughts I had about New Zealand in response to questions that were asked of an American friend of mine here by an American contemplating moving to NZ.  You can get a sense of what the questions were from my answers. 

It's more expensive

You need your own healthcare

It's way more sane politically, but New Zealand is not immune from the turn to the right that much of the world seems to be taking.  It is just not as crazy as in the U.S.  However, the policies of the National Government are in many ways similar.  There is a belief in the accumulation of wealth (for the few) and a belief that previous governments spent too much on the welfare state (which is not entirely untrue).  There is an enormous divide here between the haves and the have-nots.  Ultimately, there is no escaping the havoc that the U.S. is wreaking on the rest of the world.  It is all too connected now. 

It's incredibly frustrating not having the consumer choices you have in a big country, but it's not that big a deal

Of course people should save for retirement (duh)

Primary education is better here than in the U.S. /secondary education not so much

People here tend to have both a wider and a narrower world view in my opinion

It is really hard to leave your friends and family.  Her husband must know about that though, on his end. 

People are definitely friendly and easy-going.  There is something really appealing, too, about the sort of "frontier-y" Kiwi mentality that persists in the people and in much of the country. 

We have loved living here these past 2 years and even with the things that bug us, like the lack of organic food, or the high price of books, those are small things.  It's a great place, and if it weren't so far from our friends and family, we'd like to stay.  But it is, so we're going home.

Oh, but there's one thing we HATE HATE HATE!!!!!  In the movie theatres, you have to stand in the same line to buy tickets as to buy concessions.  This is not a problem in small movie theatres, but it is incredibly annoying in multiplexes.  If you live in New Zealand, you will have to learn to go early to movies and to stand in stupid, slow-moving lines there.  Buying your tickets online will often not help because you will have to stand in the same stupid line to pick up your ticket.  But at least movie theatres mostly use assigned seating for crowded shows.  So there you have it -- the worst New Zealand has to offer!  

I need to write something more about the whole wider/narrower world view thing.  That can be next.  

The Dowse

On the second sunny day we had after a week of snow, sleet, rain, clouds and freezing temperatures, I was ready for an encounter with light and air.  We had planned a birthday celebration lunch at a great place on Cuba Street called  Plum for the last day of Wellington on a Plate and we were not disappointed by tasty seared Nelson scallops and lovely wild salmon, and afterward my request was that we check out The Dowse Museum in Lower Hutt, which I had heard usually had good shows, and then to go for a walk along the Hutt River Trail.   

Fortunately, we were able to encounter light and air even during our museum visit, as it turned out to be such a great place and the current exhibitions so good, that we ended up spending more than two and a half hours there.  I was so impressed by one show in particular, called Crystal City: Contemporary Asian Artists, that I thought I'd share some of the ways that we experienced it. 

Among many favorites was one I first stumbled into without reading the curation note on the wall.  I pushed through a heavy black velvet curtain and found myself in a completely dark room.  I waved my arms around, hoping to perhaps trigger a motion-sensor-driven installation, but nothing happened.  I felt for a switch on the wall . . . .nothing.  I noticed that across the space there was what appeared to be another black curtain, with a tiny shaft of light shining at its edge.  I felt my way across the room, kicking my feet out in front of me in case of anything on the floor, and made it to the other side and out.  Once there, while looking for light switches on the outside of the doorway, I finally noticed the following. 

Ah, the dark room is explained!

Strangely enough, I had just run upstairs realizing that I had left our camera sitting on the couch where I'd been watching Ari construct a marble run with another little boy, as if I'd somehow known it would be important for the exhibit.  Or maybe not -- I have just had more than one close call with the camera, including leaving it on a ferry boat in Sydney Harbor and having to run across town to meet the ferry at its next stop - a story I'll save for some other time.  So I re-entered the dark room and starting pointing and shooting away at the black walls.  This is what I saw in the split-second light flares from the camera's flash.  Already I knew that my interaction with the exhibit was going to involve another dimension -- viewing the content of the photographs at home on my computer.  Unlike the artist, I of course had some idea of what I was shooting, as at least the brief flashes and the camera's "immediate playback" function gave me a quick glimpse of what was in front of me. 

Soon enough Ari and Evan came downstairs to the exhibit, and I was able to share the experience with Ari.  Now we had another dimension.  "Blind" eyes seeing unknown objects, plus a moving, interactive spectator.  Ari posed in many different spaces in the room, so we then had a series of photos of Ari with the artwork.  His final pose shows him imitating the artist.  In front of the things being photographed, but unable to see them at all. 

Another room in the exhibit showed a video by artist Hye Rim Lee, a swirling dance of glass pieces euphemistically described as "fantasy toys" (dildos I believe?) in front of which a dragon and a Barbie-like figure interact while being occasionally interrupted by a bunny-shaped pacifier.  City of dildos?  Couple being interrupted by something related to baby?  Hmm.

Here is Ari investigating another Pak Sheung Chuen work in which various sayings are printed on a gallery's walls.  Among other suggestions are to "use your body to measure the city" or this one "listen to other people's dialogue on the street and copy it down meticulously."  A couple of the suggestions are illustrated by other works in the show, including one about collecting all of your breaths in plastic bags. 

In a speeded up video, we see the artist filling an apartment with bags of his exhaled breath.  By the end, he has filled every space.  This video, as well as the instruction to "find the air from different countries while shopping in a supermarket" or something similar, got me thinking about the idea of air from one country being experienced when opening a container from that place - is there Japanese air inside a tightly sealed package of udon noodles?  Does India come out of the foil pouch of Dal Makani? 

I guess it's time for a digression about our connections with the world via the air we breathe.  Here's an excerpt (from the Barnes & Noble website) of a passage from David Suzuki's book You Are the Earth: Know Your World So You Can Help Make It Better

You’re Breathing Dinosaur Breath.

Did you know that the next breath you take will contain dinosaur breath? It sounds weird, but it’s true. Here’s how it works. Air is really a mixture of several gases. A gas is a light, invisible substance that floats freely in the air—steam, for example. Two of these gases, nitrogen and oxygen, make up almost all of the air.
There is only a small amount of the gas argon in the air. Yet each breath you breathe out, or exhale, contains about 30,000,000,000,000,000,000 (you can call that 30 zillion) atoms of argon. In a few minutes, the atoms you’ve exhaled in that one breath will travel right through your neighborhood. In a year, they will have spread all around the Earth, and about 15 of them will be right back where they started—in your nose.
Argon is always in you and around you. And not just in you but also in your best friend, your favorite pop star, the birds, snakes, flowers, trees, and worms. All of us air breathers are sharing in that same “pool” of argon atoms.So here’s where the dinosaurs come in. An interesting thing about argon atoms is that they never change or die—they stay around forever. That means that thousands of years ago, an Egyptian slave building the pyramids breathed some of the same argon atoms that later Joan of Arc, Napoleon, and Napoleon’s horse breathed. And some of those were argon atoms exhaled by dinosaurs that lived 70 million years ago. They all breathed out argon atoms into the air—ready for you to breathe in as you read this sentence. And when you exhale your next 30 zillion argon atoms, some of them will one day find their way into the noses of babies not yet born.
What’s true of argon is true of air in general. Air joins together all of Earth’s creatures—past, present, and future.

How about that? OK, so back to the Dowse. 

After we'd explored more of Pak Sheung Chuen's ideas, including photographs illustrating the poetic instruction we'd seen earlier printed on the wall to "find a building you like.  stay up watching it as long as it takes until everyone in the building goes to sleep," we moved on to a funny video by Cheng Ta Yu from Taiwan, in which he filmed actors around various well known locations in Wellington, only at midnight, reading free online translations of entries about the city in guidebooks written in English and Mandarin.  The text of the translations are also shown in Mandarin and English on screen, as appropriate, and in both languages, the final product is often wildly inaccurate and extremely humorous. It's a great way to comment on the problems of  communicating across cultures, especially as the tour itself is highly subjective, showing us only particular vantage points in particularly dim circumstances, despite the bright lighting used for the midnight video clips.

Following the theme of How We See Things, Ari then took the camera and photographed the exhibit his way.  I included a few of his shots, because it's interesting to me to see the difference in the way art looks if it is essentially above your normal viewing height.

A tree filled with wooden wind chimes that had been decorated by museum-goers at a gallery in Wellington (a related show) and then brought to the Dowse was just over my head, but didn't leave me space to get under the tree.


For Ari, it was high enough that he could walk under the tree and see the wind chimes from the bottom, which was actually more in line with the exhibit we had seen when we walked in of a courtyard of painted wooden windchimes all blowing about above our heads. 

Ari also captured the work of Jin Jiangbo whose work explored the relationship of contemporary digital technology to traditional Chinese custom.  In one piece, video images on a screen that looked like a traditional painting scroll moved in response to the viewer's playing on the Guqin, a traditional instrument. In this series of photos, Ari also manages to insert himself as artist, with his shadow image on the screen in the last shot.

Almost all of the works were worth second viewings, and we spent more time with most of them.  In fact, we returned to the Dowse 2 weeks later on a Thursday night to eat pizza, listen to music and continue exploring the galleries.  Ari, who had been distracted earlier in a show designed for kids about color, paid more attention to it and seemed to enjoy a second viewing (this show immediately brought to mind a really great show we had seen last year at the Whanganui Regional Museum about Color. See here for a piece about it that is an award from a paint manufacturer!)   A new exhibit called "Knitted and Knotted" was up when we returned and we enjoyed seeing traditional handcraft techniques – crochet, weaving, knitting and knotting – incorporated into artworks in surprising new ways.  We will definitely be heading back to the Dowse this coming year. 

Snow in Wellington. This Isn't Supposed to Happen Here!

I'm particularly liking the ambulance guys eating their breakfast.