New Zealand: Christchurch

Christchurch

The Sabbatical and the University
Our Unit
How I Do My Work in the Unit
Communications
New Zealandish
Choirsoc
Jewish Community
Purim
Food
Street Art

The Sabbatical and the University

We're here from Feb 25, 2008 to Apr 30 (Aya) and May 10 (Bob). After stops in LA to visit our daughter-in-law's parents and in Hawaii to be tourists (the warmest and sunniest place on this trip), we're living in Christchurch, on the south island of NZ. It’s an Anglo town, with its own Avon River (but with some exotic vegetation along the banks) meandering through town and the University. Canterbury University, where Bob is teaching and writing as an Erskine Fellow (they invite about 70 a year from out of the country), is located in a western suburb about a 15-min ride from City Centre and doesn’t have the charming nouveau-Gothic look you might expect. The place that does is the old campus in City Centre, now turned into the Arts Centre, a maze of artisans’ shops, restaurants, theatres, and a cinema where we saw Evening in a mini-theater big enough for 13 (sitting in cushioned living-room chairs), and Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood in a normal theater. One rainy weekend afternoon we saw 3 wedding parties shooting photos around the picturesque cloisters of the Arts Centre.


Avon River, City Centre	Chalice sculpture in front of the Cathedral	Aya in front of the art museum

Wedding photo, Arts Centre	Getting out the champagne	Lotus Heart Buddhist vegetarian restaurant, City Centre

Another wedding...	And one more

Juggler, Arts Centre	Peacock Fountain, City Centre, next to wonderful Botanic Garden and natural history museum

The current University has modern, not-too-esthetically pleasing buildings but makes up for that with streams and the Avon curving through it, and the banks of the streams and river, and the whole campus, are planted with lush native plants, grasses and trees. Many are still flowering (it’s the beginning of fall here). Some are recognizable and some are exotic, with strange fruits and flowers we can’t identify. There’s a wonderful cooperative garden that you get to by taking an unmarked footpath along the stream. The footpath ends at the Univ child care, or “early learning,” center, but before that some steps on the right take you to this garden. It’s a university-wide ecological venture in cooperation with various departments. People or groups take ownership of various sections, though one person makes the final decisions. Volunteers come to work in it Friday afternoons and can then take home any produce they want, which right now includes tomatoes, squash, various kinds of beans, chard, artichokes, and many others. Did I say it’s organic, and that they focus on heirloom seeds? There are also fruit trees, strawberries, asparagus, Brussels sprouts, and more other crops growing than I can remember, plus lots of flowers—and ceramic chickens and a birdbath decorated with mosaics, plus a gazebo covered with nasturtiums, and an outdoor pizza oven built by engineering faculty!

Our Unit

We’re living in University housing, which means council units built probably after WWII. We’re in a duplex attached through the garages, and we didn’t meet the other residents until we’d been here almost 3 weeks. It’s very quiet. Some of our neighbors in similar units are actually university departments. Our rooms are nicely decorated inside in blues and peaches. But the building is really shoddy. Tin roofs, no insulation, and the typical British—and NZ—lack of central heating. There electric are heating units in most rooms. Oak trees outside, and when the wind blows (mostly northerlies or southerlies), acorns rattle the roof like gunfire. When you run a faucet, you can hear the water gurgling through the pipes, and you can hear it from outside too. In fact some of the water from the washing machine spills outside. But we do have a washer and dryer, and you could say we have 3 bathrooms—3 separate little rooms that together make up one American bathroom.

Some things work upside down or backwards: the hot and cold water faucets, the light switches. The electric blanket is underneath the mattress. But the water does not swirl down the sinks counter-clockwise, as Bob has always claimed. NZ, Australia, and Fiji have weird electric plugs unlike any others in the world. And then there’s the driving, of course. One of the hardest things for me is remembering which side of the street to go to in order to wait for the bus going the direction I want. Around our unit we have hydrangeas, allium, roses, clematis that just finished blooming (the type with tiny multiple white flowers), rhododendrons, lilies, and lilies of the valley that are also done, and hardy rosemary. We’ve planted cilantro, parsley, and basil, and so far they’re just surviving (we forget to water them). The supermarket sells the herbs with their roots in tiny pots for growing on the kitchen window sill.


Our Shabbat table	Aya at the Shabbat table

How I Do My Work in the Unit

I can update my websites when the following conditions are met: we have an Internet connection (sometimes it disappears), and Bob doesn’t need to use it for early-morning phone calls to his students or colleagues back home, or because he’s not going into school that day. Here's an example of how simple tasks get slowed down even when conditions are right: in the middle of working on the Bulletin PDF for the Temple Sinai site, there's a slight rustling at the door and it's Phil, the uni electrician. He has come to check on the mildew in the washing machine agitator that I had complained about, which makes the whole utility room smell mildewed. When he comes in he first explains to me that what I thought was a missing double lock on the door is actually a missing doorbell--I had thought there wasn’t one. To fix that will require a separate call to Beverley at Facilities. The reason I thought about a double lock is that the current lock doesn’t always keep the door closed—it blows open sometimes in the wind. Maybe it's such calls from all of us visitors in the various univ units that have caused Beverley to go on her annual vacation just now.

The electrician did get a lot of the mildew out but advised me to get a bottle brush to reach the rest of it, as if I could even bend down to get in there (the washer door doesn't open all the way because it bumps into the dryer, which was installed a little too low right above it). I had also asked about outdoor lights along the gravel lane from the street to our house, a very long driveway because we're in back of two other houses. It's totally unlit and very dark at night if no houses are lit. When he said lights it reminded me that he had fixed our living room lamp, a shoddy aluminum pole with two bulbs, which wasn't working at all when we got here, and the first time we plugged it in after he fixed it, it blew a circuit for a good portion of the house. We couldn't find the circuit box--looked everywhere, including the garage. Called security, since we were leaving for the weekend that morning. They found it in the hall, so high up on the wall that we had to stand on a chair to get to it. So now we use that lamp with only the good bulb turned on. Then there were the visits from carpenter, who came to install the coat hooks I had requested. He's deaf, and we communicated by gestures and written notes. All these guys are very very nice and helpful, but I didn’t expect to spend time cleaning mildew out of a washing machine! There's also the man who comes to mow the lawn occasionally, and the security people who often whizz by on their Segways.

Communications and Keeping up With the World

Home phone—part of the university system, and the voicemail is so complex that we didn’t bother setting it up. I don’t think too many people do. Nobody calls, anyway, except Bob from work. Cell phones with NZ SIM cards—we’ve even learned how to text, slowly. Skype with or without webcam. Mostly email, without which we’d really be lost. We also do a huge amount of research on the web to find local things we need, and especially when we’re planning trips—renting a car, getting info on wildlife preserves, getting a place to stay. This complements our trusty Lonely Planet guidebook.

There are two national radio stations, one focusing on news, with lots of talk shows, the other on classical music, including music from all parts of the world that we don’t hear too much on WQED. One morning I was startled to wake up to an orchestral rendering of Kol Nidre. I do miss NPR. We subscribe to the local paper, The Press, whose banner says it’s the New Zealand Newspaper of the Year. Apparently not something they made up themselves, as with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s self-designation as “One of America’s Great Newspapers.” It tends to have sensational headlines on the front page but some serious news inside, and gives us a picture of what’s going on in Christchurch and NZ in general. Much more emphasis on news from the South Pacific than we get at home, for obvious reasons.

Breakfast. I'm trying to hide my head with the hood of my sweatshirt, since I'm feeling as blurry as I look. The point is the back-to-back laptops opened to the NY Times Reader.

We also download the New York Times Reader every morning and read it at breakfast on our laptops. It’s a self-contained PDF-like format that helps us keep up with world, national (US) and local (PA/Pgh) news. It’s hard to be away now that the Democratic race is so focused on PA. Bob received his absentee ballot and voted already, but mine didn’t show up and they’re sending a replacement. It’s still a hard choice for me.

New Zealandish

That’s what I call it, anyway--the way New Zealanders speak. Mostly I’ve noticed the e’s and the a’s: “seevin” instead of “seven,” “ecktuelly,” “fentestick,” “hiyuh” instead of “hair” (think of Eliza Doolittle singing “All I want is a room somewhere” with a Cockney accent). Part non-Oxbridge UK English, part New England or even Southern, and very nasal. But I’m no linguist. Most people around us speak standard British English, and many are expats; it’s mostly a blue-collar phenomenon like Pittsburghese. Lots of people here are from somewhere else, visitors as well as residents. But the accompanist for our choir, who is a student, speaks like that, very fast, as many students do, and bus drivers, and it’s a trial for Bob and me to follow. The bus drivers are extremely helpful, but sometimes hard to understand. People generally think I'm Canadian from my accent, which I think of as Midwestern, courtesy of my father, who grew up in Des Moines, IA, after leaving Russia.

Choirsoc

It doesn’t have a better name yet—all the university clubs are called Socs, or Societies. They are working on a better name for performances, which I won’t be here for. We meet one evening a week in one of the dining halls; this past week we had to compete with a rock party outside. About 20 people, some staff, mostly students. I’m definitely the oldest! We have a very good director who tells us the same things all directors tell their choirs about how to sing better (lift your eyebrows and smile to get higher notes, etc). He considers the NZ accent the worst in the world for singing--too nasal. The first hour is for singing easier pieces and just having fun, the second for learning harder pieces. So at the first session, for our first piece to break the ice, we had a Maori love song. You all know this, he said—but it turned out I wasn’t the only one who didn’t, or had no idea how to pronounce Maori transliteration! Mostly straightforward, as it turns out, like reading Italian, except that “wh” is pronounced “f.” A very fluid language, akin to Hawaiian--they have Polynesian origins in common.It’s a lovely song. We also have John Rutters hymn “For the Beauty of the Earth,” David Child’s “O Magnum Mysterium,” a modern version of a Gregorian chant, in Latin; “One Day More” from Les Mis; and a terrific jazzy version of “Go Down Moses” arranged by Mark Hayes. Just the thing for the Chabad seder we may be going to?

Since I have no way to practice the music at home, I went to the student activities center, where there was reputed to be a piano. It turned out that day it was unavailable, but instead a facilities person took me to the ballroom, where just for me he uncovered the grand piano and moved a bunch of furniture so I could play. I felt intimidated, even though the room was empty. My voice sounded so tiny in that room.

March 25, 2008

The Christchurch Hebrew Congregation and the Jewish Community

Sounds like a contradiction in terms! Actually, we may be skipping the Chabad seder if Joel and his girlfriend Meave come through on their plans to visit over our spring break, which includes Passover. No doubt it would not be either feminist or vegetarian/vegan for us, but I hear they sing a lot. So we may be having our smallest seder ever, and with a lot of improvisation in cuisine and texts. So far we’ve identified just one other Jewish family among the Erskine Fellows at the university, from Rochester. The university has lots of clubs of all sorts, ranging from hunting to vegetarian, and especially lots of Christian clubs, but no Hillel or anything like it.

We’ve gone to Friday night kabbalat Shabbat service once so far at the Christchurch Hebrew Congregation downtown. That’s because it’s a combined synagogue with Orthodox services Shabbat mornings together with the Chabad branch in town and Progressive services 2 Friday nights a month, lay-led and followed by a potluck Oneg. When we went 2 weeks ago, there were about 20 people, including a baby. Not a lot of participation. Our informal Saturday morning service at Temple Sinai is still beyond compare. After the service, the very nice couple, formerly American, who came with the baby invited us and some other people there to dinner at their house. We didn’t expect such hospitality and thought it was just great—that’s a way in which we could emulate this congregation—especially since it gave us a perspective on a different part of the Christchurch community. As it turned out, almost everyone around the table was from somewhere else, including Europe and Australia, though most were now citizens of NZ. A very interesting evening. (In general, Christchurch is full of people from all over and lots of ethnicities, much more than in Pittsburgh.)

Purim

We’ll be missing the CHC’s Megillah reading and Purim party because of the trip we’ve planned to the Otago Peninsula. We’re told that’s full of drunken singing, fulfilling the mitzvah to drink until you don’t know the difference between Mordechai and Haman. The membership of Chabad is largely Israeli, we’re told, and their rabbi is Israeli too. I’ve met him. He says all the Israelis in town come to Chabad. It may be that well-known phenomenon (which Rabbi Ende has been trying to get inroads into), that some Israelis who are totally secular in Israel feel the need to be Jewish when out of the country, and the only kind of Jewish they know is Orthodox, where their father or grandfather took them once when they were kids, or to become bar mitzvah.

For Purim I ended up baking hamantaschen from fillo dough, with a filling of dried apricots, almonds and pistachios. I made them in a hurry as if they were matzah, because I had a lot of work and we were leaving for Dunedin the next day, so used arbitrary amounts of the ingredients. As a result, too much filling, not enough dough. But they sustained us for breakfast in the motel on the Otago Peninsula, when nothing was open because of Easter weekend.

Food

The ice cream is terrific! At stands they make fruit ice cream by blending the fruit of your choice with really good (i.e., rich) vanilla ice cream in a machine that extrudes it in spirals like soft ice cream. Good produce too, including exotic fruit. It’s easy to stick with NZ produce. We got wonderful raspberries when we stopped at a berry farm/cafe on the way back from Dunedin. Not so easy to be vegetarian here, and even harder to be vegan, since all the veg food is slathered in cheese. So far we’ve found two good restaurants in city centre, one Buddhist, the other Burmese. And a pretty good Indian one--there’s a lot of Indian food here, like the UK. When you order a hamburger or veggie burger, it’s a big surprise to find sliced beets in the bun! They seem to be standard. And good Italian bread seems to be unobtainable. I miss Breadworks!

Street Art

When we first came we noticed chairs on the sidewalk at two different points along our block. Since we’re from Pittsburgh, we assumed somebody was saving a parking space and didn’t think twice about it. But they never moved, and finally we realized they are street art, rusted metal embedded in gravel. One has a rusted book on the ground in front of it and represents reading, another has 0s and 1s on a rusted plaque on the ground and represents ciphering (computing), another has stars and planets but is missing the chair … there may be one or two we haven’t found yet further along the street.

(more photos coming)