Wednesday 28 May 2008

Tools For Global Living

aka, my favourite online resources that make an expat's life easier.

World Clock - get the local time anywhere in the world. Instantly. You can even make a "personal world clock" of just the places you care about. This is handy when you live in a country that's a day ahead of everybody half the time,  when countries keep rearranging daylight savings time, plus the fact our seasons are backwards from most places. No more having to do complicated mathematics just to work out whether you can call the parents without waking them up in the middle of the night.

Online Conversions - Convert any unit of measurement into any other unit of measurement. Going from imperial to metric ain't easy. If you weigh 60kg, have you lost weight? If you're going 100 km/hour is that too fast? And don't even get me started on the number of calculations this little gadget has saved me with regards to cooking from American recipes. (And when I say ANY unit of measurement, I mean it. Every find yourself in a situation where you need to know how many avograms are in baht? I doubt it, but if you did, this site would make your life a lot easier.)

xe.com - Gives you current exchange rates between any two types of currency.

How to Call Abroad - This site will tell you how to call any country in the world from any other country in the world.
aka, my favourite online resources that make an expat's life easier.

World Clock - get the local time anywhere in the world. Instantly. You can even make a "personal world clock" of just the places you care about. This is handy when you live in a country that's a day ahead of everybody half the time,  when countries keep rearranging daylight savings time, plus the fact our seasons are backwards from most places. No more having to do complicated mathematics just to work out whether you can call the parents without waking them up in the middle of the night.

Online Conversions - Convert any unit of measurement into any other unit of measurement. Going from imperial to metric ain't easy. If you weigh 60kg, have you lost weight? If you're going 100 km/hour is that too fast? And don't even get me started on the number of calculations this little gadget has saved me with regards to cooking from American recipes. (And when I say ANY unit of measurement, I mean it. Every find yourself in a situation where you need to know how many avograms are in baht? I doubt it, but if you did, this site would make your life a lot easier.)

xe.com - Gives you current exchange rates between any two types of currency.

How to Call Abroad - This site will tell you how to call any country in the world from any other country in the world.

Friday 23 May 2008

Seasonal Jet Lag

That's what I've got. I arrived here last year in time for a second winter, and that's just not natural. I get winter depression normally, but I floated blissfully through winter number two, possibly just too lighted up by the excitement of so many new things, the joy of having Made It after all. That bastard depression caught up with me in the New Zealand Summer, though. And not a single reason for it. Warm and sun and my parents visiting, life and love and everything going ok. But I couldn't sleep, my mind was too busy cannibalising itself, and I was perpetually tired.

"I awoke today and found the frost perched on the town
It hovered in a frozen sky, then it gobbled summer down
When the sun turns traitor cold
and all the trees are shivering in a naked row
I get the urge for going but I never seem to go"
- Joni Mitchell

I think of that song normally in Spring. Summer is imminent, and long-ago childhood summer vacations make me feel like wandering the world care-free. Winter usually makes me want to hunker down, curl up under the covers, get comfortable, settle in. Well. This winter all I can think of is travel. Adventure. I want to see the world. I want to see the rest of New Zealand. I want to jump on a motorbike (not that I know how to ride a motorbike) and just drive off down the road. This winter, I know just how Joni feels. But. Well. It's the wrong time of year for such things, isn't it? I guess I'll just have to wait it out.

"I'll ply the fire with kindling now, I'll pull the blankets up to my chin
I'll lock the vagrant winter out and bolt my wandering in
I'd like to call back summertime and have her stay for just another month or so
But she's got the urge for going and I guess she'll have to go"

Friday 16 May 2008

mile stones

I got my NZ driver's license in the mail last weekend. Holding in my hands an official photo ID with a New Zealand flag in one corner, it felt almost as big a step as getting those residency stamps in our passports. I don't have to remember my passport if I want to buy beer at the grocery store!

And today I registered to vote in two different countries. I will vote in two national elections this year! How cool is that?

Friday 9 May 2008

How I Got Here

I'm not done talking about our one-year anniversary. I want to talk a little bit about how I got here. About the very beginnings.

In the year 2000, I was a journalist for my college newspaper. The night of the election, they showed coverage on a big projector in the student union. I stayed up late that night drinking chai lattes and covering the election and the student's responses. When it became obvious nothing was going to be decided that night, I had to write three possible stories: the one where Gore wins, the one where Bush wins and the one where we still don't know what the hell's going on. We all know which one the paper ran the next morning. Weeks later we were all trying to get our heads around the presidential coup Bush had pulled off, and the editors were joking about running the headline "World Goes To Hell In Handbasket."

Meanwhile, I had boldly proclaimed to friends and family that if Bush won, I would move to Australia. I guess they all thought I was joking. Actually, I was one and a half years away from a Bachelor's degree, but after that I really did intend to leave the country, at least for a while. Why Australia? Well, partially it comes down to playing with the globe in my classroom in elementary school, searching for the farthest possible location from my hometown in the South Carolina low country. Partially it's because of a children's book called "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day," in which a child has the sort of mundane very bad day that children sometimes do, and proclaims to his family that he's moving to Australia. (Also, they speak English in Australia, which is convenient).

Later that year I got assigned a feature story about a Russian man who worked at the registrar's office and also ran the college's chess club. He told me he left Russia not long before the collapse of the Soviet Union. He said he left because he could see it coming. And that just got me thinking: If that was about to happen to my country, would I see it coming? Would I have the wisdom to leave before it happened? And that notion stuck with me somehow.

Well, we all know I didn't leave the country upon graduation. I'd met Loren by then, and decided he was worth sticking around for. Years later we were sitting on the couch in our comfortable two-bedroom apartment in Berkeley, when Loren mentioned to me that Sweden had a viable political party that was Feminist. We started one of those despairing conversations about how pathetic the US is compared to other first-world nations when it comes to a lot of political and social issues. This was late 2005. The outcome of the '04 election was still fresh in our minds, not to mention the Hurricane Katrina disaster. I mentioned the fact that we didn't necessarily have to continue living in America. I'm sure I'd said it before, it was always a fact of life for me, I'd moved around so much in my childhood. But this time somehow it stuck. I told him about the Russian man I interviewed in college. He said something about not wanting to be around for the sacking of Rome. We started talking specifics about where we might want to move to and why. That conversation, that was the beginning of everything.

Wednesday 7 May 2008

number four

I remembered one more song having to do with moving to New Zealand. This one's a bit less obvious:

Andre Bird - Tables and Chairs

When you get down to it, part of the appeal of New Zealand is it seems uniquely poised to weather a number of post apocalyptic scenarios and come out pretty ok, peachy keen, even. It's not a popular thing to say you sometimes fantasise about these things, but this song voices it boldly. When I saw Andrew Bird live at the SF Bathhouse in Wellington, he said this story was inspired by a couple he knows who moved to New Zealand, and how they dreamed of a post apocalyptic future in which we have a chance to start again.

"i know we're going to meet some day
in the crumbled financial institutions of this land
there will be tables and chairs
there'll be pony rides and dancing bears
there'll even be a band
cause listen, after the fall there will be no more countries
no currencies at all, we're gonna live on our wits
we're gonna throw away survival kits,
trade butterfly-knives for adderal
and that's not all
ooh-ooh, there will be snacks there will
there will be snacks, there will be snacks."

Friday 2 May 2008

Top Three

I'm working on a Top Five of songs that have to do with our move here. But so far I only have three:

Dar Williams - O Canada Girls

(listening to this song on the bus back from a conference in Palmerston North, looking out the window at the rolling hills along the Kapiti coast)

"I guess it's got to feel like some exodus
And if I succeed, well there will be more of us
And if I don't well I don't really know

Girls
Who have found our unsung nation
Where we left so much land to itself
That everyone had her own mountain"

John Denver - Rocky Mountain High

(This song came into my head as I hiked into Karori Sanctuary one morning. When I got home and looked up the lyrics that I realised he says "twenty-seventh year" which is my age)

"He was born in the summer of his 27th year
Comin home to a place he'd never been before
He left yesterday behind him, you might say he was born again
You might say he found a key for every door"

Jimmy Buffett - Banana Republics

(A more cynical take on migration, kept thinking of this song as we were packing up to move here. )

"Down to the Banana Republics
Down to the tropical sun
Go the expatriated American
Hopin' to find some fun

Some of them go for the sailing
Brought by the lure of the sea
Tryin' to find what is ailing
Living in the land of the free
Some of them are running to lovers
Leaving no forward address
Some of them are running tons of ganja
Some are running from the IRS"

Migration

Yesterday I took the theory test and got my NZ driver's licence. Two days previous was our one-year anniversary of arriving in this country. So. A couple of things I remember about moving here..

April 27th. The day we left. We loaded up the rental car, left our house keys on the counter. By previous arrangement, some young lady with dreads came by to pick up the futon we had slept on our last night in the apartment. We drove downtown and for some reason decided to grab a coffee at Royal Grounds on our way out. It was there, sitting in the coffee shop, looking across the table at Loren, that it really hit me what we were doing. I had been so busy packing, and selling our stuff on Craigslist, and making arrangements for our trip, that it all seemed like an intellectual exercise until that moment, when there was nothing left to do but get to the airport and step onto a plane.

April 29th. The day we arrived. The taxi dropped us and all six of our bags off in an empty parking lot, down an alley, allegedly near the address we'd given him for the apartment we would be staying in. Loren went off to find the place, and the lock box containing our keys, while I watched over the luggage. There I was, down an unfamiliar alley, in an empty parking lot, with not a single key in my possession, not knowing the location of the bed I would sleep in that night, and sitting watch over what were our only possessions for the next six weeks. Now, I have known in-between places, standing between what's to come and what's come before, with nothing to do with the present but wait it out. You get that any time you travel on an aeroplane, for instance. But this was the ultimate in-between place in my life, the moment of complete disorientation before this new chapter of my life could begin.