There's no place like home, there's no place like home, there's no place like home....holy shit Todo, it worked! This still doesn't look like Kansas though.
My ruby slippers weren't even needed, and in any case I saved the dressing-up for the weekend - and home is what I'm calling New Zealand for the time being, in case you were wondering. Checking out Nelson as a place to live and even a poorly paid job with less than proper hours would pay about three and a half times the weekly rent needed for a flat in the city centre, including in most cases all the bills and often such bonuses as internet access! Looking pretty good so far, I must say.
It's really so very lovely this country, and I would dare to say in some ways Kiwis are as friendly or even more so than the Fijians, less likely to cheerfully engage you as you walk down the street perhaps, but ask them for anything at all, from a helping hand with directions to specialised advice, they really do excell.
I wondered idly what the origins of the country's name was the other day, in the way I did as a kid when first properly cogitating over such ubiquitous names as New York and New Jersey, and as you might already know you clever, clever things, the original Zealand is the largest island of Denmark back up over the equator in Europland, although I believe most of it is now known as the United States of Euwwwww.
It was practically news to me that Denmark had islands but hey, it does, and Zealand is where Copenhagen sits which is of course the capital. I knew that without even looking it up, and you'd only have to jab me once or twice with pins to make me admit I double checked.
In Fiji, I had spent an inordinate amount of time at Nadi airport for one thing and another, and I found that I was worryingly familiar with the place as I waited to go `home`; and seeing as we're vicariously back there for a paragraph or two I can share the explanation for something that baffled me and I forgot to explain.
The profusion of overly effeminate men in that country is weird, weird with a capital F, in fact. There is not a strong gay community there as first I thought, far from it in fact - it is one of the serious sources of tension in the culture with the torture and murder of known gays cropping up in the news and public life a few times every year. Nasty old business, but anyway; the supremely camp gentlemen seen all over the place, especially often in airport reception parties and resort kitchens, are called fa'afafine and are men who in childhood `choose` to be raised as female, in many cases highly encouraged, persuaded or coerced into to doing so by parents who have usually had male children, and few or no girls.
A fa'afafine, like a daughter by tradition, custom and, arguably, genetics, will take care of their parents in their old age when all their sons are presumably off raising their own families, drinking, philandering, playing or at least noisily bitching about sports and farting in a conspicuous and time-consuming fashion, as all men are biologically compelled to do, as we all know.
Unlike Hijras in India there are, as far as a little internet research can tell me, no eunuchs among the fa'afafine, and few or no of the intersex designation, which is what we all basically think of as hermaphrodite although technically that's rather inaccurate.
All in it's a bit confusing yet strangely interesting as it certainly puts a tick in the `novelty` section, and I just had to share so I don't forget it myself. The best way to learn is to teach, as I believe they say.
I made it through the evil and sinister airport at Nadi with their typical nazi-like drinks policy (you can't take even sealed unopened water through the security area but you can buy as much as you like on the other side, I wonder how many zeroes that generates in global sales revenue) and found their expertly concealed entrance to the international departures wing cunningly screened from almost all view on both sides by office dividers, and flanked by vibrantly coloured stores selling overpriced books, production-line ethnic carvings, soft toys and all the usual merchandising tat.
International departures at Nadi international consisted, in fact, of one standard width door in a side wall without label; an overhead sign placed an appreciable fraction of a mile away down the terminal, and another slightly ambiguous one (saying `Planes/People` or `Humans/Animal Skin Containers/Minerals Less Than 1000kg Or Smaller Than A Big Box Whichever Is Lesser` or something equally thought-provoking) pointing roughly towards the murky portal from the middle of a sizeable concourse. The actual doorway to go through boasted no sign itself and I had to cheerfully ask the first person past the threshold if this was in fact where I wanted to be to catch a plane out of the place. Sometimes I think naiively that airports don't want you to actually catch planes, but then of course I realise that's the point and that they far prefer you in the terminal spending some more of that lovely money of yours, you rich tourist, you.
I went aboard after the usual routine, amazed possibly the twentieth set of security scanners at the metal detectors by walking through in huge combat boots without a single peep from the machine, and whiled away my Air New Zealand flight to Auckland over a happy four hours in a smallish seat surrounded by small, pleasantly banal talk, avoiding an even smaller kind of movie which was a bit of a bugger as I'd been looking forward to films on planes again, not having had the luxury more than once in my last dozen flights.
I'd greedily absorbed a proper full-screen showing of Iron Man on the way out which is a hugely watchable movie, the first time I'd seen the proper version with the full ending having bought copies in both Indonesia and Fiji that were both sneakily filmed in a cinema somewhere. Returning to full civilisation and a country with more than a million people in it, I was stuck with something called Mrs. Shitbrown's Large-Arsed Friends Bitch About Her Grey Funeral, In A Small Grey Town In A Plague Of Grey In 1970s Romania: Special Edition Fully Remastered With Never-Before-Seen Grey, or so I assumed its title to be from the odd painful snippets of dialogue I snatched as I cruised the inflight radio stations.
That must have been the first music I had willingly listened to for more than 20 minutes in years, and it thankfully didn'tt offer anything by Bob Marley (much as I love the guy) or any twinkly pseudo-traditional Fijian folk songs which had begun to grate long before and while in the country had refused to go away.
Auckland international airport is a bit odd to get around - the airport planning demons at work again had done their best to confuse us all into mindlessly emptying our wallets into the nearest cash register, not to mention deploying the standard play of making the corridor itself between immigration and transfers/exits into a gigantic perfume shop. I hate that, not just because I am a cheapskate and I smell bad, but mainly because I know one day I will knock over a thousand quid's worth of Chanel No.5 and have to flee huffingly from the place with all my flapping baggage and lots of ill grace before they try and bill me.
Mooching through more ambiguously signposted doorways and walking the half-mile through carparks and private road systems, past complicated-looking antennaes closeted behind white palisades and chainlink fencing, following a little blue and white line painted on the earth which takes all applicable bipeds to the domestic terminal, I arrived and became immediately more relaxed, as internal flights aren't really flights, are they, not in the sense I grew up thinking of them as.
Yet having allowed for this extra level of bureacracy, immigration staff at Auckland impressed me in every way as they were excellent, real human beings despite the fact the job description practically requires you to shove a sharpened plank up your arse every morning to get you in the mood for passengers. All the check-in and security folk are great too, every person employed in the airport is in fact about ten notches above their counterparts in every other country I have been to, even being far more friendly and, well, human than the first folks you meet in Australia. .
Charmingly, I Didn't even have to wait to get back to New Zealand to feel warmed and happy as a dog with two tails as the head steward on the domestic flight spent as much time cracking jokes as he did on the safety brief, with the whole cabin chuckling happily more or less every time the P.A. sounded. The whole flight back from Auckland to Christchurch was comfortable despite the compulsory miniature seat, because I knew I was re-entering a country where pleasantness, friendliness and good cheer was not an exported image, not an oft-forgotten and now hard-won part of the national psyche, not a qualifiable elitist notion, and not an overplayed and often untrue habit of the people. In New Zealand it's the custom, practice, almost the duty of citizens to be cheerful, enthusiastically helpful, and pleasantly (and refreshingly) intelligent.
The countries that really could do better from what I know of their peoples, if you were wondering about my list there, are Fiji, the UK, the USA and Australia, respectively.
