Long White Cloud

Plastic Lines has been silent for the last couple of weeks. Last week it was because the one contributing author was living it up in the NZ snow. Prior to that it was all about meeting the deadlines that had been brought forward a week. I am assuring myself that I will try harder, because I like writing in my blog more than I like deadlines.

New Zealand is awesome. Having been raised in WA, I have a strong aversion to the cold. To my mind, cold weather is completely inexcusable unless accompanied by hills with snow on them. The South Island of New Zealand may be moderately colder than Victoria, but with snow fields in abundance, it's justified.

We stayed in a pretty crappy hostel for most of the trip, which was populated by snow-bogans in their early 20s. We overheard a whole lot of conversations because we were separated from our neighbours by locked internal door, rather than a (more conventional) wall but I don't think we heard anyone discuss any topic other than the possibility of laid. One night, one of the dodgy heaters blew up in the next unit, which shorted out all our power such that we woke up freezing at 3am and couldn't do anything about it until the next morning. My point is that IT WAS STILL AWESOME.

To top off a week of awesome snow, bruises to prove how tough I am and cheap alcohol, we spent the last night at a wildlife park where I got to pat a dear, an eel and the ugliest pig I've ever seen and let a Kea nibble my finger.

The Kune Kune Pig - awesomely ugly

One of the great sources of entertainment for the week was cruising between the two local TV channels. We were completely astounded by how nice the cops were on their local reality-TV cop show ("I'll hold off processing this fine for not having your rego in order for 24 hours to give you a chance to pay it") and learned about the perils of giving people drivers' licences at 15 (I loved it when they noted that the drunk 16 year old driver asleep in the stolen car on the side of the freeway "already had a suspended licence").

Dodgy TV moment of the week, however, has to go to the racist guy hosting the morning TV program and his bitch co-host. The most cringe-worthy moments included:

- Him complaining about how "Asians just don't integrate" (literally, using that language);
- Him reading out a letter saying that "maybe there wouldn't be so many Maori people in jail if they just stopped committing so many crimes" then staring down the barrel of the camera and saying "couldn't have said it better myself".
- Her interviewing Ms New Zealand and nodding sincerely as they discussed how she didn't get through to the final 15 because the judges were all corrupt and the New Zealand government wouldn't give her enough money to take an entourage to Las Vegas.

It was jaw dropping stuff. Unfortunately it seems like the downside to living in an agrarian paradise is a few insular attitudes.