NZ Part 5: Tekapo Photo slideshow

Here is a 7.5 minute video with a lot of photos from our Lake Tekapo stint.  Enjoy!  (p.s. Here is a link to the much better quality one on youtube: http://youtu.be/J9R4cOUli8g)

NZ Part 4: Journey South Photos

All eyes on me

Stratford clock tower

Inside the belly of the beast (the ferry)

Christchurch by night

Joe's penny farthing at the Christchurch museum

NZ Part 5: Tekapo

I have come to a point where I need to start doing something differently.  This blog has always been both a place for me to catch people up with my travels, as well as express to the world just how I feel about it all.  I generally am able to accomplish all of this without too many contradictions or the need to censor myself.  Sure, occasionally I have to watch what I say just because of the very public nature of a blog, but generally it is not a big deal.

Tekapo has been a different story.  Maybe it was because the length of our stay there made all of the tales more complex.  Maybe it was that our jobs put us in situations of high stress, which is bound to affect every aspect of our lives.  Maybe it is that a lot of things in Tekapo touched me deeply, both good and bad, and I came away with a lot of new feelings about people and places.  Whatever it is, I find myself feeling more and more like I have to hold my tongue.

It has gotten bad enough that I find myself in big conflict.  On one hand, I want to be true and real and I feel like the world might even benefit from my thought processes, or at least I'll be able to better understand myself.  On the other hand, I don't want to speak bad about people, businesses, or groups in a way that would harm them.

These two contradictions mean I need a new method.  Therefore I have decided that in order to balance these issues, I will be separating my writing a little.  I often break off into rants while writing, and especially with Tekapo stuff, some of it tends to get bitter.  Anything I feel like I shouldn't be publicly posting to the world, but is still part of the thought processes that make this crazy, stupid journey I'm on what it is, I will be compiling into an email to send out to anyone who would like to request it.

This means a couple of things.  First, if you want these emails, there is a feature that I have been playing with on blogspot that allows me to make a form for you to fill out.  I'm going to make this form and will have it on the right of the screen.  There are two forms there; the top form is to contact me to be part of the email list for the deeper thoughts, while the bottom is just to subscribe for getting regular posts in your email (not the deeper thoughts).

Second, it may mean that my writing is a little more choppy.  I tend to get started in on something and rant and rant and it gets bigger and bigger and then I realize it has become something that should be pulled into the emails.  So I may seem to hold back at odd times, but this is the reason why.

So again, please send me a message with your email address to let me know you want to receive the deeper thoughts.  (You can also just write to me directly to request these.)  And thanks for understanding that this sensitive approach is necessary.

***

Oooooooh boy.  MacKenzie's is a topic that Joe and I (and others) have talked and debated and analyzed to pieces.  It was a trial of our characters.

Let's start from the beginning.  That first day we arrived in Tekapo and took deep breaths and walked into the restaurant, we saw a big coffee machine, a busy staff, and a nicely lit bar and restaurant area.  We asked for Phil and he came out to meet us.

Phil is a small man--maybe an inch or two taller than me--with skin stretched tight over a sharply featured face.  He sat us down in the bar to talk about the jobs and I almost immediately didn't like him, though I couldn't pinpoint why.  Later I figured out that he would do this thing that an ex-boyfriend and his mother both did, which was start out a sentence not looking at me with his eyes fluttering mostly closed, only opening them again to look at me when he was mostly finished with the sentence with a stupid smile on his face.  There was probably nothing wrong with this, but I can't help but have the negative association.  It was hilarious to me when I realized where I had seen this behavior before

He said the Back of House job was for Joe and he would be getting basically as many hours as he wanted.  I would be Front of House and he explained that that would entail waitressing and maybe some bar training.  I was looking forward to the bar training part, but I knew the waitressing part would not be for me, but I made it sound as though I were pleased to take on whatever role I was needed in.  I was glad we had jobs and the waitressing part was going to suck, but I knew I could get through.

We had made ourselves look presentable for this first meeting, but Joe's appearance has ceased being "clean-cut" or "conservative."  I like him for this (though admittedly I would also like him for being clean-cut too--he's hard not to like!), but to ease a little of the tension Phil seemed to feel about his look, I joked, "Joe would really like to be a waiter, but we figured with him looking like a hobo..." and I chuckled, but Phil did not.  He took me seriously, which then made me feel both like a jerk and defensive about my handsome fiance.  Hehe, oops.

He told us several waitresses would be leaving MacKenzie's in the next few weeks, so I would likely have close to full-time hours soon.  Joe would have as many hours as he could possibly want, since their current dishwasher would be leaving in just a few days, leaving only Joe to wash dishes.

Phil gave us our contracts to read and told us we could check into where we would be staying until more permanent housing would become available in a little less than a week (when one of the waitresses at the restaurant would move out of one of the houses in town).  We would be staying at The Godley, the place I thought would be very expensive when we first got to town.  He told us that there were bad reviews about the place, so we shouldn't have high expectations for it.

We were uneasy about the contract (there was a line that said "no talkback allowed") and about the price of The Godley.  We asked Phil how much we should expect to pay after MacKenzie's so generously paid for part of the expense.  He said he hadn't called the backpacker places in town to see what their normal rate would be.

This uneasiness about The Godley never really went away.  We asked Phil many times those first six days if he had called the backpackers and knew what price we should expect to pay.  He never really called and didn't seem that bothered to do so.  Joe and I were getting anxious about it because we didn't know if we were going to be paying out of the nose for the first five or six days.  And it was as if Phil brushed off our requests for clarity.

A couple of weeks later we finally found out we were going to be expected to pay $60 per night, which was a big hit.  We were hoping for half that.  Phil had even told us that it would likely be around $30 per night, but Kiwis have this shitty little thing that we may never get used to that you pay PER PERSON.  In the States, you save money by fitting more people into a room, but here, it is standard that each person pays the same amount, no matter if the room is a single or shared with many friends.  I think that I'll try to book hotels from now on with one person per room for the same price, just to illustrate how stupid their pricing system can be.

So we were expecting around $30 per night total, which was still a lot (okay, we're cheapskates), but when we went to pay at The Godley, they said it was $60 per night.  To put it in perspective, that meant four hours of each work day those first six days went to pay for housing only.  It's a lot.  We resisted and they told us to talk to MacKenzie's and come back some other time.  We talked to Phil and his answer again was evasive.  He said he would talk to them to figure out the price (we actually suspect that perhaps when he said that MacKenzie's would pay for part of our bill, what really happens is that they negotiate a lower price for us, but we would still be footing the full bill).

When we went back the next day to The Godley, they told us it was still $60 per night.  When we tried to discuss it with them, the woman got pissy and told us that we would need to figure it out with MacKenzie's ourselves.  She sent us away without paying.  It was the weirdest thing--as if she would rather not deal with the whole thing than actually get paid.

The issue sort of just hung for a while.  With our first paycheck, we got a sheet of paper detailing the $60 per night charges that would be taken out of our pay automatically.  This was alarming because instead of discussing it and working it out with us, Phil had just let it go through as if nothing was wrong.  We were a little upset that he just couldn't be bothered and we took a few days extra to sign the paper authorizing the deduction.

When Cameron and Belinda (owners of MacKenzie's) came through the restaurant a couple of days later Belinda asked about our paperwork.  I reluctantly gathered up the paperwork to sign and give to her, but Belinda must have heard a note of dissatisfaction in my voice because she asked if everything was okay.  I thought about lying and saying everything was fine to smooth it over (it was only an extra $180--we weren't going to die of starvation or go bankrupt), but I spoke up very respectfully instead.  I told her about the miscommunication and Phil's seeming reluctance to bother giving us a clear answer.

To her and Cam's credit, they took care of the matter very respectfully.  They talked to Phil and agreed to pay the difference because he had been so unclear.  They explained that sometimes they had the same problem with Phil--not being able to pin him down to a single clear answer.  We were very grateful and it gave us confidence in the owners.  It definitely added to our pros list to stay in Tekapo.  No matter how we felt about the atmosphere of the restaurant, it was nice to know that the owners looked out for us and it would have been really nice to get to work closer with them after this experience.

Anyway, we checked into The Godley, finding that the bad reviews were deserved.  The room they gave us was small and run-down, to say the least.  The carpet was a '70s orange color, with a 5x1 foot oval bald section at the foot of the beds.  There were no windows, and the only natural lighting we had was through a rippley-glassed door on one side of the room which didn't even get sun for most of the day.  The bathroom was clean, but also run-down.  The walls were the ultra-textured paint fashion from decades ago and the overhead light was in an amber-colored fixture that made the room look damp and dark, like a cave.

Honestly, it was good enough for us.  We had been sleeping in the car for a few days, as well as on the hard floor of the Cook Straight Ferry.  A tiny tent was our home for many nights in NZ, so walls and a heater were welcome.  We aren't high class or high maintenance people.  I was glad to have some place warm and dry to sleep.  The only part that concerned us about The Godley was that we didn't know how much we were paying for this cave.  We don't mind a rundown place, but not if it is going to cost us an arm and a leg.

The room did include tea, coffee, and hot cocoa, which was nice.  I emptied the box of most of the little packets so we could get more every day when the maids came around.  Had the maids been Kiwis, I doubt they would have given us more packets, but because the maids were all foreigners, we felt bonded and they gladly gave us fresh packets every day.  We still drink these on the road.

Those first few days at MacKenzie's were tough, like I knew they would be.  Waiting tables is high stress and everyone on the team is stressed, especially on a weekend as big as Easter weekend.  I knew I was getting myself into something I didn't want to be in, but this was our chosen path.  I broke down in tears a few times in that first week.

Everyone was working as hard and as fast as they could.  Almost everyone was annoyed at my slow speed and very few of them took the time to answer questions.

I started to notice a few things.  First, the tall, blond Kiwi girl Rochelle called me "chicky," and endeavored to be nice to me even at high stress.

Another thing I noticed was that Phil was sometimes incredibly harsh to people, myself included.  One night I had a really bad night, forgetting to put an order through, mis-ordering, and screwing up the payments.  This was sometime in the first couple of weeks.  Phil took me aside at the end of the night to "talk."  I was cranky and feeling picked on, and so when Phil harshly criticized my performance, I went silent at first.  He mentioned all of my mistakes (one of which his wife had made earlier that same day, but of course my making the mistake was SO MUCH WORSE), tore them apart, asked me why I was stupid and did it that way, and then eyed me as if to say HOW DARE I?  I was shaking with anger and stayed silent at first, but then started to protest, saying that I was new, that the hot stone system didn't work, that I was trying.

I didn't handle it perfectly, I am aware of that.  But the whole experience shook me and was just the start of the long road with Phil.

While Rochelle made an effort to be at least pleasant, some of the other members of the team did not try so hard.  The short German girl named Caroline would roll her eyes, sigh angrily, and run past me if she thought I wasn't going fast enough.  She moved so fast that I could tell it made customers anxious.  She wasn't able to hide her stress.

Working at Henry's Fork Lodge was an entirely different experience.  MacKenzie's had a mixed ordering system--we took orders at the table on order booklets, but then transferred them into an entirely computerized system.  Drinks orders were printed at the bar automatically, while food orders automatically went back to the kitchen.  I actually thought the computer system was really cool and efficient.

The kitchen was intimidating.  The four male chefs were Jordanian/Palestinian and were mostly high-strung.  Samer was the head-chef and would yell at a waitress for the tiniest mistake.  Two of the chefs were high-strung but quiet.  The last chef was Yousef, whose smile was infectious as he flirted with as many of the waitresses as possible.

My trainer, Kiki, was a thirty-something sharp woman from Austria.  She was thorough to say the least.  She told me right off the bat that she was blunt and many people thought she was blunt, but, she said, it was just that she knew how to do the job and expected near perfection in her team.  What it actually amounted to was that she was giving herself permission to be a real jerk to people.

I appreciated over the next few months how tight of a ship Kiki managed.  She mainly worked the day shift as the duty manager, but every once in a while would stick around for the evening shift.  The last couple weeks of our time in Tekapo, she went to only evening shifts so she could snowboard at Roundhill and teach lessons during the day.

Repeated exposure did not thicken my skin.  I would have confrontation with her and then not have to work with her for a week or so.  The week would make me forget how poorly I felt she treated me and I convinced myself I was the problem and that she just wanted good customer service in the restaurant.  Then I would have to work with her for just an hour when our shifts overlapped and I would remember exactly why I disliked her management style so much.  Outside of work she was great.  At work, we clashed.

Joe and I got into a groove where we would come home from work at the end of the night and not be able to go to sleep right away.  These were late nights already, but made later because we had to unwind about everything that had happened during the shift.  At first Joe was critical of my inability to shrug it off, but he soon saw the shit soup that was brewed.

Honestly, there are about a million and a half things that I could say about MacKenzie's.  Since sitting down to catch up, I have remembered all of the pain and anger and sinister climate from the place.  I wrote it out in a letter to the owners (different people from the managers and other staff) exactly why my soul died at MacKenzie's.  It is something that I will never send, but I needed to write it because the place made me feel crazy and psychotic.  I would be happy to send it to anyone who requests that piece of the story.  Due to its negative content and especially considering I don't want to publish something so forwardly angry and about specific people, I'm not going to publicly post it on my blog.  Feel free to be part of the email list to read this part of my MacKenzie's analysis.  Send me a message to let me know you'd like that deeper stuff.

Outside of MacKenzie's, our life was slowly developing.  Once the waitress moved out of her rented room in a house, we were able to move out of The Godley and into the Tekapo staff housing.

At first it was depressing, magnified by the recent development that our car had started dying for no reason (frustrating--we spent an evening sprawled on beds angrily watching TV to distract ourselves from what seemed like such bad luck).

The room we moved into was dirty--the carpet had stains everywhere, there was no real "homey" feeling about it, and there was a mouse presence.  We found mouse poop in the drawers and cobwebs everywhere.  The furniture was dilapidated, though the bed was admittedly pretty big and new.  The big windows were cold, but meant lots of light, so that was a trade-off.

The rest of the house wasn't much better.  There was a nice kitchen, but it was filthy and everything down to the curtains was run-down and gross.  There were three refrigerators, but one was empty and molding inside, one was full of molding food in pots, and the other smelled constantly like old milk.  All of the cupboards also had mouse poop.

The bathroom was gross.  The shower was a bad color and the drain wouldn't drain.  The garbage cans were over-full and there were smears on the sink, toilet, garbage cans, etc.  Everything had a layer of ick.

The living room was nicely-sized like the kitchen, but not super pleasant.  All of the blinds were down, but at weird angles, giving the room a half-light.  The carpet was mis-matched and had patches of rugs and spotted carpet scraps, and the couches were unmatching and ugly.  There was no order.  The coffee table was cinder blocks and a long chunk of orangey wood.  There were random poles with duct-taped pillows on them and boxes of unknown stuff.  There was a small drink fridge with the door removed being used as a bookcase.  And two of the rooms in the house had interior windows facing the living room with the blinds drawn inside.

Turns out the whole house was actually famous for being so shitty.  There was a TV show in New Zealand that hunted out scams in construction and this place had been featured a few years back.  The construction process had been inspected, but soon after being inspected, the builders removed the re-bar from it to use it in another house.  The house was finished without re-bar (though I believe the problem was fixed in more recent years, to be fair).

The place was even more bizarre because it was so oddly planned.  Rooms were added later, but as if they were an afterthought.  The front entrance, by our room, was at the same level as the kitchen.  Our room was the first right, then came the staircase to the upstairs portion of the house, then the "puke room" straight ahead from the front door (more on that later).  The bathroom was to the left and the kitchen was just beyond that, with the sink and cupboards to the left and the table and chairs to the right.

The kitchen had one end framed for a garage door that had been taken out.  The large frame remained, along with a weird little squeaky bit of particle board that made a slight ramp to accommodate the 4-6 inch shift in floor level from kitchen to living room.  The living room was long with two posts in the middle and a partially slanting roof.  On the inside wall of the long side of the living room was the window into the puke room.  Behind the posts on the side of the house in line with our room were two more rooms (one of which we shared a wall with, and the other of which had another window on the inside wall of the short end of the living room).

If that's not confusing and sorta screwy, I'm not sure what is.

Everything about this place was "ecclectic" and run-down.  We soon found out that very few of the lights worked.  In fact, between the front entrance, bathroom, and kitchen, the only light that worked was duct-taped to a makeshift lamp made out of a slice of wood with a tiki torch shoved in it.  This "lamp" was left running all the time and had to be moved from room to room to see.

The tiny little closet room that we came to unaffectionately call the "puke room" housed one male when we first moved in, technically.  I say this because Adrian would always come into the house and disappear into the room with another dude.  People joked crudely that they didn't want to know what went on between the two of them, and they insisted that they just had World of Warcraft tournaments in there.  I didn't believe either.  I wouldn't have minded at all if they were homosexual, but I'm pretty sure they were just secretly having the other dude stay in there without paying or being on the lease.  Smart, in my opinion.

They moved out shortly after we moved in, but not before leaving a huge and wet stain under one of the carpet scraps that smelled like vomit.  This is where "puke room" came from.

Those were dark days, literally and figuratively.  The house was so far beyond gross that it didn't seem even remotely worth putting in the effort to make it live-able.  The people we lived with so far didn't seem to care and the disrepair, if brought into check, would only lapse into dilapidation again when the other flatmates didn't bother cleaning up after themselves.

We were depressed and dark, or at least I was.  I was trying my hardest not to let my type A kick in just to waste time trying to clean that which wasn't worth my time.  We were coming home from long, hard shifts at a thankless job to a house that was rotting, a car that wouldn't run, and a darkness in the house and our souls.

I honestly can't remember much from those first couple of days except thinking, we should cut our losses and get out of this dark hole.  But the lease we had signed to get the place was going to be one that was hard to get out of (as if it were some sort of exclusive paradise that people were dying to get into) and we couldn't bare the thought of quitting another job out of malcontent.

I was questioning who we were as people if we kept arrogantly thinking we were better than every job we got and couldn't handle sub-standard living arrangements.  I was frustrated at my own discontent and struggling to find something, anything to hold onto to stick out this darkness.  My anger at myself only added to the darkness.

And then the sun came out.  A couple of days into living at 33 Murray, a cute young couple found me washing dishes, introduced themselves as Tom and Karen from Swinden, England, the new couple who had just moved in, and on their way to work, but glad to meet me.  And that was it.

They picked up on the fact that I was washing dishes and they would scrub down the shower.  I would empty the hair out of the shower drain and they would wipe out a refrigerator.  We would wipe down cupboards and they would rearrange the living room (and rearrange, and rearrange, and rearrange--Tom was all about the Feng Shue).  I swept and mopped the kitchen floor and they entirely disinfected and cleaned the bathroom.  Tom helped me move the molding fridge out back, and when he removed the vomit-stained carpet from the puke room, I put down baking soda to take away the moisture and smell.

A couple of days later they were watching a movie with a friend in the living room while we were at work and they left a note on our door that we found when we came home.  It said, "If you're hungry, look in the fridge! :)"  They had left us some of their homemade pizza.

What followed was a couples' love affair.  Tom and Karen would become one of the best things about Tekapo, and definitely the main reason we stayed.  They were us, only reversed and mixed up.  I saw some of our most prized qualities in them.

Tom and I are obsessively particular about cleanliness and Karen and Joe are clean, but not when it gets in the way of anything else.  Karen and I are quieter, sweeter, and middle-children peace-makers with the random horrifically dirty mouth, and Tom and Joe are youngest children and always in need of people and always the life of the party.  Tom and I are morning and punctual people and Joe and Karen like to sleep late and cut things way too close.  Karen and I like alone time and one-on-one relationships and Joe and Tom both like to sarcastically pump up their masculinity, while being made of mush and marshmallows on the inside.

A couple of weeks into this love affair, Tom and Karen told us their news--they were pregnant.  I had sort of noticed that Karen wore baggy sweatshirts at home, but it was sort of a passing observation.  They were on their "honeymoon," which was approaching being a year in length.  They had traveled all over southeast Asia on as little money as possible, then had done Australia, and had finally ended up in Tekapo with a Working Holday visa, a job, and the hope to earn and save enough money to pay for their way home to have the baby.  They kept the baby a secret from their family and friends back at home and surprised their parents and the world by landing in England 7 1/2 months pregnant.  Coolest thing ever.

Tom was thrilled for a baby, but Karen had been sad at first.  She wasn't ready.  It had been an accident, but it was okay timing--they were married, they weren't in debt, and they could handle having a kid.  I like to hope that we helped warm her up slowly to "Peanut" (she called it Peanut) by giving her a safe place to feel bummed for the timing, but slowly become used to the idea.  I don't know.  Either way, she started the pretty amazing process I've seen other women go through where you get attached naturally.  I imagine it's probably pretty hard to have the warmth and struggle of pregnancy and not get at least a little attached.

I'm pumped for them, especially since the day keeps getting closer and closer.  At the same time, I'm sad our timing wasn't a little bit different.  Tom and Karen are such loving, warm people, up for adventure and willing to put in the time with friends, that I would have liked traveling with them.  Like, a lot.  I think they would have been perfect traveling partners for us because they would have given me a steady base of friendship, while pulling me out of my comfort zone with adventures, and they would have given Joe the social element he craves.  And the poor boy needs a little bit of man time every once in a while.

It's a part of life that I am only slowly getting used to.  Lots of my friends get pregnant and say, don't worry, the baby will change things, but we'll still be able to maintain the friendship and hang out.  But really a baby does change everything.  I think it has to.  It firmly puts a person in a very different part of life.  I would LOVE for Tom, Karen, and Peanut to come to our wedding, but it's just not something that will happen.  It's sad, but it's also an exciting part of starting a family I suppose--things change majorly.  It's a big adventure.

It's hard not to be sad about the timing, but it is definitely easy to be excited for them.  They'll make about the best parents ever.  We hope we get to cross paths with them again some day.

The other member of our floor of the house was Jason, a Kiwi who went from chef at one restaurant in town (Run 77) when we first started, to head chef of the newest restaurant in town.  He was a sweet and caring person, though he tried to hide it a bit.  Poor man was stuck with two of the cutest couples in history!  :)

Upstairs was Sam, Rochelle, Levin, and Louise.

Sam was the little Kiwi man who was assistant chef to Jason at Run 77.  He disliked living with Rochelle because her idea of clean is a lot looser than most everyone else's idea.  Sam liked to leave little passive-aggressive notes saying things like, THIS IS MY FOOD, DON'T TOUCH IT! directed at no one particularly and yet everyone knew it was for Rochelle.

Rochelle, as I've said earlier, has this really great way of putting up with a lot in people.  Even when she felt slowed down and annoyed by me at MacKenzie's, she still helped me out when I needed it.  She let Sam's dislike roll off her shoulders.  She knew she was a messy person and she apologized to people for it, but it was who she was and it didn't really change.  And there was a nice moment in Sam and Rochelle's "friendship" when Rochelle confronted him straight on about it, apologized, and said she wanted to know if there was anything she could do to ease things.  Sam was mostly taken aback by the straight-forwardness and was much more pleasant from then on.  Very cute to see.

Levin is a German stoner.  He is one of the kindest and happiest people you'll ever meet, and he has an easy-going way of life and often gets high because it is fun.  Joe loved Levin.  I really enjoyed Levin as well.

Louise is a French woman, with the deeply French accent, wild and beautiful hair, and bright red lipstick.  She left a couple months into our stay in Tekapo and we didn't ever get too close to her, but she was very sweet and worked at the Tavern at the end of the village.

For a few weeks early on in Tekapo we also had a German living in our living room.  Constantin had worked at Run 77, but had quit to clean rooms at Pepper's instead.  He was young and soon got tired of cleaning room as well and put in his two weeks' notice.  He went to Samoa and then came back to stay for a couple of days before heading to Queenstown to find a job at a ski resort.

One night we wrangled Jason into cooking for all of us.  There were many of us sitting around the table drinking beers and laughing.  Part way through the night, a knock on the back door gave us a couple of German hippies who had heard that we sometimes took in strays.  They stayed with us.  They were amazed at the warmth our house had, literally and figuratively.

At some point during the dinner, we started talking about the most embarrassing moments.  There were funny ones here and there, but when it came around to the German hippies, the one girl started telling us a story of what had happened earlier that week.  They had needed a place to stay and a man invited them to stay in his car with him.  While one German was asleep in the front seat, the other German had sex with the man.  We were all shocked with the story.  Sexual freedom is all well and good, but it was shocking to be telling stories about tripping in front of a crush and then one story comes out about screwing a man for a place to sleep within inches of a sleeping friend.  Very interesting.

Jason's satay sauce that night was amazing.  He is an excellent chef and he knows the science of it, which means he doesn't need recipes, because he knows how one ingredient will react with the other.

Constantin had showed up again from Samoa and joined in the festivities then as well.

Rochelle was glad when she moved upstairs, because she thought she was getting a better kitchen (it had a wood-burning stove), a bathtub, and a great view.  She did get all those things, but once things started to get fun and friendly downstairs (and clean), we'd like to think that she regretted it and we'd also like to think that we had a hand in that.  In fact, they even started to boast a little when they would do things as a floor, to make sure everyone knew that they were cool too.  It was cute.  I think our floor had the advantage of a heat pump that we could run until we were sweating, and a big, bright, and usually clean kitchen.  :)

Not that it was a competition.  But if it was a competition, I think we definitely won.  :)  It was fun that there was such a positive competition.

Rochelle was very sweet because once we started including her in things and really getting to bond with her over bitching about work and late nights, she thought we were the bee's knees.  I can't imagine a more loyal friend.  And we felt honored by that.

The biggest impression that sort of was more solidified by what we experienced in the workplace in Tekapo was that Kiwis seemed to have an interesting incompetence for management.  And it wasn't just MacKenzie's.

While Run 77 was a better working environment, their manager also seemed just a bit spacey.

Pepper's was a trainwreck every day.  There were always last-minute calls to say, "The guest for room 412 is here and waiting, drop what you're doing and do 412 as fast as possible!!"  It was like rooms were always an emergency and it was a stressful environment to work in.

Our landlord had no sense of urgency and didn't keep her workers in the loop.

It sort of just feels like NZ would benefit greatly from a government-run free class on how to manage people and projects.  Just really basic things were missing altogether from the management style.

As I've said before, about halfway through our time in Tekapo Phil was only scheduling me for about 20-25 hours per week, which is simply not enough.  And it would be slow and so even though I was already scheduled for so little, they would call me up and come in an hour later than scheduled.  (And this is a really tough thing for restaurants; it really was unfair to schedule me for so few hours and then for the hours they do schedule me, they sometimes don't even give them to me anyway, which means that anything else I could have been doing during that time I can't do because I don't know until a half hour before that I am not going to work as scheduled.  Very unfair.  Also unfair that sometimes Kiki would try to call me seven minutes before my shift started to tell me to wait an extra hour--very unprofessional, considering I'm already walking to MacKenzie's by that point.)

Anyway, so with so few hours I decided to start pursuing another job.  I applied and followed up very faithfully with Pepper's Bluewater Lodge, the nice tourist hotel in town.  I liked the idea because I could potentially do both jobs--Pepper's in the morning and MacKenzie's in the evening.

It took a lot of tracking the housekeeping head down, but I finally got the job.  It was exhausting, honestly.  I would work 7-8 hours at Pepper's, have a half hour break to walk to MacKenzie's and change into my uniform, and then I would work 5-6 more hours.  I basically slept and worked, with a little bit of eating, for a full month.  Great money though.

Bah.  Apparently Pepper's wrapped me all up too.  I started to write a bunch of it out, but again don't want to be nothing but critical.  I have very strong opinions about the way we were treated, the way we were expected to work, and the way that the business was run, but I find that I don't want to risk exposure or livelihood of anyone.  Therefore, again, if you would like the whole shebang (just how mad I am about this, just how stupid I thought that worked, or just how a particular person made me feel), please use the contact dealio on the right of the screen and let me know you'd like the extended crap.

Part way through my time in Tekapo, I also received a care package from my family at Scientech.  It came with a card and a few personal notes.  It made me cry.  I missed them all.  The peanut butter saved our lives while we were on the road, the gloves saved Joe's hands, the phone purse is just gorgeous, the CD is great, the sweater was so warm and cuddly, etc, etc, etc.  There were so many goodies and so many happy thoughts.  It made me feel so special.  I have never felt so special.

A couple weeks into the two jobs ordeal, almost everyone in the house had a day off at the same time, so we all went to Mt. Cook.  I slept in the car on the way there, which saved my life because I was sooooo tired.

The day was so beautiful.  It had just snowed the day before, but the sun was out and bright.  All of us were sleepy, but full of energy.  We hiked up, had lunch, and played around in the snow a little bit.  It was a magical day and the snow sparkled and twinkled.

Joe and I took a couple of days to see Wanaka, which was a cute little lake town nearby.  We stayed in a DOC campsite, where the wind was blowing so hard that we were worried about the car having a branch blow down on it, so we parked in an open area and froze our butts off.

Wanaka was beautiful, but we were again frustrated that our car was dying for no reason (this trip was shortly after we got to Tekapo).  There was no pattern.  It would be going fine and then the RPMs would plummet and it would die.  This was harmless enough, unless you were on a constricted or busy road and had to find a big enough spot to pull over before the car rolled to a stop.

In Wanaka we bought a present for Tom and Karen which we were pretty proud of.  It was a onesie with a kiwi bird coming out of an egg and it said, "Freshly Hatched."

We also were out driving around the lake when we discovered a slow puncture in our tire.  It was thankfully a slow enough puncture that we could get to a tire shop, so that was very fortunate indeed.  It frustrated us to have more going wrong with the car.

All in all Wanaka was fun, but not long enough of a break from work.

Later on in our time in Tekapo, we decided that we were tired of feeling constrained by not having a reliable car, so we ditched it at home and tried hitchhiking for the first time and with great success!  We rode with a nice man from Tekapo to Twizel, where we were shortly after picked up by an American family traveling in an RV all the way to Queenstown!  There weren't enough seats for me to sit, so I sat in the back hidden from any police that might see me, but reading and sitting in the sun on a comfortable couch!  It was amazing!

They took us all the way to Queenstown, where we checked into a cute little hostel and left to explore the town.  Queenstown is just beautiful.  It sits on the edge of the lake (and perpetually in the shadow of the mountain in winter--chilly!) and it has a vibe of youth.

We ate at Fergburger's, as instructed by everyone who heard we were going to Queenstown.  It was delicious.

We also met and hung out with Constantin, our German friend who had lived in the living room in Tekapo!  He had found a job at a ski resort, though admittedly it wasn't as glorious as he had hoped--he was washing dishes.  But he did get a free ski pass.  It was really great to see him.

The next morning we got up early and went down to walk by the lake.  We had a coffee and decided to climb the main little mountain where there is a gondola going up.  We were feeling incredibly poor and did the walk instead of pay for the gondola.

Not very far into the walk I realized that my tennis shoes were making my feet blister.  I tried to fix my socks to help, rearrange the shoe, but nothing would work, so I eventually just decided to take the shoes off.  Joe joined me in solidarity and we hiked half the mountain barefoot.

The hike was intense, especially barefoot.  At about the halfway mark, the ground was so wet and cold that our feet were screaming at us and we had to put shoes back on.  I stepped on the back of my shoe to keep it from touching the blister.  This helped, but made my pace a little slow and jagged.  But we finally made it up!

The view was AMAZING.  Worth it.  We shared a meat pie and looked out over our accomplishment.

On the way back down the mountain, we met a nice couple at one of the carved chairs.  They were older (50s, 60s?) and were from Australia, and Tasmania specifically.  We told them we were headed to Australia in September and they told us to look them up.  We said goodbye happily.

When we made it back down the mountain, we had a bite to eat and then decided to head back to Tekapo.  We didn't have to work until the next day at 16:00, but since hitchhiking relies on other people and their schedules, we decided to give ourselves plenty of time to get home.

The ride home was also very pleasant.  Our first ride out of Queenstown was with a man named Dean, who was a construction worker who worked in Queenstown and lived in Cromwell.  We immediately liked him.  Hitchhiking can be a little iffy because you don't know who you will meet (though honestly it is sort of a self-selected group of generous, interesting, and nice people), but when Dean told us he used to lift his puppy into his truck to prevent hip dysplasia, we knew he was a good dude.  You can almost always count on someone who takes good care of an animal like that to be a great person.

Dean was so nice and we liked him.  He had a lot of deep things to say, which was surprising coming from such a manly-man construction worker.  He was mild and kind.  By the time we got to Cromwell, it was almost getting dark, so he took us out to a place that would give us the best chance on getting a ride for the next section, but not before offering a bed if we had no luck.  He was the nicest dude, offering us a place to stay if we had problems getting home.  We would later stay with him a month or so later and we still text with him to this day.

We had little luck at the place he dropped us and we were really getting nervous for a while, but finally a van pulled over for us.  A young man named John was finishing an airport shuttle off and very kindly gave us a ride all the way back to Tekapo.  He was also deep like Dean, which impressed us.

We got home to Tekapo with pretty good time to spare and we were so pumped up about humanity that we were beaming.  We had been so depressed about our car not working, thinking we were trapped and then on our first hitchhiking attempt we had met such nice people, traveled for so cheap, and made really great friends.  We felt like there was hope for the human race if there were such great people!  Tom and Karen seemed to get a kick out of our energy.

On a night off from MacKenzie's and Pepper's, Karen, Tom, Joe and I did the Earth and Sky tour.  This was one of the attractions of Tekapo.  Mt John, which was a hill on the edge of the lake, had an observatory on the top.  The MacKenzie region has phenomenal views of the stars already (something about the lake effect and a thin atmosphere) and the town of Tekapo decided to make sacrifices to promote this study of the heavens.  All of the street lights in the town were orange in color, meaning that the light did not bleed and interfere with the viewing of the stars, plus the lights were capped, which majorly cut down on the light pollution.  The view was incredible.  Joe thinks that is the thing he misses most from Tekapo--walking home at nights along the river and looking up at stars so bright and beautiful you'd lose track of where you were walking.

The tourist attraction for the observatory is Earth and Sky tours, which take people up for some history, information, and observation.  Joe and I got letters from Phil saying we worked as Front of House staff (Phil, in a rare streak of kindness chose to write that for Joe even though Joe was Back of House), which meant that we got to go for free!

A man named Chris would come into the restaurant every once in a while and I originally started talking to him because his accent was so similar to my own.  Turns out he was from Arizona and ran the observatory.  He was the most interesting person, happy all the time and he had a personality that made his excitement for star knowledge infectious.  He had confirmed the rumor I had heard that Front of House staff could go for free with a letter, in the hopes that we would recommend the experience to diners.

So we got to go for free and it was sooooooooo cool.  Joe was like a child, so excited.  It was eff-ing cold, but we learned about the southern stars, got to see Saturn and its rings, and they took a time-lapse photo of us in our loaner arctic parkas under the impressive Milky Way.  It was amazing.  We even got free hot chocolate.

One of the joys at MacKenzie's was getting to work with Sarah.  When an American girl (who coincidentally was from Utah and was an ex-Mormon, meaning she and Joe had a lot to talk about) came through intending to do dishes, but decided after a night of watching that it wasn't for her, Phil needed a dishwasher and another waitress fast.  He found Julien and Sarah.  They were a French pair (not romantic pair) traveling together who lived and worked at the hostel by the lake.

Sarah is passionate, loud, and loving.  She is an only child, and she calls everyone darling.  Her accent and smile are infectious and she was a pleasure to work with (as long as you didn't cross her).  She was one of the few who were really just helpful when you were out on the floor.

Julien did dishes on the two nights Joe had off each week.  He was quiet and short and handsome, with dark curls and a French nose.  He was a nice, nice dude, and Joe and I hope to travel with either/both of them in the future (there's a particular exotic train somewhere in the world that we would like to go with them).

Sarah, Julien, Joe and I finally made it out for a hike together on one of our mornings off.  We hiked to Lake Alexandrina and this was where we really got to know the two of them and fall in love with them.

Another joy was Vicki, the loud Brit.  She was short, curvy, and funny.  I got to lay sarcasm and dry wit on her hard, which was really fun for me.  She draws her humor from exasperation and occasionally let some borderline racist things come out of her mouth about Asians that would come through the restaurant.

The Asians are an interesting topic.  Many people in Tekapo (not really Vicki though) seemed to view them as tourists who were easy to take advantage of--they were wealthy and didn't usually speak great English.  I'd like to think that my approach is a little better.  I've been enough places in the world where I don't speak the language and something as simple as ordering a beer can be scary and intimidating.  In those cases, I really, really, really appreciated anyone who was willing to help me out.  I felt vulnerable and kind people would help me.  And sure, sometimes there were a few Asians who went through the restaurant who were not pleasant, but most of them really appreciated patience and help.  I found most of them to be very nice and very thankful for the help.  I was uneasy about the way some of them were treated.

There was a group of guys who would come into the restaurant a couple of times a week.  They worked for the power company called Genesis and were doing two or three weeks on and a couple of weeks off.  They lived in Australia when they weren't in NZ, but they would come to Tekapo and live at Pepper's.  The first couple of times they came into the restaurant, they left modest tips.  After that, they became "locals," which were the undesirable breed of customer that expects perfect food and service, with no tipping afterward.  I started to get really bitter especially about the group of Genesis boys because they were young, single dudes making great money and I would change their towels and scrub their toilets in the mornings and serve them food at night, and I would receive no tips, and really would actually just receive complaints--the steak wasn't good tonight, or where is my tomato sauce.  Mind you, I'm trying my hardest to remember his tomato sauce and get everything right, but what's the point when he's just going to complain and then leave without tipping anyway?  Doesn't inspire me.

At Pepper's, there were a few characters I worked with who were fun and interesting.  The first was George, who I unfortunately didn't get to work with much.  He would run the Mantra facility front desk, and he was such a live wire that he hated sitting down for too long and would go into the apartments ahead of us when the front desk wasn't busy and strip beds for us.  He was very nice.

Another was Rose, who was a little crazy.  She was from Thailand and she was a short little woman, who talked a lot, especially to herself in the third person.  She taught me how to clean.  I watched her go from being pretty care-free to one month later being so angry with management that she was just yelling all the time.  It was sad and very indicative of how bad the situation was.

A few of the people I worked with at Pepper's arranged a going-away dinner for myself and another girl near the end, which was very neat.  Kiki was kind enough to let me take a couple of hours off to relax with them.  I took their orders, added my own, and then when meals came out, I got to sit down and eat with them off the clock.  This was the only paid-for meal I would eat at the restaurant, and it was a bowl of soup, one of the cheapest things on the menu.

It occurred to me part way through that people at Pepper's were leading their housekeeping teams in a way that they could check the apartments and rooms first for left goods.  No one took clothes or anything, but if there was opened food, it was fair game because it was going to go in the garbage anyway.  Of course hotel policy was that nothing was to be taken home, but I think everyone knew it was happening.  And don't go crazy--we weren't taking home things that could be contaminated. Just the things that people would have to work pretty hard to intentionally contaminate.  I suppose it is always a risk.

I got many an awesome thing from there.  Conditioner, shampoo (no, not stealing the hotel ones, just the half-empty ones people would leave, both the hotel brand and other brands), partial bottles of wine, a bottle of port (yum!), and things like milk and flour.  It was a nice perk.

I got to share the port with people to celebrate things, which made me look classy as shit.  :)  When really all it meant was that I was a cheapskate hawk who took partial bottles of just about anything rather than see them go in the trash.

Just as I was starting the job at Pepper's, we had the entrance of some of our favorite people back into our lives--the Italians!  They were in Christchurch and couldn't find jobs, so we told them to come to Tekapo.  We were so happy to see them.  It was like seeing family again.

Joe took them around town on their first day and both had jobs by the end of the day!  It was amazing.  We invited them to stay in the living room, but they refused, saying they were happy to sleep in their van.  They parked at our house and used the kitchen, shower, laundry, etc, but always slept in the van.  We were worried about the stress the extra people would add to the house, but they were polite and generous.  They gave us $10 per week to compensate, did dishes and baked for us, and made sure not to take the bathroom from anyone.  They were perfect guests.

I was really impressed by them, and especially Martina, for marching into the places with confidence.  Derek was like, yes I can make coffees.  He had made them at home, but had had no professional training, but the dude got in there and did it to the best of his ability.  Good dude.  And Martina was even more impressive.  She understands a lot of English, but not a lot of Kiwi English, and she doesn't speak much at all, but she went out there and marched into businesses and got herself a job as a kitchen hand at the Tavern.  It really was cool.  I don't have that kind of confidence.

Tom and Karen got very attached to the Italians, which was very sweet.  We had been worried about how Karen would feel about an extra couple of people in an already pretty full living arrangement, but they were so considerate and amiable and Karen really liked them, as did Tom.

They taught everyone in the house how to swear in Italian, just like they taught us those first days of knowing them in the apple orchard.  Haha.  There was swearing going on in all parts of the house.

About the same time Tom started bringing strays home.  He brought three men home from the cafe one day.  Two of them were about to start work at the Hot Pools and one was to work at the new restaurant, Tin Plate.  Tom said they could stay for $15 per night, which added up fast!  We were sub-letting our spare space and the empty puke room!  :)  It was funny.

Andy and Joe were from Britain, and their friend Cristian was from Chile.  They were such nice dudes.  Between the two Joes, Andy, Cristian, Tom and Derek, there was always laughter going on in the house.

One of the last nights that we had in the house, Joe, Joe 2, Andy, Cristian and Levin had spirited debates for HOURS into the night.  Haha, they all woke up hung over the next morning, but more from talking than from anything else.  I was thankful to have a couple of doors between my bedroom and the kitchen where most of the action took place.

The money we collected from the boys went into a pot that we split once the boys moved out.  Tom and Karen, Jason and his date French Sarah, and Joe and I went out to the Kohan, which was the local Japanese/Korean restaurant.  We spent the money there in celebration and had a great time.  The money from the Italians went towards household things like dish soap, toilet paper, bleach, etc.  It was a good arrangement and we laughed at our monetizing schemes

The house throughout our time there was just a big mix of the best and most interesting people.  All travelers or interesting Kiwis.  We had so much fun.  The day before we left, the whole place got together to throw a Goodbye America party.  It was beautiful.  The next morning the boys from upstairs came down to hang out all morning until we left, which was the sweetest thing ever.  Levin baked us bread (which ended up saving our lives later) and Joe spent a long time laughing and looking through photos with the boys.  It was very sweet.  I could tell Joe was attached to them and flattered by their attention on our last day.

The boys and Martina stood at the door of 33 Murray and waved at us until we couldn't see them anymore.

We were very sad to go, honestly.  We had had many heartaches there, mostly because of MacKenzie's, but also some fights with each other, as well as the car issues, etc, but by the time we left, we were sad to go.  I was exhausted from working, but I still stayed up as late as I could before leaving to be with everyone.

We were leaving behind a big bag of mixed feelings.  Anger, frustration, bitterness, but also some of the deepest and sweetest friendships we've had.  People pull together in places like Tekapo and it is a bright spot in our memories when we think of Rochelle, Vicki, Sam, Jason, Tom, Karen, Joe, Andy, Cristian, Julien, Sarah, and all the others.  We were heartbroken to leave (well, at least I was).

The most beautiful memory for me was at Run 77.  Rochelle had had her final straw run-in with Phil and quit (props to her! we felt like we had helped her feel confident enough to not put up with his shit anymore) and had started working at Run 77 with Tom and Karen and the others.  That afternoon on our last day, we got to Run 77 and Rochelle was already crying a little.  They were all smiles and warm wishes, but our sadness at leaving them was mirrored on their faces.  Karen leaned over her pregnant belly for last hugs and Tom hugged us, but then feigned indifference with the sweetest tears in his eyes and told us to take off gruffly.  I'm just about the most insecure person you'll ever meet and while I had been guarding my dread at saying goodbye for weeks, it was the most beautiful moment to see that they would miss us too.  We took one last picture and tore ourselves away from some of the most beautiful people we've ever met.

We hiked up to the hitchhiking spot we had used before with our big bags on our backs and love in our hearts.