Thursday, 4-Feb-2010, 5:30 PM Queenstown local time
Kristi's first shooting day should be closing soon. The schedule says wrap at 5:15 PM, but I suspect that is overly optimistic and they're about an hour outside town in any case. I think we'll do take out again tonight to celebrate (and really, the only groceries I have left are PB&J and bargain lunchmeat), but maybe I can convince her to walk into town with me to this little Italian place that Cathy the Intern and I ran into by accident on Monday. It is literally buried at the back corner of an ally, but once inside it has split-tree wood furniture, ambiance through the roof and excellent food. I got take-away spaghetti with chicken on Monday and Kristi and I both enjoyed it tremendously.
Today I walked some more. I wandered the path outside the hotel, going to the left from my balcony view. More gorgeous waterfront for quite some distance. There is a dock that Kristi and I found on Tuesday and I went and sat on that for a while. It is a private dock, technically speaking, but there are no barriers and I do appreciate the owners (whose house is uphill behind about a hundred trees) letting me use it while I listened to the wind on the water. Except when an airplane flies overhead, it is pretty quiet overall this far outside town.
I also wandered back into Queenstown proper, and this time went all the way through to the Skyline Gondola (www.skyline.co.nz). This is a 5-minute ride in a gondola car to the top of the mountain. Up there are numerous trails and touristy activities, including a luge if you want to get back down quickly, a bungy jump, and a bungy swing for those that want the bungy experience but with a little less randomness in your fall through space. I have to admit it was fun watching people throw themselves out into space and scream and scream until the bouncing stopped. They also have trails, and I wandered those a bit, and took pix, including from the other side of the mountain, but eventually the sheer steepness of the trails wore down my ankles. I'm a desk monkey – my body is still in training for this kind of thing, so I'm feeling really good about slogging a couple kilometers today. I got tons of pix, and I'll post those on Facebook along with the others.
As an interesting aside, the “paper” money here is not paper, but plastic. Very thin sheets, as flexible as paper, but much harder to crumple. Conversely, once they do get bent, they stay that way. I was saved from an impulse buy at a vending machine when it was simply impossible to straighten the bent corners of the bill it kept rejecting. Constructing the bills from plastic also makes it possible to put transparent windows in them, making them harder to copy.
The bills come in $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100 notes. While it sounds bizarre to think of yourself carrying around $100 bills, sadly it isn't. I suffered sticker shock the first couple days, especially with food prices, even adjusted for the stronger US Dollar. A large pizza from Winnies (www.winnies.co.nz) costs $36 and delivery is $5 more. That “large” is about the size of an American “large” pizza, which could cost only USD$18, or so. The exchange rate is about 80%, so that En-Zed (“NZ” - New Zealand) pizza is roughly USD$29. I asked the locals and they point out two things: 1) yes, food prices are a significantly greater percentage of gross income here than in America, 2) Queenstown is primarily a tourist and television town, so there is a bit of a captive-market mark-up. (This captive-market mark-up was really obvious at the book store – school supplies were about what I'd expect to pay at home, but the novels, tour books and other tourist attractions were unbelievable – I mean, really, can you fathom dropping USD$18 on a novel that in Seattle might cost $8?? As much as I feel like I need a book, I just couldn't do it.)
Coins come in 10-cent, 20-cent, 50-cent, $1 and $2 denominations. The $1 and $2 are metal slugs and a pocket full of them will make you want to feed them into vending machines just to make them go away. All costs are rounded up to the nearest 10-cent mark. So a book that costs $5.99 (it was a special promo deal, but I didn't buy it because I would have blown through it in two days) would have tax applied, then round up to the nearest tenth, for example $6.73 rounds up to $6.80. That means there are no pennies or nickels here. A simple and elegant system, and I think the round-up goes into the general tax fund, but I'm not sure.
Alright, that's enough for today. I'm going to go upload some pix to FB and try to call Kristi to get an ETA for her return.
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