Month: April 2024

I admit it, I love a horse race. Yes, I agree that there are significant issues with the treatment of horses and I certainly get upset when I learn of horses dying or being mortally injured. There needs to be far more policing of racing, that much is certain.

But still, seeing a horse race just brings tears to my eyes. (I cry about horses a lot. Don’t ask me why.). And New Zealand is horse crazy, at least where we live. There are horses everywhere. I have to believe that they care for them.

So when I randomly saw an advert for the New Zealand Oaks, I said, why not? The information said that proper horse racing day dress was required. So we went all in. A nice dress and jewelry for me. (No hat for me as the British ladies wear at Ascot. Not that I am against them. I love hats. I just don’t have any here.) Matt wore his white three piece suit with his straw hat. Matching blue shirt, tie and cuff links and of course his cane to make it all dapper.

As we were trying to figure out where our seats were a woman came running up to Matt and asked him if he wanted to be in the best dressed contest. His response? I have been waiting for this all of my life. She rushed him to a waiting area as other contestants gathered. Then they were marched onto the lawn for the judges consideration. Incredibly, Matt lost to an older gentleman in an ill fitting suit and a bow tie. Look at this:

Well, Matt thinks the bow tie clinched it for the guy. All I can figure is that this gentleman had an in with the judges. For the rest of the day people were coming up to Matt telling him he was robbed and he was their pick as best dressed. So at least he won the people’s choice..

As for the races, I picked two winners, one won by a nose and went to photo review. I actually went home with money in my pocket. It was a beautiful day and we enjoyed it thoroughly.

The largest free outdoor festival in New Zealand, we knew we had to go to the Newtown Festival. Newtown is the section of Wellington where the immigrants land. It is a vibrant mist mash of cultures, lots of fun to walk around in. They had 16 stages for music and over 400 vendors. It covered 11 city blocks. It was to some extent overwhelming but we dove in.

                  We also bopped around Melbourne.  So much to report.  

   Beer Run.  There was one very important stop that was a must do— a special trip to a beer store. While the local craft beer here in New Zealand is very good, the imported beer selection is not great.  I was missing my Japanese and Spanish beers—Hitachino Nest and Alhambra.  I vowed that if they had the beer in Australia, I would bring some home.  Before we left, I asked Google for an answer, and I found a store that sold both.  We taxied out to the Richmond neighborhood, and there was our heaven.  We skipped through the store like two deprived kids oohing and aahing at all the beer from around the world.  We put together 16 bottles and lugged it home.  We were carrying so much beer, our luggage was overweight.  Oh well, it was worth it.  Second greatest beer run ever.  

            Dinner.  We ate omakase (a tasting menu) at Minamishima, a highly rated Japanese restaurant, where we enjoyed some rare and unusual sakes to accompany an interesting mix of small plates featuring tuna, eel, wagyu beef, golden eye snapper and flounder fin to name a few. We love gorging on Japanese food and sake. This was one of the better Japanese restaurants we have visited.

            Market.  We wandered around Queen Victoria Market, a monster food and retail market in downtown Melbourne.  

Made up of several buildings, with merchants offering everything from cheese to fruits to meats and sweets, t-shirts to cheap sunglasses to sheepskin everything, it would have been easy to spend the entire day wandering around.  Unfortunately, we were traveling and had no way to keep food cold.  Worse, New Zealand is strict about what comes in, so we could not pick up food to bring back home.  That was very disappointing because, guess what?  I love food.  It was like food heaven, but no, the customs Gods would not allow it. 

                     The Triennial and Avocados.  We also happened to be there for the National Gallery of Victoria’s Triennial, a multi-discipline exhibition of artists, projects, performance art, painting sculpture and so much more from all over the world.  We spent some time there.  (The granddaddy of this kind of art extravaganza is the Venice Biennale.).  

Here are some random photos of installations:

One exhibit, a documentary film, The Avocado Legacy, really has me concerned avocado farming in Mexico. The societal obsession with avocados (think avocado toast) has resulted in the industry exploding in Mexico.  While avocados are extremely popular and big business, avocado farming is intensely bad for the environment.  So much money can be made that forests are illegally logged by criminal cartels to clear the way for planting avocado trees.  This logging decimates the monarch habitat by cutting down their trees and filling acre upon acre of land with a monoculture.  You’ve seen pictures of the thousands of monarchs roosting in the trees at a preserve where they stay for the winter.  That habitat is being destroyed in the name of avocados.  

  The local women, who live with the forest and feel they have a connection to it and to the butterflies, were angry that the illegal logging was taking place and they banded together to take on the cartels.   While the women eventually prevailed by blocking roads and threatening the workers, an environmental advocate for the monarch habitat was murdered because he was so outspoken about the clearing of the native forest for avocados.  

 I had no idea of the impact of avocados on the environment and all I can say is, don’t eat avocados grown in Mexico.  

 

          Finis

           We had never been to Melbourne or that area of Australia, so we did some sightseeing too.  Instead of renting a car we opted for bus day tours—one along the Great Ocean Road and the other to Phillips Island, where we watched Little Penguins waddle and petted a koala.  

The Great Ocean Road follows a portion of the southeastern coast of Australia.  Built by returning soldiers after World War I, it is a gorgeous drive with spectacular ocean views.  With every turn of a bend, oooks and aaahs would erupt at the sight of waves crashing onto rocky coastlines, or at beaches stretched far into the distance with the sands playing off the clear blue water.  Our goal was a view of The Twelve Apostles, very photogenic rock formations, best seen at sunset.

On the way, we stopped in Kennett River to see koalas in the wild and in fact we did see a koala being a koala.  Here he is sleeping in the crook of a tree.  

They are very, very tired most of the time. This has to do with their diet of eucalyptus.  The leaves don’t provide much in the way of energy (no carbs) so they are just zonked most of the time.  You can tell he just fell asleep in the middle of a meal. His back was to us, so the pic is not great.  But damn it, we saw one that was not in a zoo or sanctuary.

 We also stopped at Loch Ard Gorge, part of Port Campbell National Park, for some views of spectacular cliffs and roaring ocean.  

            

Hurrying along, we bolted down dinner in Port Campbell before racing off to see the Apostles at sunset.  At this point, there are only four stone pillars left, others having eroded and fallen into the sea.  I am not sure there ever were twelve.  To hear the tour guide, the name Twelve Apostles was a marketing gimmick.  No matter what they are called, it was hard to resist taking dozens of photos from every last angle.

   

 In a separate tour, we headed to Phillips Island. First stop was Moonlit Sanctuary, home to native species, conservation efforts, and where we had a photo op with a koala. They are absolutely adorable and soft and easily distracted by eucalyptus leaves.

Next off to the Little Penguin colony and the nightly Penguin Parade.  The colony is situated in a cove surrounded by rolling hills.  Unlike the penguins of Antarctica who nest on rocky beaches, the penguins here nest in burrows that dot the hills.  The penguins pair up to produce offspring and every day, one sticks around to guard their home and the egg or chick, the other swims off for dinner.  At dusk, the swimmers come home after a hard day at sea.  They wash up on shore in large groups.  After a careful look around, they make a mad dash across the open sand.  Trying to avoid being picked off by a predator, foxes or large birds, there is safety in numbers.  Once across the sand they spread out, following trails that crisscross the hills leading to home.  They call it a parade but it is more of a penguin rush hour with hundreds of penguins waddling through the dunes.

            On this night, it was cold, really cold, and the wind was blasting off the ocean.  We sat huddled on risers waiting for their return.  The penguin parade path is lit with a type of light that allows us to see them, but they cannot see us.  I would imagine they could hear us, but they seemed okay and quickly walked their path hurrying along, anxious to get home and into cover. Adorable.  Just cute as can be.  Unfortunately, to make sure the penguins are not startled by flashes, photography was prohibited.  So we have no photos.  They gave us stock photos instead.  This does not do any justice to what we saw.   

  I admit that I am a fan of Taylor Swift.  I am not a Swiftie per se, because I don’t really have time to follow her every move, thought, outfit or boyfriend.  But I have her albums and like her music.  I also admire her tenaciousness.  She is one tough broad from a business perspective.  Her taste in men might need a bit of fine tuning, but how to make money and keep fans interested, the woman just knows.  

New Zealand is not always on the concert tour circuit, particularly Wellington.  And that played out here.  While she was coming to Southeast Asia and the Pacific part of the world, she was not coming to New Zealand, not even Aukland.  She was playing Japan, Singapore and Australia.   My plan was to find tickets at one of these locations and do a little sightseeing along the way.  Those were the location options. 

            Could tickets really be that hard to get?  Well, Japan was completely out of reach price wise.  Singapore was more affordable, but the dates were not good and there were not many tickets available on resale sites.  That left Australia.  Sydney or Melbourne.  I decided to try Melbourne.  We had never been to that city and the concerts, there were three, fell on a weekend so Matt would not have to use too many vacation days.  Flying to Australia from New Zealand is relatively inexpensive, certainly cheaper than flying to Japan or Singapore.  In addition, in certain states in Australia, it is illegal to charge more than 10% above a ticket price for resale.  If I could snag an Aussie ticket, I would not have to take out a loan.  In terms of scams, I was protected because Stub Hub guaranteed the tickets would be valid.  Plus, Tay Tay was protecting the tickets from scammers by withholding release.  

            I plunged in and, incredibly, I found reasonably priced tickets, much less expensive than the thousands of dollars people were paying, as many news stories reported.  With tickets bought, we made our plans to visit Melbourne and the AU state of Victoria. This was September 2023.  

            Six months later, February 2024, we boarded the plane bound for Melbourne.  Approximately 99.9% of the people on board were going to the show.  There were Swifties everywhere—preteens, teens, young adults, and mature women like myself.  They wore decorated cowboy hats and friendship bracelets and Taylor tees.  Many were dressed in pink.  The captain announced that we were on Air New Zealand Flight 1989 and the passengers erupted in cheers.  He said he did not know why everyone was so excited about the Flight number but her would ask his daughter who was a Swift fan.  (It’s a clever reference to a Swift album.)

            Matt was one of the few men on the plane and certainly one of the few men going to the show.  He kept telling people the best thing about going to the show would be the lack of line for the men’s room.  Little did he know that the women would take over the men’s rooms.  

            There were three shows.  The stadium was configured to seat 96,000 people, which means that she would play to 288,000 people in three days.  She could easily have filled it three more times.  The entire city was abuzz.  As we traveled around Melbourne, we saw women headed for the stadium.  I soon realized that I was not prepared in the least to go to this show.  Women were dressed in full-on Swiftie fashion.  The costume of choice was sequin dresses, white cowboy boots or white go-go boots, and faces adorned with lots and lots of glittery makeup.  I don’t think I have ever seen so many women in sequins.  But I had no time to find sequins anything, so I let it go.  

            On the day of the show, we arrived fairly early because 96,000 people is a big crowd.  Plus, reports were that tens of thousands more planned on sitting outside of the stadium to listen.  Sure enough, the grounds were packed but well organized.  Large tents were set up for merch sales.  By the time we got there, there was not much left.  Swifties are mostly tiny teens and preteens and all they had left were size XL and up.  I opted for an XL.  Matt was elated he could get a shirt in his size.  

            As we entered the stadium, we were handed lighted wrist bands.  We had no idea why.  After waiting for about two hours in the blazing sun, it was time for Taylor.  The three-hour marathon concert had begun and 96,000 of my closest friends sang every word of every song.  The three teens and their mother sitting in front of us knew every song, every line, every move.  It was cute at first but then I started to get annoyed.  I came to hear Taylor Swift perform, not three screaming teens and their mum from Melbourne.  But there was not a thing I could do about it.  

            Our seats were not bad.  We could see everything and, of course, her stage set up and cameras were perfectly situated.  She was also miked perfectly.  I could hear every word she sang and uttered.  I knew most of the songs, but certainly not all.  Those wrist bands we were given were part of the show. They would light up and blink in a specific color, or all colors, according to the song/mood.  You will see in the pictures that the entire stadium seems to be lit in red.  That is the wrist bands for the Reputation songs.  This was a fun addition and made it sort of participatory, aside from all the singing.  

            I would not call it a great show.  She was good.  It was a good show.  I reserve the word great for a Prince concert.  That man put on a great show.  Or maybe U2.  They always put on a great show.  But Taylor put on a good, entertaining show. I took an unofficial poll of every tween I saw coming back from a show, many for whom this was a first concert. Just about everyone said it was wonderful or even magical.  

And I was there.  Matt was there.  I’ll remember it all too well.  (Stupid Taylor joke).

            Was it worth the trip?  Sure.  Because in addition to the concert we got to see Melbourne and a small part of the south coast of Australia. 

           

            Gosh it sure did feel good to do some berry picking.  Matt and I spent the year (or two) that was COVID picking fruit of every kind at a local farm.  It allowed us to be outdoors and out of the house.  Summer is short here so when I saw a sign for blackberry picking, we sought it out almost immediately. 

In Maryland, we, and every other picker, worked on filling large containers, gallons of the stuff.   My freezer would bulge with fruit. Here, people are much more reserved, picking small amounts, maybe just enough for a snack.  When we arrived, the owner of the farm offered us a bucket.  It was small, maybe two gallons, and it did not take long to fill it.  When we showed up to pay for the berries, the farm owner was delighted, of course.   A young girl saw our overflowing bucket and gasped, “Mommy, look at what they picked!”  The mother’s jaw dropped. I smiled and rubbed my belly, “And they are all going right here.”  Lots of giggles.

            The farm also had a sunflower field.  Here is some sunshine: