the slow reveal

When you've no hot water in your flat, your day-to-day rhythm inevitably changes. Filling a bath is the work of perhaps three or four hours – boiling kettle after kettle and saucepan after saucepan, dumping each new load into the tub, trying to perceive a noticeable increase in depth, re-filling the vessels to get the next load underway and so on. Each rise in the water level tends to punctuate your morning, dividing everything else into discrete intervals so that you can see precisely what you've managed to accomplish since, say, an hour earlier. It's quite an interesting process.

Don't get me wrong, though: after nine days of the boil-and-fill routine, the sudden sputtering of your hot water taps is almost cause enough for a party! In fact, thinking back to early October (when our hot water was cut), I did decide to celebrate on the evening after it returned, sharing a bottle of sovyetskoe shampanskaye (literally, "soviet champagne") with my flatmate. And even though I had a lesson the following morning, the weeknight indulgence felt entirely justified :-)

If you've yet to experience life without hot water, picture yourself waking up one morning to discover that you can have your first shower for nine frikkin' days. You'd be in heaven, believe me. You'd lather and scrub yourself to within an inch of your life, emerging from your flat looking like a tomato, but ridiculously well-disposed toward almost everyone and everything: "Hey there, neighbourhood dogs!", you'd say. "Mornin', local loitering folk!" "How're ya doin', Mr. Invisible Speed-Hump, over whom I trip almost every day!" ... and so on.

It's a wonderful, almost giddy feeling.

Continuing on (and trying to regain the dignity lost when you stumbled over Mr. Hump), you pass the old bar heater buried in the park behind your block – an icon of soviet-style domestic life, which someone has transformed into urban sculpture by submerging it waist-high in dirt.

A little further, and you're walking beside the dusty courtyard where a group of babushkas frequently sit around an old picnic table, chilling out and playing cards with one or two elderly gents from the adjacent buildings. Holding your camera down at your side, you try (not for the first time, nor the second nor the third)

to snap them surreptitiously from a distance, without the aid of the viewfinder to help you take aim. Chances are you're just going to end up with a few more pictures of dirt, but your mood is so buoyant today that photographic roulette seems like a pretty fun thing to try.

A couple of minutes later you're on Ulitsa Gagarina, your nearest main road. Looking right – and assuming it's a clear morning – you're thrilled to see mountains towering majestically at the end of the street. Better enjoy them while you can: they'll be gone in a couple of hours, completely erased from view by the build-up of petrol fumes in the air.

Heading around the corner, you pass an attractive woman of about thirty who's washing her BMW on the footpath. She's wearing skin-tight designer jeans with jewel-encrusted decorative stitching across the back, PVC boots with stiletto heels and dangly diamond earrings. Completing the ensemble is a low-cut slinky black top, which she almost falls out of as she leans forward to buff the rear bumper with a soft foamy sponge. Being from a western country, you naturally expect a large yellow phone number to appear in front of her at any second, obscuring the naughty bits and inviting you to exchange some text messages with a computer program pretending to be the car-wash woman. It doesn't.

Soon you arrive at the bus stop on the intersection of Gagarina and Timiryazeva, where buses of various shapes and sizes fight their way through the throng of ancient Ladas, shiny Mercedes and SUVs to compete for your business. Some of the buses have decorative sun-visors made from curtain material draped across their front windscreens, hung with tassles and looking a bit like belly dancers' veils. Most have cracks in their windscreens, and the occasional one has tape and clear plastic over a missing window – all evidence of past collisions.

As each bus pulls over, a conductor leans out of the window (or occasionally swings out of the centre door, holding on to a railing) and 'sprukes' the bus route to prospective passengers. The one you need goes something like "Timiryazeva-pa-Atakent-ee-Ramstor-Centralni-Stadion-Abai-Furmanova-Zelyoni-Bazaar!!!!", all run together into a single, epic word.

You're listening for the "Furmanova" part of that, so when you hear it you quickly cram yourself onto the bus and get your 40 Tenge ready for the conductor. He might take it now, he might take it later, or he might leave it to you to pay him as you get off. And you most likely won't get a ticket, though it's not entirely unknown; probably depends on how honest he's being about the daily take.

So that's your day so far. You're about two hours in – almost half of which was spent in the shower – and it's another ten or eleven hours until your work day ends half-way across town from where it began, and you hail the 'taxi' (i.e. private car) which will bring you home.

Welcome to my new(-ish) life in Almaty.

I have to say, when this whole adventure started two months ago, I really wasn't sure if it was for me. My first couple of weeks in Kazakhstan had me swinging on the mental pendulum. I swung repeatedly from "Wow, it's just amazing to be here!" to "Oh my gods, what have I done?" and back, passing through "Yeah, it's okay I s'pose" and a few other points along the arc.

I've since discovered, though, that there quite a lot to appreciate about The Big K, and as it slowly reveals itself to me I'm enjoying it more and more. I mean, those crazy days like the one I described above are exhausting but extremely fun. Just like in Japan and Korea, your "huh?" sense is always being stimulated by one thing or another, and (as you've probably guessed) I love it when that happens. You get that feeling of "This is a truly foreign country – I've got so much to learn about it!"

Having said that, there are definitely familiar elements here. Russian culture is quite prevalent, though it's generally a much softer version of same than I experienced in Moscow. But Kazakhstan is much more than just 'Russia lite'; you're always aware that you're in Asia, and you rarely go for too long without being reminded that this country also marks one edge of the Islamic World. So really it's quite a melting pot – a blend of the three great cultural blocks I mentioned, spiced up by some bonus influences from elsewhere in Asia and Europe.

On the downside, the traffic is a frikkin' nightmare. If I die in Almaty, it won't be over-zealous muggers or corrupt police or xenophobic skinhead types who take me out. I can tell you now what the murder weapon will be: it'll be either a trolleybus or, more likely, an SUV.

My flatmate Scott says that Kazakhs have "a childish attitude towards their cars", and I'm afraid he's right – a disturbingly high number of them drive like drunk P-platers. Car accidents are legion, and seemingly regarded as a normal part of everyday life. And of course, the fact that you can buy a driver's license doesn't help matters much.

Still, at least if you're a fan of old Soviet cars – which I am – there are some Ladas, Moskviches and other Soviet bombs to be spotted among the horrible SUVs and personality-free modenr bubble cars. That's always a bonus )))

Another thing I found off-putting at first was the amount of construction going on. Even in nouveau riche areas like the emerging financial district of Samal, you can find yourself walking through a half-completed pedestrian underpass which is only partially-lit, with exposed electrical wires on the ceilings, rubble strewn across the unsealed pavement and workmen smoking and chatting in a shadowy alcove on one side of the passageway.

As far as I can make out, much of this construction has to do with the changing fortunes of Kazakhstan over the last 16 years. The BBC calls this country "the success story of the former Soviet Union", and there does seem to be quite a staggering boom happening here – along with a lot of people walking around in clothes I could never dream of affording! There's quite a bit of bling on display as well (especially if you consider fancy cars to be one of the principal forms of 'man-bling'), which of course is a sign of newly-acquired affluence. So I guess the years since independence have been productive ones )))

And btw, depending on your mood, even the annoyances and inconveniences can become part of the appeal of a place like this. Exampleton: ul. Gagarina (my nearest main street, as I mentioned before) is a continual roadwork and construction zone, and the chaos of the streetscape there can be strangely enjoyable. At times there's just so much crap lying around that making your way down Gagarina can feel more like climbing than walking, and it's kinda fun to see how the path changes from week to week. Not so great when the whole place is iced over, though. When the ground gets all slippy, you start to notice once again just how many opportunities there are to fall over and impale yourself in this split-level, sharp-cornered, exposed-metal city.

The construction boom also gives rise to some nice little idiosyncracies – like the fairy lights that bathe sections of Ulitsa Auezova and Ulitsa Zhandosova in a festive glow, wrapped jauntily around the giant arms of cranes on the many building sites there. When the great arms move (as they often do at night), you get a free light show. It's just one of those things that tickles my joyful sense of absurdity.

On a purely aesthetic level, though, I definitely wouldn't put Almaty it in the same category as, say, Weimar and Erfurt (former East Germany), or Tallinn, or Tokyo, or Seoul – basically any of the cities I've 'fallen for' as a tourist. I mean, it does contain some beauty spots, but many of them are surprisingly well hidden. You don't come here and immediately go "Wow!" the way people do in Paris or Prague or wherever; you need to hang around for a while and let the slow reveal happen.

If you can excuse the dodgy metaphor, it could almost be said that Almaty likes to perform a little 'civic striptease' for visitors – have a little patience, invest a little time, and you'll probably end up seeing what lies beneath her veils. But like the much classier belly dancer she aspires to be, Almaty's not going to take it all off at once. No matter how much you've paid to come in, you're gonna have to wait for the good stuff.

That's actually true in a lot of ways – not just in terms of locating the pretty parts, but also in uncovering the fine cultural detail, finding the stuff you need, the best food, the best places to go out and so on. In any case, though, it's as I said before: the people, not the place itself, supply the charm. (Except when they get behind the wheel of a car, and some kind of Jek&Hyde transformation renders most of them horn-crazed, risk-addicted and generally sanity-free.)

Before I leave you alone, I just want to mention one very pleasant feature of Almaty's urban face: namely, that it's free of some of the scars which blight most other cityscapes around the world. Like the Golden Arches, for example. Apparently McDonalds did some market research here and concluded that there wouldn't be enough interest in its product, so they decided against opening franchises in Almaty. Consequently, the only arches you'll see here are of the Islamic variety, like those gracing the entrance to Atakent recreation park / conference centre (about ten minutes' walk from where I live).

Personally I think that's something for the Kazakhs to be proud of.

Anyway, those are some of my current feelings about the new digs. They can still bounce around pretty wildly at times, depending on what's happened in the last couple of days. I'm not convinced that I've had my last "Get me out of this place right the Hell now!" moment, but I'm pretty sure that I won't act on it if it happens again; there's just far too much to learn about the Life in The Big K. Last week one of the local teachers told me about her holiday in Turkey, saying that when she first arrived there she felt like "a kitten whose eyes hadn't opened yet". I still feel that way here sometimes, and I'm looking forward to loads more eye-opening moments in the months to come.

Okay, that's plenty for one ramble. Over and out.

Bye!

how to tell you're back in the real world

I'm heading out to Mamyr school at the far edge of town, to teach my Tuesday night class. The number 75 bus approaches my stop on Timiryazeva and Rosybakieva and, with stomach-twisting groans of protest, lurches to a standstill. It's packed.

An 18- or 20-seated vehicle, barely more than a minibus, I'm guessing there are slightly over fifty people crammed inside. But I must board this bus – I've only been to Mamyr once before, and I'm not sure whether my journey time on that occasion was typical, so I need to allow for variation. Plus, I've been told that these 75s are sporadic; I've no idea when the next one will arrive, and if you ask anyone about bus timetables in Almaty, the standard response is incredulous laughter.

Half a dozen people are shot out of the bus like champagne corks with legs, and about a dozen more rush from the bus stop towards the doors. As the slow-moving and tentative foreigner, I'm naturally the last one to board. I manage to get about half of myself onto the bottom step before the doors abruptly slam closed.

"Bugger!", says my inner worst-case-scenario voice. "Well, time to get used to life as a cripple, I guess."

I unclench slightly as the doors hit my shoulders and rebound harmlessly. Luckily for me, they're impact-sensitive like the ones in lifts. But the driver won't be discouraged – he tries a further three times to dislocate my shoulders before I somehow manage to sardine my way further up the stairs, and the doors close behind me. By this time we're surging forward, swerving into the centre lane where SUVs are waiting with their louder-than-the-apocalypse horns to tell us that we're not welcome on their part of the road (which is basically all of it).

On the step above mine is, without a word of exaggeration, one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen in my life. She's tall and willowy, with perfect almond eyes and sculpted cheekbones, her hair curled slightly at the bottom into a long bob and dyed a ferrous brown. We exchange the first of several glances that say "This is just frikkin' insane, isn't it? Oh well ... what can you do?" She's a step up from me, though, so we're not communicating eye-to-eye in the usual sense. In this Commuters' Olympiad, I'm the equestrian competitor and Cheekbone Woman is on the basketball team.

A minute later, the number 75 stops again. As the doors spring violently open, a middle-aged, egg-shaped Russian woman thrusts a determined foot onto the bottom step. She's got the babushka headscarf and two of those prominent moles on her nose that usually come packaged with an "I've outlived Kruschev, Brezhnev and perestroika, so don't even think about trying to stop me!" attitude.

The head-scarfed babushka grabs hold of a railing, barks something vamos!-like and heaves her bulk onto the now-moving vehicle, pressing me forward towards the Kazakh Goddess. At this point, I'm almost leaning on her arm. My stunning fellow commuter then does an unexpected thing: she sends me another look and leans closer, in a specific kind of way that only your partner would ever do in a Western country.

I'm somewhat taken aback by this.

She's wearing an off-white, coarsely-stitched woollen coat, and the fibres are tickling my right ear as we bounce along the uneven roads. She smells amazing against the backdrop of sweat and gasoline fumes.

Next she changes her handhold, bringing her right hand across my field of view and her shoulder even closer to my ear. The veins in her wrist pop out slightly as she clutches the railing directly in front of me. For a second I forget my surrounds, and it's just me and the exquisitely fine-boned hand of a stranger. Then an SUV does a wild dash across an intersection in front of us, the driver slams on the brakes and I'm jolted back to reality, feeling rather foolish.

Almost 12 months in Russia gave me a crash course in dealing with different perceptions of 'personal space' across cultures. A peak-hour ride on the Moscow Metro could involve levels of proximity and physical contact normally reserved for hairdressers, lovers and proctologists. So I know that whatever's going through the mind of the Kazakh Goddess, she probably isn't trying to send me the signals that Western synapses might be tempted to perceive in this situation.

Still, in the mad intensity of our journey to Mamyr, I'm having to fight really hard against the urge to rest my head on her arm and close my eyes, just to squeeze a bit of comfort from the chaos. It's the most bizarre impulse. I swear I'm not one of those creepy folk who enjoy a bit of frottage on public transport (though I do like using the word in conversation – it's just a fun word, don't you think?), so I honestly don't know what's come over me today. Weird.

Next stop: more champagne corks are released from the bottle, and a new crop of commuters join us. A kind-faced Kazakh woman offers to nurse my bag in her lap, and I accept. Some of the new passengers squeeze between me and the Goddess; she gets pinned against the front windscreen, while I'm crowd-surfed about half-way back toward the centre door.

A group of young Kazakh men are stealing glances at me, no doubt wondering what the Hell a foreigner is doing on the 75. And somehow, though I've been tragically separated from the Goddess, the vamos!-barking headscarf woman has remained steadfastly by my side. She looks up and starts chatting to me, making wise cracks about our situation and punctuating her every comment with a wonderfully full-throated laugh. I'm comprehending about 10% of her jokes at best, but I can't bring myself to spoil the mood with an "Izvinitye, nye panimayu" ("I'm sorry, I don't understand"). So I laugh and nod in appreciation of whatever it is she's saying, throwing in the occasional "Da" to indicate my agreement.

Fifteen minutes later, the 75 is approaching Mamyr school. Two stops before mine, the Goddess peels herself from the windscreen, forces her way to the door and alights. I watch her go, thinking that if I was a typically assertive and persistent Kazakh guy, I'd probably get off and ask her for a number (which I'm told is an entirely acceptable thing to do in this town). But of course, I'm the sadly repressed product of a failed English experiment in penal re-settlement, so I stay on the bus.

Then a rather disturbing thing happens: with the school almost in view directly ahead of us, we suddenly swerve left into the turning lane.

What? Where the Hell are we going?

Apparently there's a system here whereby the conductor somehow finds out where his passengers are headed and, if it's appropriate, orders the driver to make suitable detours. So we turn at the intersection before Mamyr and start climbing towards the mountains.

The road we're on is still in the final stages of being built, and as yet no-one has thought to install any bus stops. We travel for about a kilometre before finally stopping, and I'm now on the far side of an enormous construction zone with peak-hour traffic surging through it. To reach Mamyr, I'll need to cut through unfamiliar back streets and then walk along a half-constructed arterial road with no lanes, no footpaths and lots of lovely, smelly ditches to make the walk more interesting.

I pick my way across no-man's-land and eventually meet the road. Then it's a question of weaving along the shoulder, occasionally veering off to avoid a ditch or squeezing between thoughtlessly-parked cars and oncoming traffic. I arrive at school about 15 minutes later, flustered, dishevelled and with a lot less prep time than I'd hoped for.

"Zdrastvuiyte, Entoni. Kak dela?" ("Hello, Anthony, how are you?) comes the question as I reach the staff room. To answer that question honestly, with suitable explanatory notes, would take far more effort than I'm willing to put in at this point. So:

"Spasiba, Kharasho". ("Fine, thanks.")

Welcome back to the Real World, Mr. Nerd. We missed you ...

tiny fun in a huge metropolis

You've no idea how much I've had to resist making puns on the word "Seoul" on this website. It surely has to be one of the world's most punnable city names, and it's been extremely difficult to avoid titles like "Seouled Out" or "A Window on The Seoul". But you'll see: I can show restraint when my heart and Seoul are in it.

Oops. Sorry.

Anyway, I guess most of you will be reading this fairly soon after yesterday's entry, so we might as well just pick up where we left off.

From memory, the Word Nerd had just taken a reasonable request to a foreign embassy and been beaten over the head with it. (I imagine a few of the people reading this have had similar experiences, and believe me, I'm Empathy Boy now!) As I mentioned, my first visit to the Embassy of Kazakhstan was on Wednesday (yesterday) and they need me back there on Friday (tomorrow), so today became my Designated Tourist Day.

Of course, my impressions of this city are pretty vague so far, but one thing I can say confidently is this: Seoul is definitely not small. If you include its various 'satellites', Greater Seoul is home to something like 22 million people; it's a vast, vast and, above all, vast city. In satellite photos you can clearly see the large, grey, Seoul-shaped splotch at altitudes from which no other Korean cities are visible at all. And so far I've had just two days to explore the giant splotch at ground level, so don't expect anything too insightful in this entry.

Having said that, I've seen a lot of stuff in a short time. I'm finding here (much as I did in Tokyo, although the two cities are very different) that every time I turn my head there are a dozen new things vying for my attention and contemplation. It's all a bit of a 24-hour sensory fun park at this stage.

Speaking of senses, the place where I'm staying is in an area called Hapjeong. It appears to be a fairly working class neighbourhood, where the streets are a happy clutter (or a dirty chaotic mess, depending on your perspective) and where smells of rotting garbage and sulphur mingle with the fragrant aromas spilling from late-night eateries. When the garbage/sulphur smells are winning, the stinkiness can be quite overpowering. At other times, though, the food smells waft in my direction and evoke pleasant memories of Korean meals I've had with students in Australia and NZ. It's a good place to walk through the streets and just watch people cooking, eating, sitting at outdoor tables and chatting to each other, shopping, cooking again (a lot of food gets cooked around here), and generally going about their everyday lives.

However, since today was my Designated Tourist Day, the first thing I did was get on the (extremely efficient and user-friendly) subway and leave Hapjeong behind, heading for the centre of town to book myself a city tour. This turned out to be quite a good idea, because – although the tour itself was only slightly more informative than a Windows help file – it was one of those 'jump on, jump off' things that passes through a gazillion places and gives you the basic layout of the city you're in.

The tour began on the main street outside Gwangwhamun subway station. This was the first time I'd been into central Seoul, and the Absolute Everywhereness of things rather dazzled me. There was a sudden sense of "Wow, I'm really at the heart of things here, in the centre of a big, important capital". The tour began on the main street outside Gwangwhamun subway station. This was the first time I'd been into central Seoul, and the Absolute Everywhereness of things rather dazzled me. There was a sudden sense of "Wow, I'm really at the heart of things here, in the centre of a big, important capital".

Highlights included Namsangol Traditional Korean Village, which had all the potential to be incredibly cheesy and embarrassing, but actually turned out to be pretty good. I think that's mostly because the buildings were all 'real' historical structures, not Plastic Paddy* re-creations. Also, the place was mercifully free of hokey craftspeople in faux national dress, operating looms and doing other terribly 'earthy' things like that.

What Namsangol did have was a pretty sizeable collection of authentic period houses, with elegant curled eaves, beautiful, dark-stained wooden furniture and ingenious use of natural light.

Short version: them was purtty =)


As I was wandering amongst all this stuff it occurred to me that, from an Australian point of view, places like Namsangol are the 'anti-Europe' in a sense. See, for Australians, the Big European Holiday always comes packaged with some 'freakiness of antiquity' moments – the ones where you find yourself leaning up against a stone wall somewhere and thinking "Wow, I can't believe this thing was built in the 8th frikkin' century!". You just don't get that in the Wide Brown Land, so the concept of something standing for over a thousand years tends to boggle the mind a little.

In Korea (and likewise in Japan) I've experienced the opposite thing. The traditional dwellings of both countries look so venerably ancient that I get a slight shock when I'm reminded that many of the ones I've seen are scarcely more than a hundred years old. It's amazing to think how completely these societies have transformed themselves between that time and this, as revealed by their architectural heritage. By comparison, the journey from Gothic to Bauhaus seems leisurely almost to the point of laziness.

From the bus stop outside Namsangol (where an army of primary school children smiled toothlessly at the funny Westerner and yelled "Haaaaaiiiiiii!!!", making me doubt my long-held conviction that Japanese people produce the world's cutest kids), I was whisked onward to N Seoul Tower.

This is basically the Sydney Tower/Skytower/Berliner Fernsehturm of Seoul. And in case you're wondering, yes I am aware that visiting a city's tallest tower is a painfully touristy thing to do. Much like, say, going to a traditional village. But this was my Designated Tourist Day, so I went.

In my defence, I didn't actually go up the tower. There were too many other things around to distract me – like the sign you can see here. Naturally I couldn't resist the idea of "a beautiful world [made] with junk", especially since there was an 8-foot-high transformery-looking thing standing next to the sign, with a motorbike frame for a spinal column. So I paid my W10,000 and went in. It was amazing. I saw, quite literally, hundreds of artworks made from garbage, ranging from hedghogs with spark plug quills to angry robot mothers with rice-cooker heads (about to boil over, of course). It was an incredible collection.

Meanwhile, outside the tower is an elevated deck designed to give visitors a view of central Seoul, and here I got my first glimpse of the Han River, which divides the city into North and South. All very good to see, but what I most enjoyed here was the ingenious (and probably illegal) way in which visitors had turned the viewing deck into an unofficial outdoor visitors' book. As you look at the wire mesh that prevents people from falling or leaping to their deaths, you see hundreds of padlocks fastened to it, all bearing messages. Of course, I can't read hangul** (yet), so I'm not sure what most of the messages say. Are they specifically addressed to friends who might visit the same spot at a later date, or general messages of goodwill to anyone who might read them? No idea, but either way I really liked the concept.

So, er ... guess what I then had to spend the next half an hour searching for?

Yep, you were at least half right.

First I had to find a padlock, but then a marker pen was also necessary (because you can't use a normal pen to write on metal). After that it was just a question of practising the hangul characters until I had them right, then finding a moment when there was no-one around who might alert the authorities. (The two cute 20-something women hanging out on the deck seemed fairly safe – especially after they asked to have their photograph taken with me.)

 

Of course, afterwards I reflected on the idea that "tiny things please tiny minds", and thought that if you were looking for a test case to prove the old saying, my Designated Tourist Day might be a good place to start. Meanwhile, the person in the room diagonally across from mine at the hostel had spent her day touring the D.M.Z., one of the most potent political symbols of our time. (I'm not allowed to go there because the Embassy of Kazakhstan has my passport.) So yeah, I felt a bit small when we compared our stories of the day. But still, I had fun. So there.

Okay, that's it for now. Time to sleep. You'll hear from me again tomorrow, but it won't be as long and winding as today's entry. No really ... I promise to be brief next time!

Take care :-)

Anthony.

 

* "Plastic Paddy": an expression I heard ages ago and liked a lot. It's apparently used to denote Irish kitsch of the type that tourists consume with great enthusiasm, but which Irish people themselves find horribly distasteful. Several years ago I invented a similar phrase to describe the Australian equivalent: "tradgy dadge". This is based on the Australian expression "ridgey didge", meaning "genuinely Australian in character". My version didn't catch on. Shame, since there's SO much dreadful kitsch down there just crying out for the right insult to adequately describe it.

** "hangul": The Korean writing system, and quite a unique and interesting one. Up until about 900 years ago Koreans used Chinese characters, but then King Sejong (one of the nation's historical luminaries) commissioned scholars to create a clear and logical alphabet for their nation. The result is both ingenious in its construction, yet very easy to learn and use. (It took me only three or four days to get up to about 60% literacy.) But just put yourself in Korean shoes for a sec: imagine if your government said to you tomorrow "Hey guys, we've got this whole new writing system worked out, and everyone has to use it from now on, so we're thinking you'd better learn it ASAP." Wouldn't that just be bizarre?

extreme weather guy

On the 16th of November 1989, two weeks after completing my final HSC (Higher School Certificate) exam, I attended my high school formal at a frightfully prestigious venue known as the Newcastle Workers' Club. This turned out to be quite a large event in my life, and the calendar date is permanently etched in my brain. At the risk of inducing catatonia, let me explain why.

First, there was the fact that the HSC was finally over, and I hadn't died while attempting to complete it. I knew there were some things about high school that I'd miss – like studying Revolutionary Theory, which was my extra history unit. But overall, I was pretty damn pleased to be alive and kicking at the end of it all. Or at least alive and smoking.

Then there was this rather bizarre twist: I can't remember how I'd managed it, but by some means or other I'd found the necessary courage to ask Dolores Biscuitwidth to The Formal (Aust'n equivalent of a "prom")with me. And stranger still, my request had drawn an unexpected reply from her – she'd said "yes".

To explain the significance of that: Dolores (not her real name, in case you hadn't guessed) was the person with whom I'd been utterly obsessed throughout my last year of high school, and who may or may not qualify as my 'first love'. So her willingness to accompany me as we graduated into the world of adulthood was a pretty mind-blowing thing at the time.

All sounding good so far, but there are definitely some less pleasant memories that accrete around this calendar date as well. Like the moment when I discovered that Dolores had disappeared during the ceremony to join her far-more-glamorous quasi-boyfriend Vernon Snackables (name changed to protect the guilty) in the salubrious downstairs bar of the Workers' Club. As far as I was able to work out, Vernon's glamour mostly derived from the fact that he was older and more 'experienced' than me, he treated Megan like a used tissue, he was a borderline sociopath and he had an exciting drug habit.

Oh no, hang on, there was something else: he was cute. Very cute, in fact. Much more so than, say, me for instance. So in one sense I did understand why I was second fiddle in the Dolores Biscuitwidth Symphony Orchestra. I was the silly, geeky friend, Vernon was the classic 'bad boy', and we were both very good at our jobs. So props to him. Still, all that perspective didn't really help me much at the time :-(

Luckily, though, as the the night wore on things improved. Imogen re-joined me at the formal, and I guess Vernon got sick of waiting for her in the bar, so he sloped off with some disreputable associates. This was good, because after the formal Dolores decided to come out with me and a group of classmates for a night on the tiles. Which leads to the fifth (and final) reason why 16 Nov '89 looms so large in the memory banks – namely, that after we'd spent the night doing all manner of silly things in the inner suburbs of Newcastle, Dolores and I fell asleep in each other's arms. Well, almost. It would be more accurate to say that we dozed for a bit on a friend's living room floor, before hastily clearing out and packing our bags to get the hell out of Newcastle once and for all. But I like the first version.

The next day, our post-high school lives commenced when we boarded the same train, bound for Sydney.

I could go on with this story, filling several pages with the strange convolutions of the following years. They're really quite ... well, strange and convoluted. And the story ends up with Dolores and I discovering just a few years ago (after a long period of not seeing each other at all) that we were living just blocks from one another in Sydney suburb of Stanmore. Me in share housing, her with partner and child.

But I won't, because none of that is actually the point.

The thing I actually set out to tell you is this: exactly one month after that night when I entered the Newcastle Workers' Club for the first and only time, the entire frikkin' building was reduced to rubble by an earthquake.

So let's review:

1. High school formal
2. Anthony & Dolores escape to Sydney
3. One month's worth of business as usual at the Worker's Club; and
4. Destruction, chaos, nature's wrath, bodies being pulled from under shattered cement blocks and identified from dental records.

I'm pretty sure that, if I was reading this, I'd now be thinking "Ah-huh ... so what exactly is your point, you silly man?". But here's what you don't know yet, and what I myself only realised this week: I, Anthony 'Word Nerd' National Namesake Cook, have finally found my purpose and function in this world. And it's as follows: I'm Extreme Weather Guy.

While you cool your skepticism let me cut to January 2006, when I was commuting every day through the outer reaches of Moscow in temperatures that frequently dipped below -20C. I wrote about this at the time and so I apologise for repeating myself. However, I just want to remind you briefly of one detail. While we all know that winter in Russia is always a pretty frigid affair, I happened to be there in the year when even the Russians themselves were freaked out about how cold things were getting. In fact – as the BBC helpfully informed me – the winter of 2005-6 was the coldest Russia had endured for 27 years. And what was different in 2006 to any other January? Simple: Extreme Weather Guy was there.

In case you're still loitering in the corridors of the unconvinced, let me tell you about what happened here tonight. At about 9pm, while I was sitting in my Herne Bay flat trying to work out how to explain the difference between will and going to when discussing future intentions, there was an earthquake. True story. And not just a little tremor, mind you, but the largest quake this town has experienced for 30 years. Large enough to close the airport. Large enough to make every dog in Auckland bark more or less in unison for about three minutes. Large enough to bring audible cries of "whoa!" to my ears from other apartments in my building. Larger than ... um, okay, I've temporarily run out of large stuff to mention, but I'm sure you've tuned into "large" theme by now, so let me tell you what else it was (aside from large):

It was cool.

To add to the fun, this happened on a day when I'd taken about 30 students from my school on an excursion to Mount Eden (one of the volcanoes in central Auckland – mentioned in a previous ramble). While we walked around the crater, I decided it was time to frighten some of my star pupils by telling them the facts about Mount Eden and its sister volcanoes. And the facts are basically these: they're all part of a massive volcanic field that sits directly beneath Auckland and is still active today.

I pointed towards Rangitoto, brooding in the harbour like a big broody harbour-dwelling thing, and told them that it wasn't there 600 years ago and that it appeared suddenly one day while the Maori were working in their fields on adjacent islands. I pointed around us to all the other cones we could see, which were numerous. And I told them the prevailing scientific belief that none of these volcanoes are likely to erupt again. Instead, scientists say, the lava, magma and other deadly goo will break through at a different location in the city, and Auckland will have a new volcano for visitors like us to marvel at. Everything I said was true.

And then, that night, we had a 4.5 earthquake.

A couple of minutes after the ground got wibbly-wobbly, I sent the following text to my Kiwi buddy Greer: "Wow ... volcanoes, glaciers, frikkin' earthquakes. I love your country!" And that's true too. Of course, it wouldn't have been quite as much fun if we'd gone a point higher on the Richter Scale and my flat had crumbled around / under / on top of me. But it didn't, and I wasn't (crushed to death, I mean). So that was okay; just another one of those things that served to enhance my authentic Kiwi Experience.

Now the dogs have shut up and I'm sitting here in the picturesque calm of Herne Bay, thinking about my obviously magnetic effect on extreme weather systems. What should I do with this newly-discovered ability, do you think? Move to Washington D.C. and rent a flat as close as possible to the White House, maybe? Hmmm ... suggestions, anyone?

Actually, I'll tell you one thing I could do. I'm planning to return to Australia for a few months during 2007, so if there's any little corner of that country you'd like to see obliterated, please let me know. For a modest fee, I'd happily swing by your neighbourhood of choice and concentrate really hard on making the Earth around me crack, boil, freeze, violently invert itself, be submerged by molten lava, toads or flood waters, or whatever else I can think of at the time. You don't have to answer right away; have a little think about it and see what you come up with.

While you do that, I'm off to get some sleep. Bye!

saving akira

"Nice to meet you, son", said the ruddy-faced man in the baby blue cloth hat. "Hope you brought your togs with you."

"Brought my what?"

To be honest, I didn't really say that. Instead I allowed my brain 1/2 a second to sift through its expanding collection of Kiwi English, and then said "Well, truthfully, I'm not much of a swimmer". At that point in time, I was yet to realise that this is almost the Kiwi equivalent of a man in Australia saying "No thanks, I don't drink beer". I've learned a lot since then.

It seems from an outsider's p.o.v. that New Zealanders always have swimming plans lurking somewhere at the back of their minds. In any given tourist brochure you pick up, the basic sales pitch goes like this: "Come and experience the finest [blah blah thingie whatever] NZ has to offer, and enjoy a refreshing swim afterwards in our nearby [lake / mineral pool / white sandy beach / other body of water]". If the brochure advertises an activity, the first thing listed under "requirements" will be "swimwear". And if it's aimed at the local tourist market, you can guarantee the phrase "bring your togs!" will appear somewhere – always with the joyful exclamation mark. It seems there's no kind of day out into which a Kiwi* can't insert some paddling time. Quite impressive really, but a tiny bit socially awkward if you don't like swimming. And guess who doesn't :-(

So, given that I'd just revealed I was from an alien planet, I think the cloth-hatted man's response was very gracious. "Oh well, there's plenty of nice beach on Motuihe. You can always go for a wander along the coast. The ground can be a wee bit sharp, though; did you bring your jandals**?"

This conversation, btw, was taking place at the back end of a ferry headed for Motuihe, an island in the Hauraki Gulf outside Auckland. Mr. Cloth-Hat was one of the stewards of the Motuihe Conservation Project, who are re-planting the island with native NZ trees. Similar completed projects on neighbouring islands have had amazing results: on nearby Tiritiri Matangi 80% of the island has been re-planted and it's now the best place in the country to see some of NZ's most fabulous birds.

Anyway, while I was on Motuihe, in the morning I basically planted little baby manukas (a.k.a. tea trees) in root-trainer pots, which was repetitive but strangely relaxing. After lunch I went off in search of pohutukawa trees on the windward side of the island. They needed to be 'banded' – which is to say that, working with two other people, I had to put wide hessian bands around them, tied between two sticks. This is so that strong headwinds don't rip the young trees out of the ground and hurl them into the waters of the Gulf.

Mind you, at the time I was less than crystal clear about exactly what kind of tree I was meant to be protecting. The word pohutukawa flashed by me a few times without connecting firmly to anything in my brain, and it was only later that I really got the name right. Here's the conversation that finally did it:

KIWI PERSON:      "So what did you do on Motuihe?"

ME:                           "Well, in the morning I planted Manuka and in the
                                  afternoon I banded those trees that sound like a
                                  Japanese film director."

KIWI:                       "Sound like what?"

ME:                           "You know, Akira Kurosawa."

KIWI:                       "Aaaah, you mean pohutukawa".

ME:                           "Um ... yeah, that could be them."

The following weekend I saw lots more pohutukawa on Rangitoto. And a couple of things just struck me as I was typing that. First, it's one of those sentences you only get to write once in a lifetime. (I like those.) And second, I should probably explain what the Hell it means.

So, Rangitoto Island. This is basically a volcano that shot up in the middle of the Hauraki Gulf about 600 years ago, a little way outside the North Head of Auckland's harbour. Rangitoto has that classic cone shape that everyone thinks of whenever the word "volcano" comes up in conversation – it kind of squats conspicuously out there beyond the heads, doing a reasonable impression of Mt. Fuji with half the air let out. It's an open invitation to anyone who's never seen a volcano before ... and until a few weeks ago, that was me.

One of the weirdest things to contemplate vis-a-vis Rangitoto is that, at the time of its emergence, there were quite a few Maori living on the (very) nearby island of Motatapu. So picture this: you're pottering about in your tropical ocean paradise one day, carving delicious edible sculptures out of ripe summer fruits or whatever, and suddenly an enormous mountain pushes itself angrily out of the sea in front of you, vomiting ash and lava onto you, your loved ones, your drinking buddies, your crops, your fabulous fruit sculpture (which you've spent hours on) and pretty much everything else within your rapidly shrinking field of vision.

All of which begs the question: "Jeez ... how would you cope?"

So anyway, you get onto the island and you've got the whole anatomy of a volcanic eruption laid out before you, which is pretty remarkable. I mean, Motuihe was pretty, but it's more or less your standard semi-tropical island (albeit with some funky birds, whom I dutifully chased with a camera). Rangitoto, on the other hand, had some ugly, scarred areas along with some pleasant and even beautiful parts, and I found the whole jigsaw of it quite fascinating.

To start with, on the lower parts of the island there are vast amounts of loose volcanic rock called scoria lying around. These came out of the crater as magma, tumbled down the sides of the mountain and solidified to create snapshots of Rangitoto's birth pains. Some of the scoria lies in valleys that sweep dramatically down from the summit, giving it the appearance of a solid river (and the light-coloured mosses growing on top provide quite a convincing 'white-water' effect). Elsewhere it's seemingly thrown about quite randomly, making certain parts of Rangitoto look like abandoned quarries.

As you head up towards the summit, the scoria disappears and you find yourself walking through forest, surrounded by giant tree ferns and pohutukawa and other exotic greenery.

  

At this point you start to notice the soils of Rangitoto, which also came from the crater. Their colours change dramatically from one location to another, ranging from yellow through outback red to deep purple. According to the signs around the island, the soil's colour can tell you what it was originally and how early or late in the process it was released from the Earth. All of which is cool, of course ... but mainly, I just thought it was kinda pretty.

Further up still and you can look out over Motatapu – the island where those poor Maori were living when their weekend was ruined by the arrival of a scary magma-spitting mountain on their doorstep. When Rangitoto erupted, Motatapu was completely covered in ash, and even now it's almost treeless. Looking out from the lush forested slopes of Rangitoto – a volcano, don't forget – to the naked hills of Motatapu is quite bizarre; you get the sense of nature arranging things in exactly the opposite way to what you'd expect.

And then of course there's the crater. This, I have to admit, was a bit disappointing. Expecting a massive, gaping, fearsome hole, instead what I saw was ... well, it looked like a thickly-forested valley. Probably because that's exactly what it is. Even the fluffy little green birds with the striking white eyeliner who were flitting around the crater's edge didn't seem to feel overawed by it. They were just there to enjoy the pohutukawa seeds.

And that was Rangitoto.

Before I 'sign off', I want to mention something a bit odd that happened while I was wandering through the fields of scoria.

The environment of Rangitoto inspires plenty of free mental association, and as my mind wandered about I found myself once again thinking of a certain famous Japanese film director.

To explain the oddness of this, I have to tell you that I'm not a massive Kurosawa fan. I haven't even seen Seven Samurai or Yojimbo (his most famous works, the second of which was re-made as one of my all-time favourite films, Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars). However, late one night about six months ago, Australia's multicultural TV network SBS showed a film called The Dreams of Akira Kurosawa.

As far as I could understand, there were two main characters in the film: Kurosawa himself, and some other guy that was walking around listening to him deliver monologues. It seemed like a kind of Dante/Virgil pairing, with Kurosawa leading his friend through various hellish landscapes and explaining the nightmares that he associated with them.

I couldn't work out whether, in the rubric of the story, these were meant to be actual landscapes or just regions of Kurosawa's mind. But they were filmed in an interesting way. The film makers had obviously gone to real locations and shot them, but it often appeared as though they'd filmed the actors separately on a green screen, to show that they weren't actually walking on the landscapes but rather floating slightly above them. And the scoria fields I saw around me on Rangitoto looked a lot like some of the locations in that film.

More than that: there's something not-quite-real about the idea of hiking around a volcano which heaved itself out of the ocean just a few geological blinks-of-an-eye before you got there. It really does give you the sensation of being a little physically detached. There are moments when you feel as though you might not really be there – perhaps you're walking in front of a green screen and the background images are being matched into the picture as you go. Much like The Dreams of Akira Kurosawa.

To finish off with yet another irrelevant sidebar ('cause, for those of you who didn't know, my super hero name is "Captain Tangent"): a couple of people have asked me whether I'm struggling with Maori place names. The answer is definitely "yes". Even the word Maori itself is tricky to pronounce, and I was a little surprised to learn just how wrongly I'd been saying it before I got here. But speaking of things Japanese (or at least of one Japanese guy), someone here told me a very interesting thing: a few Japanese immigrants and students who come to NZ decide to try learning the Maori language, and they apparently find it quite easy to pick up. Isn't that interesting?

Okay, so maybe not hugely interesting. Unless you're a Word Nerd, of course. But I have been thinking about it as various Maori place names flash by me on road signs etc., and as I hear and read Japanese around the place. (I learned to read and write Katakana and Hiragana last year, so now I'm an avid reader of Japanese signs, even though I usually don't understand what the words mean.) And from a phonetic point of view, I think the Japanese-finding-Maori-quite-easy phenomenon kinda makes sense. Check it out:

Japanese:   "Hajimemashite. Watashino namaewa Antoni desu."

                       ("Nice to meet you. My name's Anthony.")

Maori:         "Kia Ora, Antoni. Pohutukawa?"

                        ("Welcome, Anthony. Christmas tree?")

Now, don't they seem to you like they could almost be the same language?

Okay, enough of this silliness. I'd better go. Stay tuned for news of my road trip to the volcanic Central North Island, wherein stinky sulphurous fun was had by all :-)

Take care and stay well. Bye!

(* Just btw, New Zealanders do actually call themselves "Kiwis". If you think you're scoring points by equating a New Zealander to a flightless bird {which I think a lot of Australians do} ... well, you're not. Sorry.)

(**"Flip-flops" if you're English or American, "Thongs" if you're Australian, and probably a different preposterous name if you're from any other part of the English-speaking world.)