When your chicken is completed...

Wow, third night in the country and it already feels like weeks, so many experiences, so many thoughts.

I was thinking the day we arrived of the way a dog's sense of smell is so much more sensitive than ours--I read somewhere that a dog can smell just a few molecules of a substance that happens to float by its nose--and feeling as though something similar was going on in my mind. There seemed to be a million different perceptions, and the awareness of them, all being known at once. I don't know if dogs go the next step and place all their olfactory sensations in a context of already-known smells, comparing and making assumptions and predicting. But I could feel myself trying to do that.

New Zealand! I stepped out of the door of the airport and saw big araucarias all over, their very straight trunks and distinctive symmetrical branches, looking like trees put together from some kind of children's tree construction set. And New Zealand flax (phormium), growing huge and wild by the roadside, the bloom stalks 8-10 feet tall. And then, by god, it's spring! The smell of privet, of orange blossom, of wisteria. Birds nesting! It's November, and the birds are nesting. I kept seeing yellowish foliage on trees and immediately my mind made it old yellowing autumn foliage until I remembered, no, this is tender new foliage that hasn't filled up with chlorophyll yet. It's by god spring here! Amazing.

Outside the door of our room at the B&B in Auckland were orange trees pruned into a hedge. Oranges and blossoms at the same time, fragrance of the blossoms wafting into the room. So many things looking English, the furnishings and the electric kettle with the tea set-up and the architecture, and then the incongruity of the orange trees and that smell, what I have known as a Southern California smell. It was disorienting in an interesting and pleasant way. That keeps happening.

Something I have been struck by is my level of ignorance about what this place is like, what places have meaning for the people who live here, what kind of meaning they have. Ignorance about how things are done--things as simple as getting the check in a restaurant (not like home, let me tell you), as ordering a cup of coffee--long black, flat white. I spent the past few months doing research in preparation for the trip, and the way I look at that now is as a process of trying to gather up preconceptions. That may sound like a judgment but I don't mean it as one. When I travel I like to know what to expect in the way of customs, what is going on socially and politically in the place, what historically has gone on, what the current attractions are (for my tastes). I like to have a known context that I can fit my experiences into. But I know less about this country than any place I've ever been, and am noticing the tendency to take each new experience and compare it to others, to create a context. i can see that is cutting me off from the full experience of whatever is occurring, but it happens automatically. It feels so natural that it makes me think dogs are probably doing something similar with smells.

About the chicken being completed, though...It's the kiwi accent (ex-sent). Vowels quite unfamiliar to me are used here. "Please move to the depairture lounge when you hev complayted your chicken" I kept hearing. When you have completed your chicken, your chick-in, your CHECK IN! I get it. Vowels are mostly quite short and very very different. Not like Australian vowels, very different. Coffee? Keffee.... Auckland? Oakland...