Now there's a pity
Wherein our narrator whinges about the lack of
WiFi in Auckland International Airport.
They have these lovely desk stations, one of
which I'm sitting at now, typing away. They even have phone jacks. And just 4
meters to my right, there's a bank of 3 computers, each of which eat NZ $2
coins, and provide you with internet/web
access.
But there's no WiFi. My poor
little AirPort smells *nothing* in the air. I'm not sure why this is - perhaps
the business travellers passing through the airport here are too fagged, shagged
and ragged to actually care to go online. But my goodness, they do it in
Sydney, and whatever they do in Sydney, they do in Auckland - sooner or
later.
I had it figured out pretty
quickly: New Zealand is the little brother to Australia's big brother. Like all
brother-brother relationships, it's fraught will all sorts of testosterone-fuled
issues of competition and one-upsmanship. New Zealand has very nearly the same
flag as Australia - except the stars are red, not white. (There may be other
differences, but they're too subtle for my eyes to discern.) The currency looks
very similar - it's plastic, just like Australia's - except the two dollar coin
is *larger* than the one dollar coin, which makes perfect sense, actually, but
has been consistently confusing me, because I'm acclimated to the Australian
2-dollar "pound" coin (because it looks very much like a british pound, and has
about the same value) which is smaller than the Australian
dollar.
Oh the comforts of
home!
But back to it. The big brother
has a checkered past (that convict thing), but, like the prodigal son, has
fallen back into a very comfortable middle age. New Zealand never did anything
wrong - being the comfortable satellite colony of Britain (they were offered
independence in 1907, and didn't accept it until 1947) and an altogether
comfortable, sophisticated culture. The biggest thing New Zealand has working
against it - its low population - is precisely the thing it's working so hard to
preserve. It's a fiendishly difficult country to immigrate to, yet about 25% of
the population are first generation immigrants. There are close to 4 million
Kiwis in the country - although about 10% of them are in Australia at any point
in time (permanent residents of either country can move back and forth between
them at will), and at least another few hundred thousand are in Britain, the
USA, or just backpacking around the
world.
I can understand why they cut
out and see the world. Auckland, with a population of about 1.4 million, began
to feel awfully small after just a few days - not impossibly small, but
relatively small. Sydney, with its 4 million population began to feel
positively gigantic, and Sydneysiders are always griping about how small Sydney
is, relative to London or New York or (lately) Shanghai. But Australia allows
1% of its population to be supplemented by immigration each year. (Perhaps in a
few years, one of those immigrants will be me.) New Zealand used to do this,
but has cut back lately, so that maybe just .5% of its population, on a yearly
basis, is new immigrants.
So New
Zealand is far away from everything - except Australia - which is far away from
everything else. It really is far away here. It took a long time to check in
at the airport this afternoon, basically because everyone packs everything
including the kitchen sink when they leave the country. It's a long, long way
to anywhere, so folks had more luggage than I'm normally accustomed to seeing in
a check-in line. Acres of luggage, bikes, surfboards, and so
on.
I had a very successful day today,
lecturing at the Auckland University of Technology and dispensing some free
advice to the faculty of various parts of the college of Arts. First thing this
morning I gave a lecture to a classroom of design students - one of my favorite
jobs, because I really managed to blow their minds. Too much, perhaps, because,
at the end of the hour, there were no questions. "Too many," one girl muttered,
when the call went up for questions. Heheheh. That first was a more or less
off-the-cuff talk about design in the age of active materials, not so much a
retread of the lecture I gave at RMIT as an elaboration on the same themes. I
borrowed from a Scientific
American article I'd read on the plane to
Auckland, all about the origin of the linguistic assignments for colors.
Pre-modern cultures generally have the same three words for color: black, white
and red.
Which brings me to my walk
through the Auckland Museum on Sunday afternoon. It's world famous for its
incredible collection of Maori artifacts, and I spent an hour feasting on this
fully realized and thoroughly unique Polynesian culture. They had a
reconstruction of a ceremonial hut (I believe it had simply been reassembled
inside the museum). that you could doff your shoes and walk through. Inside,
beautiful wood carvings (tikis, more or less) adorned nearly every available
inch of wall surface. Everything was painted, was colored - and all of it in
red, white and black.
Look back to
Lasceaux, Catal Huyuk, Uxmal, it doesn't matter: the colors of the "primitives"
are black, white and red. Whether they noted blue and described it as
"black-like' is unknown. But it makes sense. Black is cool and dark. White is
light. And red is warm - in addition to its role as the color of
lifeblood.
Oh, and the men are better
looking in Australia. More redheads here in Auckland (because exposure to the
sun won't kill them) but, on the whole, Sydneysiders are just prettier to look
at. Lucky for me.
Posted: Mon - April 5, 2004 at 04:53 PM