quick! before i forget…

i went to new zealand, and all i got was this lousy photograph of a lousy airline meal. well, an exaggeration maybe: it wasn’t “lousy” so much as “lacking”. the pie gravy was gummy, but at least there were actual chunks of meat glued into it; there was cake, but it was cold, hard and dry; there was no fruit or veg, unless you count the tomato sauce. ok, lousy.

also, i did take more than this one photograph. just, surprisingly, nothing more of food.

we were in christchurch, because my father had a conference to attend, and invited everyone along for the ride. so while he met with colleagues and ate convention center fare all day, my mother, maeve and i…

walked the streets;
[ looking at the street map in the hotel room, we’d plan our expedition and set out for a long walk to something at the other end of the city. what we discovered is that christchurch is pretty small though, so we’d always reach our destination in about ten minutes. ]

went to the art gallery;
[ the christchurch art gallery is a just-right-sized museum for a couple of hours’ exploration, and has a large activity room set up for children with puzzles and magnetic walls. when we were there, there was a gargantuan inflated rabbit sprawled across the main foyer, and another smaller one hiding in one of the galleries. just what a kid needs to be engaged with art: bunnies! ]

and explored the arts centre.
[ which is a city block worth of working studios, galleries, cafes and shops –including a much-lauded fudge shop — and whose courtyard we stumbled into, to find ourselves amidst a cluster of medieval mosaic pillars. lovely. ]

except that as you got closer, you discovered that each pillar had been wrapped with printouts of intricate kaleidoscopes of people, an installation by korean artist, lee joong keun. lovely and amazing! ]

there was a lot of public art in that one city block.

but eventually, a kid gets tired of art, and starts asking to see penguins. we breezed through the international antarctic centre (in which there is a snow-filled room where you can put on a high-tech jacket and experience an antarctic storm with 40km/h winds — breezy indeed! it may seem like a fun idea to start with, with the layer of powder snow on the ground, the cave in which to take shelter from the storm, and the slippery dip made of ice, but by the end, it will be a somewhat traumatic experience from which the kid cannot wait to escape), pausing long enough for the kid to throw the shriekiest of tantrums in the penguin enclosure. the penguins didn’t care though; they were behind glass.

eventually, too, a father gets tired of conferencing, and we climbed aboard a rental car and headed out to the jade-green countryside. barely two hours out of the city, the kid painted the upholstery a fetching shade of vomit, so we stopped for a little rest at little river.

we spent the next three days in akaroa, a town where a volcano used to be. everywhere we turned, it was like looking at a picture postcard. a postcard on which a picture of a kid has been superimposed on it, eating a pink ice cream.

there was a lot of good eating, in particular a dinner by the cosy fireplace at ma maison, where every one of my three courses was perfect: akaroa salmon and caramelised scallops, resting on a salad of pickled diakon, mung bean and paw paw, finished with a lemon butter nage and a vanilla balsamic glace; followed by pressed terrine of confit duck and veal, with crispy bread and a seedless grape chutney; followed by double chocolate tart with maple syrup, vanilla bean ice-cream and a black forest sauce. what they did not say on the menu was that the tart also came with a great dollop of marscarpone, and that the black forest sauce was actually a little bowl of macerated cherries, which really pushed it that bit beyond just “perfect”.

there was a lot of wool purchased. possumerino in fact, a non-pilling, lightweight, extra warm mix of sheep wool and possum fur. my mother must have been up for a special-service-in-pest-control award for keeping the pesky possum population down, because by the end of the trip she’d bought possum merino hat, gloves, socks, cardigans (three!), and had scored a scarf from the conference folk. oh! oh! and a possum fur collar!

unstoppable, my mother.

there was a lot of broken crockery in the artist’s garden at linton. these days i am wary of too much whimsy, but the kid seemed to enjoy the crockery-covered cats and dogs, the ballerina table, the grand piano which housed a collection of succulents and played a selection of french cabaret standards sung by the local piaf… me? i found a small corridor, tiled with shards of mirror, just wide enough for a bench to sit and reflect upon this ex-volcano hanging off a little island in the south pacific ocean, and what a pretty good place it was to be.