Rarotonga highlights
Rarotonga didn’t exactly welcome us in, when we arrived at 1.30 in the morning it was so hot my jeans immediately shrunk three sizes and started sweating. Once we were through customs and immigration it started to rain. The lighting in the airport carpark is minimal so Lee collected the wrong rental car (they just leave your car unlocked with the key under the mat on the driver’s side). My sister had called the day before to give me directions to our holiday house, but it was very dark and neither of us had slept any on the plane and it took us ages to find the right place.
Luckily for us, the owners of the holiday house were there to make sure we got in OK. They didn’t have to do that, but we sure appreciated it! Sleeping in Rarotonga when you have just come from a Wellington winter is a trial: factor in the humidity, the heat, the crowing of roosters, the chirping of geckos in your bedroom and the noise the torrential rain makes on the tin roof and it’s pretty restless. We got there in the end, though.
Catching up with my sister and her family was the highlight of the trip for sure, but we also ate at some fantastic restaurants. Here collected for your enjoyment. (more…)
While I’m away
Oh, I think I forgot to mention on here that we’ve had some good news in regards to my mother in law. The cancer has not spread to her lymph nodes and she has a lumpectomy scheduled for the 31st. Radiation therapy will follow, but its way better than chemo. Her surgeon said she was in the ‘best possible position’, so we’re all feeling rather relieved. Which is not to say that the time ahead will not be difficult, but it’s so good to have some of the mystery removed.
So Lee and I are off to Rarotonga for a week, then we’re in Auckland for a couple of nights. We might get online in Auckland but I don’t *expect* to be online until the Friday when we get back.
I have scheduled some blog posts to publish so that my stats don’t go all to Hell and you have something to read while I lie on the beach. Mmmmm the beach.
Check back here tomorrow and on August 22nd, 25th, 27th and 29th for new stuff 
I’ve scheduled them mostly for afternoon/evening. I obviously won’t be doing my usual twitter and livejournal reminders so it’s up to you to click back. You know it’s worth it.
In the mean time, read about the last time I went to Raro.
Jenni’s Guide to Auckland
A couple of Coldplay concert videos: Someone from down on the floor at the concert on Wednesday caught this footage of Coldplay performing Yellow. It’s not the whole song, but you get an idea for how much singing along there was, and what the huge yellow balloons looked like. And Chris Martin’s revolutionary outfit.
Someone else got this film of what the butterfly confetti looked like from the ground…just gorgeous.
So. My highlights from the trip, in no particular order. Not counting Coldplay, since you can’t generally plan on them being there.
Tanuki’s Cave Yakitori bar. You go in and sit down at a space around the bar and order a bit handle of Asahi and edamame and whatever else tickles your fancy off their menu. I can recommend the takoyaki. The asahi is very drinkable, the food is quick and good and the atmosphere is just….perfect. They play My Neighbour Totoro on a screen at one end of the bar.
The Imax. We saw Watchmen but really any movie that you are keen on and that they are playing would be awesome. It’s so big that it’s immersive. Plus Lee and I had frozen coke and it was yum.
Borders. It’s huge, but more importantly it’s all mazey and arranged on different levels. Wellington’s one just isn’t as cool. Plus everyone knows where it is so it’s a good meeting place.
Auckland Museum. I like the interactive discovery area, the Victorian street, the tree that does a day cycle in 5 minutes so you can hear the different bird songs and the dinosaurs. Especially the special exhibit T-Rex.
It’s big. 12.8 metres long and 4.0 metres tall at the hips. Plus it had a neat interactive exhibit and I did in fact learn some things about Tyrannosaurs that I didn’t previously know. The other neat thing about the museum is that in the gift shop you can get 10 of their specially printed Auckland museum postcards for $2.00. That’s nothing! So just about everyone on my postcard list got Auckland Museum postcards and two people got elaborate stories instead of news, based on the pictures on the cards. I am eager to hear when people have received their postcards.
The Chocolate boutique in Parnell has many delicious treats, including the Italian denso, which is an insanely rich hot chocolate. Their handmade truffles are really good.
Submarino, fish in a bowl, denso and cherry tart.
You can get to it really easily on The Link bus, which is cheap at $1.60 a ride and does a loop around many useful areas in Auckland. It’s handy and has a TV that gives you the weather, the news, images of what the driver is seeing and of the people on the bus. It also did news headlines and advertised local businesses and there was a neat live map so you could see where you were.
$3 Japan. Up the high end of Queen St, $3.00 Japan was like a magical heaven. I got some presents for people, some stuff for myself, useful things, silly things. I got some really nice comfy socks….it was just magical.
We had a really good seafood platter at Neptune on the Viaduct. It wasn’t too expensive and had turkish bread, dips, scallops, prawns, fried fish, smoked salmon, heaps of calimari, mussels and olives and pickled onions. It was seriously yum. The people at the next table to us actually said ‘we want what they’re having’ but I can assure you it wasn’t because I was screaming or anything. The food just looked really good.
And also, you should totally check out this behind-the-scenes glimpse into The Winding City video that Conan put up. It has me in it, and many hilarious bloopers. And bits that I filmed too.
Stuff to do in Auckland?
OK, so I know I have to take Lee to Tanuki’s Cave for dinner and I will be checking out Queen St and locating the Kikki-K in case it’s bigger than the one in the Hutt. I’m keen go back to the museum cause it was neat and check out MOTAT because I’ve never been, I don’t want to go back to Kelly Tarlton’s because I thought it was a rip off last time, and I don’t think I can convince Lee to take me back to the Auckland zoo or Rainbow’s End…
So please….what else can we do in Auckland? We have a few days.
Online I found this neat Auckland guide, but it’s pretty limited.
More Food Blogging
On the course of the holiday in Waitarere I had some wonderful gastronomic experiences which I will now share with you.
Fresh pipis hunter-gathered just down the road by our very own Manly Men. That’s right, Lee, Bro-in-Law and tall skinny guy braved the crashing waves, howling winds and looking silly to dig for pipis. I didn’t think they’d get any, but lo! They returned with many a pipi and they were very very nice. Sweet and sandy and good. Giffy found that if you peeled off an outer skin layer of the fishy bit you could get rid of most of the sand, which was a bonus.
New Years Margaritas. Shaved ice, margarita mix, tequila, Easi-yo strawberry ’squirt’ and lots of fresh strawberries make for a delicious New Years treat. Big thanks to Hive Mind 1 and my darling husband for providing. Was very tasty.
Cadbury brand Crunchie flavour icecream + Cadbury brand chocolate sauce = ice cream heaven in a bowl. Seriously. Chelle was like “the only thing that could make this better is if the ice cream had hokey pokey nuggets in it.” and then…the ice cream totally had hokey pokey nuggets in it!!! Perfection.
Barbecue flambe roast pork. The barbecue caught fire while roasting the pork, thanks to there being no sand or kitty litter in the grease trap tray, but it didn’t matter. The pork was succulent, juicy and very very good. I love my brother in law, for he cooks good barbecue meat.
Expensive designer cheese from Lindale. It’s a smoked havarti and man, it has everything I like in a cheese (apart from garlic), it’s rich and strong, but has an aged tang to it. I ate it with seaweed rice crackers which overwhelmed the flavour a little, but together with fresh salad greens it was really really good.
Plain old onion dip. I can’t help myself. It’s ust reduced cream and Maggi onion soup but I freaking adore it. I love it with ready salted chips, plain rice crackers and fresh carrot (*winks at Giffy*). It’s just so very creamy and good. Ack, I am such a kiwi.
PoF: Tokidoki
CO: food, clearly.
Off Topic, but I suspect there are readers curious…Giffy and Erik’s quilt is now bound on two sides. I have done the first part of binding the remaining two sides, the machine quilting, and that leaves whip stitching by hand, corners and then the quilt label. I hope to get it done so I have time to wash and dry the quilt before the ceremony on Friday. Fingers crossed for me!
Happy New Year
Just got back from a lovely lovely brand new holiday house in Waitarere. The house had these neat things: giant slabs of wood made into outdoor furniture, close proximity to beach, about ten beds, gigantic bowl of a spa bath, new covered Barbecue, flash new kitchen, lovely big front deck.
I sunbathed a lot.
I read:
Fables: Homelands and man, did I love this! It may be my favourite Fables title after Storybook Love….Boy Blue is just too cool.
Fables: Arabian Nights (and Days) which was a bit disappointing. I liked the first half, but I guess I found it hard to sympathise with the second half of the story. This one is very interesting though, because it shows the other side of the battle and the innocent people and it’s all very intriguing in a Big Overarching Plot kind of way. I wonder how many titles there will be in total?
Little Town on the Prairie was very good with a healthy dose of shocking racism at the end. Didn’t manage to start the next one yet.
Daisy Kutter: The Last Train, another graphic novel. Set in the Wild West but with Robots. Daisy used to be a train thief but she’s gone straight, until a stranger offers her an awful lot of money to rob one more train…dead pan humour, and extremely cool art. I give it A+
I am currently two thirds of the way through Soul Eaters which is the third in the Michelle Paver Chronicles of Ancient Darkness books. It was a bit slow to get started since it was a bit samey to the first two but it is very exciting now and I want to get it finished.
I played a lot of Wii and just today bought Lee the Marvel Superheroes game for his birthday. I am good at baseball and when I was playing against a certain tall skinny boy, the Wii enforced the Mercy Rule since I was beating him by five home runs. *gloats* Also, I enjoy the ‘find mii’ game on Wii Play where you have to spot the person avatars in progressively harder rounds.*
I have finally registered for Kapcon and will be running two games. Gregor’s Best Friends (which I still mean to write an actual play for) and my Pride and Prejudice Game.
*This is much easier when they are people you know, like two Rachels or three Giffys. Some of the rounds are darkened, some rounds you just have to find yourself or a specified mii, sometimes you’re looking for the ‘odd one out’. It’s addictive.
Gastronomic tour of the Gold Coast
Here’s what I ate while I was on holiday, more or less. Special highlights are given more explanation.
We stayed at Santorini which is a holiday apartment complex up a level from the street. Underneath the apartments are four restaurants: Barchino, Buono Sera, Chiang Mai Thai and Bistro Cheers Japanese. Five if you count the cafe in the cycle shop, which I do not.
On our first night we had pizza from Buono Sera, the friendly Italian place. I had a corona with lime in it and we shared garlic bread and a really very good pizza with olives, meat, mushrooms, etc. Basically a supreme, but a proper Italian wood fired oven gourmet pizza. Lee didn’t like it as much as I did, but then you know how I feel about pizza.
On the second night we tried out Barchino, which is a flash cafe open all day for breakfast, lunch and tea. The waiting staff were very friendly and we made friends with one in particular over the course of our stay because we really liked the food there. We shared a big seafood antipasto platter. I loved the breadsticks wrapped in smoked salmon, the calamari and the pickled fillets of fishy the most. It was all good, although I don’t like mussels unless they’re smoked and I can’t stand oysters from the shell so I didn’t eat those. The king prawns of course, were the best.
On Friday we checked out the Thai place and were quite disappointed. Lee’s pad Thai was made with a lot of tomato and didn’t taste right at all. My food was about 15 minutes later to the table than his, which was annoying and although the beef was good, it was spicier than advertised. We didn’t go back there.
Nick’s seafood cafe was always busy. We walked past it in the evenings after dinner on our way to the beach a couple of times and although the smell was somewhat off putting (think fish’n'chip shop) and the sign rather inelegantly advertised the “great barramundi burger”, but after seeing be so full so often we decided to give them a try.
Oh. My. God. Instead of deep fried you could ask for grilled fish with a variety of sauces. I chose a garlic butter grilled barramundi fillet and it was completely divine. Just so fresh and delicious. We went back there twice over the course of our stay, although the second time they messed up out order and the fried fish they gave me upset my tummy.
Barchino did wonderful breakfasts, and once we ran out of cereal we ate there pretty frequently. I especially liked the thick raisin toast with maple butter, pancakes with pistachios, carmelized bananas and butterscotch sauce and best of all, they had a juicer so you could order all sorts of smoothies and juice mixes. My favourite was a Great Barrier Reef with watermelon, apple, pineapple and fresh mint. *bliss*
At Sea World we weren’t impressed with the range of fried takeaways that seemed the same at every different ‘cafe’ so we tried out the $18 all you can eat buffet at the Paradise Room. It was the right choice. The day we went to Sea World it was swelteringly hot and the sun was quite relentless so the air conditioning was much blessed by the both of us. The buffet was good. A giant plate of King Prawns started it off and there was a huge variety of hot food, salads, cold meats, asian goodies like fried rice and bits of fish and a huge table of little desserty treats. We sat inside for about an hour gorging on the grub and watched the waterski show right in the lagoon in front of us.
I also liked a little chocolate shop in Pacific Fair called Chocolicious which had lovely lemon truffles, Red Rooster in the airport just before we came home and another chicken place in Pacific Fair called Otropo. Or something like that.
Hopefully you’re hungry now.
Point of Fashion: tokidoki bunny tshirt
Current Obsession: getting printed photos from my wedding
Wife
I really hate the word wife. Chelle’s right, fiance is such a better word. Husband is not so bad, but over the course of the honeymoon I’m getting used to both.
I made some entries over at livejournal, two while I was away and one having just got back. I’m not gonna recount the whole honeymoon because uhm. Gross? So here’s the potted highlights as they come to me in my slightly startled and out-there frame of mind.
We went to two theme parks: Movie World and Sea World. I much preferred Sea World although I did get to be a ginormous fangirl at Movie World and got pictures of myself with Batgirl and Robin, outside the Daily Planet, opening the door of the Gotham City Hall building and sitting on the fountain like I own the movie lot. Lee got a very sunburned neck.
Sea World is an amazing place where you can see Polar Bears (omgwtf!), giant sharks, many rays, lots of rather large dolphins, a dugong (I kept singing ‘dugong, duuuuugoooonnnnnnng!’ but was disappointed with the relatively small size of it) some scruffy penguins, pelicans and lots of fish. They had a dolphin show with lots of high jumping and dolphin surfing and suchlike and a waterski show which was pretty impressive, if inherently lame. I got some neat pictures of polar bears and sharks. Too many of sharks. I love them but I don’t think anyone else will be terribly interested.
Shopping was awesome. I am in love with the following shops: Valley girl (thanks Chelle!), Sex Kitten (everything in that shop was made for me, I swear it) and Dotti. If someone could organise them all to open in Wellington I’d be much obliged. Valley Girl is opening in Queen’s Gate so fingers crossed it has the same stuff. I also discovered a wonderful little brand called tokidoki which is all gothic anime cool, so I suspect a few of my readers will also appreciate I bought a tshirt with the bunny on it and a collection of badges. Soo cool.
I’m on the phone to my Mum so I’ll finish up, more later.
whizz
Phew.
Just did my paper. It went fine and dandy. Hopefully my stomach will settle down now. I’ve got a theory that all my tummy woes are due to stress, which I haven’t been feeling in my head so much, it all being channelled to the guts.
Christchurch is freaking freezing and I am not coping well. My hotel room is lovely and I’ve been seeing bits of movies on Sky 1. Thankfully our hotel is half a block from the conference so I don’t have to go out too much, the wind is straight from Antarctica. I have made two missions to the fudge cottage and will be returning with much toffee.
I had dinner last night with my aunt and uncle, 9 year old cousin and 15 year old cousin. It was actually really nice, laid back and fun. My 9 year old cousin thinks I’m the coolest person ever, although I didn’t leave her with my neopets account password in the end as I don’t want to lose all my items!
I’ve got lots of free goodies from the stall holders, including about a dozen pens. If anyone wants any pens, let me know now and I’ll get some more…
Big dinner and dance tonight. I don’t think I’ll stay very late.
I saw the first 45 minutes of Cruel Intentions last night before I fell asleep and now I want to see the rest of it. Shopping in Chch is somewhat disappointing, it’s all souvenir shops.
Point of fashion: Classic beauty/hip librarian
Current Obsession: why am I still sick?
Jenni and Lee’s amazing holiday in Rarotonga adventure!
This is going to be a brief potted verison because I don’t think you want to know every last detail and besides, I want stories to tell In Real Life too.
Lee and I took our longest ever International flight together all through Monday night. The movie was Robots and I couldn’t sleep.
Rarotonga is such a beautiful Island. Hibiscus bushes are used as hedges, and they were all in flower, lovely deep reds mostly but some pale pink and purple too. Because of the hurricane earlier this year there were lots of uprooted trees and there was next to no fruit available. Most of the food is imported from NZ anyway so I didn’t get much exotic fare.
We stayed in a rental house which was dirt cheap and really nice. It had lovely high ceilings and tiled floors so it didn’t get too hot inside. It also had a large gecko population, and I have some neat photos. They’d surprise you coming out from under bags or from behind things and scurry up the wall. We had some teeny weeny ones and a couple of rather large ones, I didn’t see any that were longer than a paperback novel for reference.
Mostly we lay about in the sun or went snorkeling. Rarotonga is entirely surrounded by a coral reef so the beaches are all quite shallow and the water is warm. On the other hand the sand is strewn with broken bits of coral so it’s hard to walk on and there’re lots of mini-coral rocks in the lagoons. This means regualr swimming is kinda hard but it’s great for snorkeling. I saw lots of neat fish including these really long thin needle-nosed silver guys that would pretend they were sticks. They’d look at you approaching with their big eyes and when they saw you weren’t fooled that swim off like eels.
I saw a white eel with markings like mystic runes painted down its sides in brown. I saw fish coloured like a bad 80’s t shirt and some in really quite fashionable colours (white with lime green and pink spots darling. Gorgeous!) I saw a weirdo flat fish with both eyes on the top of its head laying in the sand almost completely camoflagued. I think you could go snorkeling and see very little if you weren’t patient, a lot of the fish are very well hidden and you just have to look harder until you see what’s *really* there.
We ate dinner out at restaurants nearly every night and if anyone’s heading that way I especially recommend Tamarind House (where sister girl got proposed to) and the Island Night at the Edgewater Resort. They had this huuuuuge buffet dinner, a huuuuuuuge buffet dessert followed by dancing and this guy husking a coconut with his teeth. That’s hard core.
I wish I could have found a tshirt that said: Rarotonga: Replete because all the meals were very generous!
I bought some very beautiful pareu (sarong) fabric and pretty carved pearl jewellery. The town is lovely and small and hot and everyone’s on “Island Time. ” Wellington seems huge and rushed in comparison. My biggest complaint (now that the Raro Belly is mostly cleared up) is that I’m back home in the cold place. I was wearing short shorts and a singlet a couple of days ago and I was too hot. Now I’m in a zillion layers and woolen accessories and I’m not warm enough!
I have some gorgeous photos to show you. But later. Oh and there was also the giant spider attack, but I’ll tell you that IRL if you’re lucky.
ETA: I’ve had some questions about where we stayed. It was Ava Lodge and I really recommend it.
