Oriental Bay and Otaki Forks

We spent the day Saturday exploring more of Wellington, specifically the suburb of Oriental Bay. This is the priciest area of Welly and we found out why; it is a beautiful neighborhood bordering a scenic edge of Wellington Harbor. There were a few neat playgrounds as well as a beach, though it was too chilly to do anything but look at it.


Above: looking out at the harbor from Oriental Bay; below: Amelia doing her thing at the playground.


Sunday was warmer and we decided to get away from the city for a bit. We drove about 1.5 hours north along the coast (newsflash: it was really pretty) before taking a rally-inspired gravel road through the Otaki Gorge. On the way down, Amy gripped the door handle and tried to stifle her gasps. I didn't fully appreciate her situation until the drive back when I was the one nearest the edge.

The Otaki Forks area is an old mining camp from the early 1900's which is now a nature reserve. From the parking area, we crossed a swinging bridge over a nice river and started out on a short tramp (I'd call it a hike, but Amelia no longer lets me get away with it: "People only hike in America, daddy. In New Zealand it's tramping.") She should know as she's become quite a fan of tramping in the last few weeks. We spent much of the day watching her lead the way at a run:


The views of the gorge were...well, gorgeous.


At the end of the day, Amelia and Amy celebrated their accomplishment. It was well deserved as Amelia actually did hike over 2 miles by herself. Oh, and the black eye is courtesy of an accident with one of her toys in case you were wondering.



In other news, we're keeping our fingers crossed for all of our friends and family back home in La. Hopefully Gustav will end up being little more than a reason to throw a nice hurricane party...

Tramping part Deux

Amy and I had heard that a seal colony could be found nearby and we decided to take advantage of another stretch of "fine" weather by taking the kids to see it. Evidently this colony is a "bachelor" seal colony consisting solely of males who have lost their bid for dominance in the breeding colonies on the South Island. This is good for us because they're less aggressive and there's no danger of stumbling between a mother and her pup.

We drove about 15 minutes to a part of the coast that's just west of town. From there is was about an hour's walk along the shoreline to the area where the seals tend to hang out. Here's a view back towards town (you can just make it out in the distance):



As we walked, Amy educated me about the history of the "bach." Pronounced "batch" (as in batchelor pad), these are small, typically humble dwellings which were built on public land as late as a few decades ago under a provision which worked rather like the US homestead act. We passed a few of these on the way. Some were cozy and others were reminiscent of concrete bunkers. Most of them were being put to good use by groups of guys who clearly loved drinking beer, riding off road vehicles (the only way to get there), and sitting in front of the fire. As you might imagine, they enjoyed some nice views given that they had chosen select spots of beachfront. I am currently looking in to building one myself. You will know I succeeded if you never hear from me again.



The walk wasn't bad. We're starting to get our technique down; Quinn rides in the pack and Amelia rides on my shoulders once she tires of running. Here's the crew celebrating Amelia's discovery of a nifty-looking shell:



We had been forewarned of the seals' scent, and indeed we began to smell them as soon as they came into view. There are about 80 fur seals in the colony, and they spent lots of time lounging around.





They are surprisingly well camouflaged for animals of their size. I suppose it helps that they hold very still most of the time. In this picture, Amelia and I are sneaking towards a big male. There are eleven seals in the following picture (remember, you can click to zoom in):



We timed the trip perfectly as the first raindrops we've seen in several days began to fall right as we drove away.

Driving

One of the main things our friends from back home ask us about is how the driving is going for us. Anyone who's been to one of the countries where they drive on the "wrong" side of the road can probably empathize with the difficulty of switching all of one's reflexes. Think about it for a minute: when you get ready to cross the street, you look to your left, don't you? I wouldn't suggest trying that here.

Ditto for driving itself: everything really does feel quite backwards. I figured (wrongly) that I'd only have to get used to driving on the wrong side of the road. In fact, there are lots of things that are different. The rules for yielding are completely different, including something called the "left turn rule." I'll try to explain, and if it seems confusing then think about doing it while you're actually driving around in a state of near panic: if you're turning left and you notice that the oncoming car in the other lane is turning right, then yield to them. In other words, it is sometimes proper form to turn in front of oncoming traffic. If you ask people how you are supposed to ensure that nobody kills you while attempting this, then they'll invariably tell you to try to make eye contact with the other driver. Clever, except that it's often raining.

It's a weird feeling getting behind the wheel for the first time. It's like being 15 again: you don't have a good sense of where the other side of the car is, and you don't know where any of the buttons or signals are (try turning on your blinker and your windshield wipers come on). On top of all of this, once you finally figure out how to back out of your very tiny driveway, you're faced with really curvy roads that look something like this:



That's a two lane road, mate.

My first driving experience took place the day after we arrived. Beth, one of the psychiatrists with whom I'm working, took it upon herself to teach me how to drive to the store. She should have earned some sort of medal for this. We managed to survive with only a scraped up rim. My next few driving experiences involved Quinn screaming loudly in the backseat while I gripped the wheel tightly and tried not to kill anyone. The good news is that things improved pretty quickly as Amy and I found that we both calmed down a lot after a few hours behind the wheel. I even got the hang of the two-lane roundabout after a few days.

One wonderful thing about this city is that there simply isn't much traffic. I'm attributing this to the fact that the city is largely walkable and has great public transportation. At any rate, you can drive right through the middle of town with no problem. It's easy to drive from our house to the other side of town in 15 minutes even when the "traffic" is bad.

The upside to all of this is that it improves your driving skills dramatically. Well, at least I think it does. I'm interested to see what driving back in the US is like...

On tap for this weekend: trying to find Wellington's local seal colony, and another trip to the west coast. We'll keep you posted.

Beef Wellington

Most of the neighborhoods in Wellington have a personality all their own; Khandallah has great views of the bay, Thorndon has the best grocery store, and Newtown is to be avoided at night. Our suburb, Kelburn, is known for the shops which include a well-known butcher and a few good places to eat. They're nestled tightly together, so just trust me when I say they're pretty neat even if the picture doesn't seem too exciting:



We had some guests over last night (the hilarious Scottish registrar, Chris, mentioned previously, and his equally Scottish partner, Michael). Given the foreign nature of the food in the grocery stores, we elected to keep it simple by serving steak and potatoes. Ergo, I made my first trip to the famous Kelburn butcher.

I walk in and I'm greeted by the butcher himself, an amiable, middle-aged fellow with a bit of grey hair around his temples and a hint of a lazy eye. I start off by making sure I have my terminology down: "So, back home, my favorite cut of meat is a New York Strip. Is that what they call those cuts here?"

He replies in a pretty thick accent. I don't catch everything he says but it's clear that what I'm saying isn't translating (as it turns out, a NY Strip is called a porterhouse here). I tell him I'm looking for a few New York Strips and he disappears into the cooler, which (hide your eyes, vegans) was chock full of fresh carcasses, and returns with a beautiful strip loin. I tell him that's what I'm after, and he asks, "How thick d'ya want 'em?"

Hmmmm, lemme think....1.75 inches times 2.54 centimeters per inch equals....

I hold my fingers really far apart and say, simply, "thick."

He raises his eyebrows a bit, smiles, and nods. Now we're speaking the same language.

While he's cutting the steaks he starts talking about all of the hormones, corn, and antibiotics that goes into American beef, explaining that NZ beef is grassfed (Omnivore's Dilemma readers, rejoice!). Sure enough, the meat doesn't look nearly as fatty as what I'm used to. I wonder if that means it will be tough.

He comes back a minute later with three steaks that looked like this:



I knew then that he and I were going to get along famously.

The dinner was a lot of fun, and the steaks were quite tasty and not a bit tough. Chris and Michael told us some wild stories about Glasgow, and we all enjoyed ourselves so much that we agreed to meet up next time at a local cinema where you can bring your own wine and sit on couches.

Shameless Kid Pics

No stories, no witty banter, no fuss. Just a few pics of the kids taken during the last three weeks in Wellington. Click here.

One Fine Day

They use the word "fine" around here to describe good weather. We hear this word routinely in weather reports (given the amount of rain we've seen, maybe "routinely" is a bit strong).

The weatherman predicted that it would turn "fine" on Saturday and stay that way through Sunday, so we decided to make the most of it by taking off on our first tramping (hiking) trip. We targeted the nearby beach at Makara because it's only about 20 minutes away and we've learned not to trust the weatherman. Makara has a reputation amongst the locals for being windy, which is kind of like having a reputation amongst the Spartans for being violent. As it turned out, though, the weather held and we were treated to some nice views of the Cook Strait and the South Island.

The cliffs were steeper than the pictures would make them seem. This, combined with the fact that we had to sneak through a section of trail closed for sheep-herding (which was, predictably, covered in sheep dung) means that Amelia's favorite new game is "sheep on a cliff." She runs around pretending to be a sheep and warning us not to step in sheep poo.

Here's a picture that deserves further explanation; Quinn waited patiently until we were at the apex of our journey before having a category 4 blowout in his diaper. He trashed most of the clothes on his lower body, so he got to wear Amelia's emergency pink cat shoes on the way home. This did not appear to agree with his sense of fashion:



Aside from this brief and understandable protest, everyone enjoyed our first go at tramping. (Below) to Amelia's left you can see the South Island, around 10 miles away. A few editing notes: due to improvements in staff training, clicking on a pic no longer takes you to a ridiculously huge version of that pic (try it!). Also, we're going to begin linking to our online picture album because loading tons of pics on this blog would make it unreadable. If you'd like to see a few more pics of our hike, for instance, you can click here.

Psychiatry in NZ

They may speak some form of English here, but pretty much everything else is different. That's certainly true of my profession. I'm in the same field, obviously, but the nature of what I do has changed dramatically. I spend about half of my time in downtown Wellington at the community mental health center where I do outpatient child psych, and I spend the rest of my time in nearby Porirua at the adolescent inpatient unit.

That sounds kind of boring when I describe it. Believe me when I say that it is not.

This country has about 4.2 million people in it. I think I've met about half of the country's child psychiatrists in the last few weeks, and there aren't very many of us. This means that patients wait over 5 months for an appointment at the outpatient clinic, and people are very ill by the time I lay eyes on them.

You would expect that with such a huge demand for psychiatrists that I might feel overwhelmed, overworked, and hence very stressed. Negative. My work day usually starts at 9am. I'd say 9am sharp but that's simply not how things work over here; think Caribbean time and you'll get the idea.

When I first arrived, I was still very much in my American mindset. After a few days of wondering when things were going to get busy, I asked my Scottish registrar (i.e. resident, a psychiatrist-in-training) how much time one normally blocked off to see a patient. He looked at me strangely. I explained: "Well, back home, we'd see a new patient for about an hour and a half and we'd see a medicine checkup patient for about a half hour. So how much time should I be blocking off?"

He replied, as if explaining to a child, "As much as you need."

This didn't compute. Here I am staring at a 5 month waiting list and nobody cares how much time I spend with patients? I persisted: "Look, I really don't want anyone to think I'm lazy. Normally I'll see about 6 or 7 patients before lunch. What's normal around here?"

He smiles a bit, and with his killer Scottish accent says, "Ah, Broose, I doon't think you'll haff any bach-to-bach clinics hair, mate." (As an aside: he's the second Scot I've met in the last two weeks. They love it here because of the balmy, dry weather).

Point is, expectations are different. It's easy to get used to, though. I actually caught myself looking at tomorrow's schedule and thinking that it will be a really busy day. I'm seeing 4 patients. Don't get the wrong impression, either- I see every single patient that anyone discusses with me and I'm even calling up people to see if they need to be seen. They just operate differently- they spend a lot of time on everyone that they work with, but they don't work with as many cases.

I'll say this, though- the cases that we do see are no joke.

Keep in mind that I'm fresh out of training in the States. The first patient I saw had had a serious suicide attempt two days prior and I was seeing them in the outpatient clinic. The next patient I saw arrived at the hospital dehydrated and catatonic. I saw maybe 4 cases of catatonia in 6 years of training back home. In less than two weeks I've seen cases of obsessive compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, and catatonia that trump anything I've ever seen or even heard of.

The severity of cases makes it tough, but there is a silver lining here. In the States, I was often required to be more of a family therapist than a psychiatrist because the ratio of family dysfunction to mental illness was higher. Here, there is basically a guarantee that everyone I see has a major mental illness, and I never spend any time wondering if I'm being useful.

This is getting lengthy, so I'll close with this: it finally stopped raining. After 17 days, we've had over 24 hours of sunshine. Hopefully the patients at my hospital are enjoying it. After all, the door there is only locked when it needs to be.

Pram down! Pram Down!

About four days ago, our double pram (read:twin stroller) arrived. This represented a significant improvement in Amy's mobility given the challenge of transporting two toddlers around on foot.

Yesterday we had our weekly trip to the grocery store. Thus far this has been characterized by Quinn screaming his lungs out as I drive white-knuckled through the roundabouts on the wrong side of the road. Yesterday was much better because the learning curve for driving around here is as steep as the local hills and I now whip around with the best of them. I digress; more on driving at a later date.

Given our past experiences in the grocery store, it was decided that I would take the kids on a stroll around town in the pram while Amy shopped. It was windy and fairly chilly (but no rain, at least not that afternoon; our streak of days with significant rain continues unabated at 17.) Amelia got cold and I gave her my sweater, which Quinn proceeded to puke on. Amelia then had to pee (twice) and there aren't any readily available loos in that part of town, so I decided to train her for Mardi Gras and helped her pee in a secluded corner on the sidewalk. After about 45 minutes of passing the time in such colorful fashion, we made it back to the car and I strapped both kids in and headed off to meet Amy at the front of the store.

You may have noticed that I didn't mention picking up the pram and loading it back into the car. That's because I left it on the sidewalk, and this represented a significant decrease in Amy's mobility given the challenges of transporting two toddlers around on foot.

At least the rain cover for the "old" pram fits on the new one...

"It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues."

-Abraham Lincoln

Don't worry, Abe, you won't find many people around these parts without a vice...er, vise. I was thrilled to discover that an antique vise and anvil (who owns an anvil?) were squirreled away in the basement of our 1930's-era home. After living with a vise for two weeks I've begun to wonder how I ever managed without one in the first place. International travellers, take note; you need to bring a leatherman with you. If you are lucky enough to have both a leatherman and a vise, the world is your oyster. As it turns out, this hasn't been our only encounter with a vise in the last two weeks.

You may have heard that New Zealand is significantly less litigious than the US. This has some noticeable effects on everyday life. Amy takes Quinn and Amelia to a local co-op preschool and she was rather surprised to discover that the playroom included a shop complete with real vises, hammers, nails, and saws. Yeah. The two-year-olds here entertain themselves by nailing things together with real nails and real hammers, then sawing their creations to bits. I'll say this: they do seem to find it quite entertaining.

I'm sure there's a downside to living in such a carefree culture, but the benefits thus far are obvious. You can have more fun if there are fewer rules. Today we took the kids to the botanic gardens to play on the playground there (incidentally, we did this in the rain. For those of you keeping count, we've been here 16 days and have yet to see a single full day without rain. That's two sunny days with rainy nights and 14 days of rain). The playground is a lot of fun because it includes attractions like a zipline.

Amelia hasn't quite adapted to the reckless Kiwi lifestyle. She spotted the zipline and the following conversation ensued:

Amelia: "Mommy, what's that? I'm not doing it."

Amy: "Well, thats-"

Amelia: "I'm not doing it."

Amy: "Okay, you're not doing it. It's called a zipline."

Amelia: "I'm not doing it."

Amy: "That's fine, dear."


"Swinging in the rain..."