Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Mixed media

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Just at the edge between winter and cold early spring, two Oxford ducks were exploring the new possibilities.

Er, what I mean is …

After a lot of trouble and with much help from Cecil Coupe, my trouble-plagued blog has come through a WordPress upgrade and onto a new ISP. Wish me luck as I now move from treading thin ice to (I hope) a dramatic re-entry into full springtime.

Grote Markt with tiny twilight moon

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Can this really be the only three-star destination in Belgium?

The great market / Grote Markt / Grand Place of Brussels is indeed spectacular, with or without a tiny crescent moon next to one of its many spun-sugar towers. Frank and I got here yesterday, taking a train (!) all the way from London.

More soon, but we are racing off. Forgive the blog-interruption last week; some odd hackers with a big interest in both dodgy drugs and Google ranking hijacked the blog so I couldn’t post even a comment or a correction until Cecil Coupe fixed things for me. If you still use WordPress 2.3.1, time to upgrade it!

Dock of the bay
Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Is it 11 hours or 13 … the time difference between New Zealand, and Oxford, England? We got to Oxford pretty late Friday night, and I’m still too jet-lagged for such complex mathematics.

This morning I’m resting my sleepy spirit with New Zealand memories, most especially of our peaceful week in Ferry Landing Lodge, overlooking this bay. This small B & B is top-rated in TripAdvisor because so many of Pam and Rob’s guests take the time to write rave reviews.

It’s not exactly the format for TripAdvisor, but Frank even wrote a sonnet for Pam and Rob’s guest book.

We took a transcontinental flight
And the transoceanic overnight
Then drove through scenic Coromandel,
To reach Ferry’s Landing, whose tale I tell.

It’s been our base for six fine days
We soaked up lots of UV rays
Hiked, swam, and slept as we pleased
Life is sweet with times like these.

Breakfast was fine and fresh and merry
At dinnertime we took the ferry
Bones got carved, glow-worms sighted
The snarls of workaday life got righted.

Thanks for everything, Pam and Rob
From the grateful Wilczek mob.

So does that or does it not qualify as a sonnet by a Nobel-Prize-winning poet? Once again, I’m just too jet-lagged to know.

Fellowship of the rings Part 1

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Beneath Shakespeare Cliff, all over Lonely Bay’s really quite lonely beach, lie broken and sea-smoothed bits of gastropod shell.

We’d seen such rough shell circles in New Zealand restaurants, used as napkin rings. That’s why we quickly had rings on our fingers (though no bells on toes.)

There’s something about New Zealand that makes people smile. How about this sign from coffeeshop Mariposa in Port Wells?

UNATTENDED CHILDREN
WILL BE GIVEN AN ESPRESSO
AND A FREE PUPPY.

We formed many hypotheses about Shakespeare Cliff. Mine was that William Shakespeare jumped off after some bad reviews. Frank says that it wasn’t William Shakespeare at all, just his boyfriend Cliff. So, which of them really wrote all those wonderful plays?

The surfer’s car

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

…and this is our car.

Tim is a (wonderful!) surfing teacher at Hot Water Beach. When the waves there get too big, he will drive his van to some more sheltered beach to give lessons–for example, Buffalo Beach in Whitianga, not far from the ferry.

He carries a pile of supplies around in this van, doling out wetsuits of various sizes and well-loved surfboards to his young students. Now I have to stop writing this entry, but enjoy your own mental images as I do mine!

Kauri trees are huge!

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

The kauri tree is Mother Nature’s perfect tree. It goes up and up and out and out with no branches for quite a long way (no knots in the wood) and very little taper.

If you are looking for timber to make giant masts without splices or even fancy furniture, you probably want to do what early New Zealand settlers did, which is to chop down huge virgin forests of kauri trees.

Now just a few of the oldest trees are still left standing.

My children, seen here, are poised to defend this one.

Wave riding in New Zealand

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

January in New England is lovely but cold.

In New Zealand, where Christmas is a summertime holiday, January is just one more fine time for catching a wave along many sand beaches. (Bring lots of sunscreen.)

Both sharks and Johnny Depp are said to be lurking around Coromandel Peninsula now, but I think you have to swim much deeper than we do to see the former and run with a much faster crowd to catch sight of the latter.

Nobel and Ig Nobel together at last

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Here you see Frank with New Zealand’s own James Watson–no, not the infamous James Watson biology Nobel but the deservedly honored (with a 2005 Ig Nobel Prize) author of a paper on Mr. Richard Buckley’s exploding trousers.

New Zealand is a lovely land full of surprises, whose only non-good surprise has been just how hard it is to get internet access even from hotels that advertise “broadband internet.”

Item: Palmerston North Coachman Hotel, where we paid for “broadband wifi” and then discovered that the signal didn’t reach as far as our room.

Item: Albany Executive Inn, just north of Auckland, which charges $4 for your first 20 Meg per day and $.15 more for every Meg on top of that level. Heck, 20 Meg hardly covers my uploads to Flickr!

Item: Jet Park Airport Hotel south of Auckland, which offers broadband in only “deluxe” rooms, and charges an extra $26 per day if you use it.

New Zealand is not alone in the problem, of course. Our worst “yes, we have internet” story was near Poitiers in France, in a lovely chateau (it was not our nickel) where the “internet” was one computer behind the front desk, the very computer where all the chateau’s daily business was done. But if you wanted to check email, the clerk would kindly let you sit in her chair a few minutes and try to access your email through her very slow telephone modem.

Tomorrow, however, we move on to even less internet. Our hotel on the Coromandel Peninsula has “internet” in the sense that you get 20 minutes each day to check up on your email. That’s 5 minutes per Wilczek, since all four of us will be together, something I’m incredibly happy about.

So if my blog goes a bit silent next week, don’t assume that sharks got me–I’ll have lots more to tell you about once we get back online.

Toto, I don’t think…

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

…we’re in NH any more!

This is what a pet food display looks like, in at least one large Auckland supermarket.

It is a big refrigerator case, in case you can’t tell, showcasing meat that people will cook and feed to their pets.

Actually, my mother also liked to cook her own dogs’ food but no local groceries offered any dog meat that wasn’t canned or dried and kibbled. Her dogs got the people food, cooked without salt or butter but often with garlic.

I bet she would enjoy the New Zealand section of heaven.

Sky view of North Island

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

We left Palmerston North yesterday, on a lovely blue morning, heading for Auckland and yet more physics for Frank.

I don’t really have much to say about this photo except that the gentle tranquility of this landscape was something I thought you’d like seeing.